Tag: Todd Parnell

What Really Happened to Lakota’s Todd Parnell: School board activism adopts ‘Black Lives Matters’ values

The truth of the matter in regard to Todd Parnell, he was offered a new job opportunity out of the district of Lakota and was planning to leave his school board position at the end of the year anyway.  So it didn’t take much to set off his fuse when police came to Lakota West to obtain evidence on a cell phone from a burglary they were investigating when two students went Black Lives Matters on the police resisting their efforts and eventually destroyed the evidence in front of everyone.  Anybody watching the situation would take that as an admission of guilt.  But the students were empowered by the race riots on the national news and behaving badly, so Todd knowing he was planning to leave had a “f**k-it” moment and just said in an email to the Lakota West Principal, Ben Brown, that the police “should have shot them.”  (The students) Honestly, I heard little bits about the case over the last few weeks and I didn’t think it sounded inappropriate at all.  Other than the fact that the students were minors, they were obviously involved in criminal conduct and were behaving poorly toward the police, giving the police many excuses to shoot them, which they smartly showed restraint.  But to what cost?  Logical thinking people who see what’s going on do think that perhaps police should have just shot them and taken the phone and used the evidence to prosecute them, if they lived, and saved the tax payers a lot of money.  To that way of thinking, Todd on the school board represented the opinion of people like me.  If Todd wanted to leave the school board fine, but it would have been, and should have been up to him.

Yet here’s where things go wrong.  Activism on the school board, activism to remove conservative voices like Todd Parnell took over and rival school board members led by the Superintendent Matt Miller moved quickly to use the incident to purge the school board of an elected official, so that they could replace him with someone more friendly to their progressive positions, which is precisely what they have done.  They picked a replacement who may be the nicest guy in the world, but he is not an elected person that represents the community.  He is a pick by activism by the school board president Brad Lovell to stack the votes against conservative voices and it’s a pretty dirty trick that didn’t become clear until the smoke cleared from the Lakota West police incident.  Who does Matt Miller think he is, or Jenni Logan for that matter, the treasurer to push for a human resource move against Parnell?  They aren’t in charge; the school board is.  If voters want to get rid of Todd, they would and could have shown outrage and maybe he would have resigned on his own due to public pressure.  But the pressure was completely activism on behalf of the school board to take up the Black Lives Matters Marxist position and give criminals more due process than an honored member of the school board.  It was a case of wokeness at its most obvious and its disgusting.

My phone has lit up over the last week about this case and it did surprise me that Parnell resigned.  As I said, most everyone I know thought about the young criminals the way I did, that they should have been punished on the spot for their actions.  It was beyond logic that the school board would defend the criminals and adhere to the new definitions of Black Lives Matters more than the culture of Butler County understanding the politics of the area the way they should.  It was arrogant at best and I held my tongue until more of the facts came out because I personally know a lot of these people and I was having a hard time believing they would be that stupid.  But as it turns out, the Lakota School Board cares more about Black Lives Matters radicalism than they do the voters in the district and they took action on their own to remove an elected official and it was all initiated by the Superintendent and the Treasurer.

One thing I don’t do is kiss and tell, unless the lipstick has some truth that is needed for the case in hand.  At that point I will use it if justice is the outcome.  At the start of the Covid-19 lockdowns, one week before Ohio shut down restaurants, I was at P.F. Chang’s interviewing potential conservatives for the Lakota School Board’s upcoming elections.  In came Matt Miller, Jenni Logan and West Chester Administrator Larry Burks to have lunch there also, so we had a slightly uncomfortable exchange of hellos as they clearly were not comfortable that I was eating lunch where they were.  But I was fine with them, I personally like Jenni and I think Matt is pretty good as a superintendent so long as he isn’t asking for money, which I said to him.  I was happy they were there because I had seated in the booth next to them one of the number crunchers from the old No Lakota Levy campaign so I could get a report on the meeting, which was impromptu because my meeting prior to the school board candidates was with him to discuss strategy for the 2021 and 2022 school levy campaign that we knew was coming soon.  To me its all a chess game I’m happy to play with them, to them, they’d rather have complete social compliance at any cost.

As we broke our little talk and Matt went back to his table, I offered to shake his hand, as Covid-19 wasn’t yet a quarantine thing, hard as it is to believe.  My school board candidate while this was happening, he was commenting on the drop in stocks that were happening as we spoke and was alarmed, so all this was new to everyone.  But instead of the handshake Matt offered me an elbow bump, which was the first time I had ever seen that—which is now as common as the sun.  It bothered me that the guy was so into all this progressive sentiment that he’d know to do that so early in the process.  And it made it clear to me where his mind was.  He intends to be a “woke” trendsetter and that is the direction he intends to go as a school superintendent, and it was at that moment I realized Matt Miller was not someone who I could work with.  And that he is very much a progressive activist rather than a concerned community member who wants the best for Lakota.

No my thoughts on Lakota and the school board right now depend largely on the election.  Its not a secret, I tell everyone who asks me, my plan is to see Trump elected and to put Betsy DeVos into a position to defund any liberal activism in all public schools of federal dollars.  So this is a very top down issue and Lakota will certainly qualify with this kind of behavior of losing their federal dollars and I am ready to fight them on the ground when they try to cover the balance with property tax increases.  I like our chances to win at least 3 to 5 levy attempts with the ground numbers we have now, so that will force a lot of these liberals off the school board under great pressure and allow for activism going the other way.  So I don’t blame Todd for wanting to leave or for what he said.  Losing a conservative at this point doesn’t matter much until the federal funding cuts come next year.  But it is a shame to see such activism from Matt Miller and Brad Lovell who clearly has let the status of president go to his head.  Brad was always a little sideways anyway, but since they let him take the president seat, he has become what we all thought he always was, way too power hungry and much more manipulative.  They all have some big embarrassments coming.  And being “woke” won’t help them.  People vote for representation; they do not need the management structure at Lakota further undercut than it already is with radicalized labor forces.  It may be hip to know about the progressive “woke” trends, which Matt and Brad are clearly in line with, but we are supposed to be teaching kids at Lakota right and wrong—life skills, not teaching them to be woke, and to defend criminals from police, which is now an official position by the Lakota School Board.  They are more interested in defending criminals than protecting property owners of their hard-earned tax dollars.  But rather, they intend to use it to destroy our culture and everyone in it who resists the “woke” culture and their Marxist intentions.  That is the real story of the resignation of school board member Todd Parnell.  The school board did not come out in defense of their friend and colleague, they used racism and criminal conduct to drive him off the board so they could re-staff the position with someone they liked, and that is a real problem.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

Sign up for Second Call Defense at the link below. Use my name to get added benefits.
http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Lakota’s School Board Approves a Reckless LEA Contract: The new average teacher salary will be $73,000!

It’s a very hard thing to do, to sit in front of a person, or a group of people when you are an employer and tell someone they are not worth as much money in employment as they think they are. I would say it is one of the hardest things in the world, and most managers aren’t good at it. Yet in the private sector managers must do it every day to keep books balanced in relation to the income they are dealing with. But in government seldom if ever does an elected manager push themselves to endure the ridicule of such a situation and that’s what happened at Lakota schools on Monday April 23rd 2018. A radical teacher’s union sat in front of the school board hoping for an approval of their LEA contract which provided raises of 3.5% for the first year, 3.25 for year two and 3.25 for year three—this after they had received a 1.9% cost of living increase plus bonuses. Surely the recent teacher uprisings in Kentucky were on the minds of the board and they had no stomach for a strike—which should never happen when children are involved, yet the threat had been made by the Lakota teachers under the whispers of insurrection. Lakota had been operating with a nice budget surplus, and they are actively looking for ways to compete with other districts for a limited number of teaching positions—no doubt all that played out when the deciding vote from the conservative Todd Parnell cast in favor of the contract. Yet the massive irresponsibility that transpired could be applied to every government position in America, what was happening at Lakota was happening in every city and county and is a trend that must be stopped, otherwise everything will come to a terrible end soon.

At first glance the conditions of this Lakota teacher’s contract seem reasonable. After all, roughly 3% in raises is on par for most cost of living projections. The problem is a little deeper than that when we find out 3% of what? 3.5% of $45,000 a year would be reasonable for a public-school teacher which is essentially a glorified babysitter these days. It could easily be argued, and it should, that teachers in the modern age are doing more damage to children with liberalized educations than they help because children will have to undo all that mess at some point in their adulthoods. But for the babysitting service for busy parents, $45,000 per year to hold 26 children in a classroom environment may be worth the cost. But that’s not what we are talking about in the case of Lakota. Currently the average cost of teachers within the Lakota district is $70,000 per year. While some teachers may be worth that much money the number is likely under 5%. The other 95% of all employees at Lakota are likely worth a figure under $50,000 per year based on the value of the teaching profession to the world at large. Market value considerations should be applied, but because we are talking about government schools, no such value is ever applied. Instead, teacher unions collectively bargain to rack up huge cost impositions against property tax payers of those schools in the district of their residence and as a result, these parasitic labor unions destroy any sense of reality when it comes to labor negotiations. The only negotiating they do is demand more money as teachers, or they walk off the job leaving kids to fend for themselves while those busy parents seek some way to have someone watch their children while the teachers are demanding more money. Not a good system by any measure.

The net result of the Todd Parnell vote is that the average wage for Lakota teachers went up from $70,000 per year to $73,000 by the end of the contract and that is just reprehensible. As I have said, probably only 5% of the teachers are worth that much money. An even fewer percentage are probably worth more, but a vast majority likely aren’t even worth $50,000 and they only make that because of the radicalized collective bargaining negotiations that take place due to the government unions that have infested all these government schools. Parnell should have voted against the contract but as he looked out at all those teachers in the audience, it is hard to stand against such a tide. After all those employees don’t really care about the students because they threaten at every turn to walk off a job if they don’t get their collective bargaining. At best such tactics by the unions are terrorism and obviously Parnell as a school board member didn’t want to be responsible for setting off a labor incident at Lakota. I’ll have to give credit to Lynda O’Connor, she did hold strong on the school board, but she was the only one.

Obviously to pay for those raises Lakota is eyeing a tax levy because once you give union employees something they never go backwards and will continue to ask for more and more until the entire system is bankrupt. When Lakota does ask for the next levy I will use this incident to explain why the government school doesn’t deserve it. Very few voters can sympathize with a bunch of government employees upset about a levy passage when they make over $73,000 per year on average. That is a ridiculously high wage rate for job positions that are simply glorified babysitters. In the past when school board members like Julie Shafer have attacked me for standing against school levies what they really are mad at are the bad decisions they made in the past that required levy passage to sustain a budget—because they want to throw money at teachers and be the good guys with their peers instead of doing the hard work of management and telling those employees that they aren’t worth the money. Let those unhappy teachers go to some other district and lower the payroll of the Lakota budget. Hire fresh teachers right out of college who only make $45K per year. If they want to make more, leave and let Lakota hire some new fresh faces. That is what you do in management. But if you don’t know what you are doing with people and employees, you think that experience is worth the money. Often it isn’t. Youth and vigor are often what children need to learn new things, not some old over paid coffee sipping teacher just milking the system because the union protects their lack of ambition behind collective bargaining. I would bet that most of the teachers in the Lakota school system fall in this mediocre category, and it is the responsibility of the school board to do the hard job when they can to keep those costs down by pushing those old budget busters away.

The problem of budget busting happens when nobody wants to be the bad guy and tell employees that they aren’t worth what they think they are. Schools need to operate more like the private sector does because after all that is what we are supposed to be preparing kids for. The goal isn’t to prepare kids for some socialist indoctrination center called college any more. That scam has been fully revealed to be extremely destructive to the education process. Most kids would be better off not going to college so to keep their minds intact—and reluctantly voters are starting to admit that to themselves—as hard has it is to come to terms with. Many parents save for a long time to send their children to college with life savings that would be better spent elsewhere—so it is hard to acknowledge that colleges are only indoctrination centers and the prep work happens in public schools paid for through a socialist practice of taxing private property. Even knowing all that nobody wants the public school to fail in their community because the schools attach themselves to businesses and homes in an unhealthy way, and until that changes school board members like Todd Parnell will find themselves split. Parents don’t want to lose that free baby-sitting service while they are out in the world doing what they think is important stuff—to pay for their kids to go to college. That whole problem is far too philosophically challenging for them. But I know this, in Lakota there are a lot more residents with kids out of the schools than in them, so if Lakota wants an embarrassing bloodbath at the ballot box, I suppose that’s what they’ll get due to their poor management of tax payer resources.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.