Tag: Vanessa Wells

The Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Vanessa Wells and Against Lakota Schools: Lawyers run these public enterprises and that has to end

I think the courts are a poor substitute for dueling.  We’ve tried to bring a civil discourse to conflict management, but it hasn’t worked, and that is undoubtedly the lesson at Lakota.  We tried to help that public school in Butler County, Ohio.  But they are infested with dangerous progressive policies and expensive legal advice, which they have been wasting money on for years.  And they got caught in a lot of mess over the last few years, which I think only goes in one direction.  Once President Trump is back in the White House, there will be significant reforms to how schools are funded and managed, starting with the Department of Education, and lots of things will change in the public school system and the lawyers who run them.  And to that point, a small window of that kind of change was seen when the Vanessa Wells case against Lakota schools was heard by the Supreme Court of Ohio and found that Lakota had been deceptive in their attempts to conceal information from the public and they awarded Vanessa her information request and legal fees reimbursed.  It’s a story many of us thought from the beginning Vanessa Wells would win.  She’s brilliant on legal matters and is more intelligent about attorney issues than most practicing lawyers.  So they weren’t prepared for her and a small army of diligent moms, one of which did get elected to the school board, which caused them all kinds of problems.  Because they weren’t prepared for opinions, they couldn’t control those opinions through their standard practice of restricted public disclosure.  The Supreme Court of Ohio found that Lakota had acted unlawfully in its desire to conceal public disclosure regarding the actions of their superintendent at the time, Matt Miller, who eventually resigned over his actions once his bizarre threats of lawsuits did not gain traction.

When it was learned through a police report the kind of life that the superintendent was living, many parents didn’t want to pay his salary.  This issue won’t go away; there will be a lot more of this in the future, especially now that the Supreme Court has ruled the way it has in this Wells case.  I happen to know Vanessa very well.  Interestingly, many of my personal friends are involved in Supreme Court cases, but this one was big, and the case law that spawns off it indicates the future of education.  Essentially, public entities do not get to conceal information important to managing their taxpayer-funded endeavors.  Lakota schools got caught trying to hide the bad behavior of its employees from the public, which was revealed clearly in the email correspondence that the superintendent’s lawyer tried to enforce on a community they didn’t respect.  There was a lot of talk at the time that Matt Miller was going to sue the Lakota school system as he was still employed as the superintendent over harassment by the school board led by Darbi Boddy.  To make a long story short, the school board is the management body represented by the community and is supposed to have control of all these radical lefty employees in these public schools.  But what was revealed through this process, and because Darbi Boddy pushed the issue in less than polite ways, was the level of manipulation that truly goes on in the background by lawyers who run the schools.  The school boards are only there, in all public school districts, to give the illusion of public disclosure, the issue of civilian oversight that I have been talking about recently a lot.  Because it is at the heart of the problem in just about everything we discuss regarding government.  Over the summer, I have been a foreman on a grand jury, and that is the same kind of case there.  All the lawyers involved play a game of respecting civilian oversight while they work in the background to completely rule as unelected bureaucrats at every level, with what they think are complicated legalisms that only they understand. 

Working with Vanessa and Darbi, along with many other people, many of them excellent legal minds, we learned a lot about where the actual costs at Lakota schools go and how they seek to protect a kind of Never Trumper political agenda with ruthless zeal. Significantly, what was done to Darbi Boddy to get her off the school board and defend themselves from what is an inevitable future of public disclosure.  But part of that process was this little game that was exploited by the letter Lakota tried to conceal from the public where the lawyers are showing they are really in charge of the school, and their defense of avoiding public scrutiny was to threaten to sue all of us involved, and ultimately the school itself by the sitting superintendent who mistakenly felt that he had a right to privacy as a public employee that he did not have.  Vanessa and I received a similar lawsuit letter, which played out over this period, as did several others who were involved in having an opinion about the lifestyle choices of the superintendent that we found objectionable and even dangerous to children.  Vanessa, Darbi, and many others have spent a lot of money on legal bills to defend themselves from this public school’s poor management practices.  I laughed off the threat as ridiculously stupid and handled my legal matters on my own.  I approach those kinds of things to treat it like I do when I fix my cars.  I wouldn’t say I like professional opinions; I want to do it myself when something breaks because nobody, in my opinion, can do it as well as I can.  I work with many lawyers; if I need to, I’ll use them as a bandwidth issue.  But this case was clear to me at the start, and the purposeful attack by the legal people involved in Lakota were obvious constitutional violations, and I knew any court challenge would fall apart at the first stages of review. 

We’ve also seen this same strategy play out in national politics. It is undoubtedly a progressive trend that has been floating around legal firms for decades, and it came unraveled at Lakota schools in ways that only confirmed my worst suspicions.  When the threat came to us, Vanessa and I talked about it while I was on vacation with my family in a really nice place as we bought everyone ice cream on a scenic waterfront.  I became furious because such a silly matter was disrupting my time with my family, so I made a point to ensure everyone was paid back for that incursion in my life.  But what was so audacious about the threats was their designs to keep the public out of their business, so bad things could happen without any civilian oversight.  And the Supreme Court saw it the way I knew it would that day, buying ice cream for my family.  But to the level that these lawyers have even hoodwinked the school board members, that was shocking, and I learned about all of them far more than I wanted to know in this process.  And that system won’t be allowed to continue, I can say that.  However, there is a process, and the Trump election is the next point of interest.  Electing more school board members only to have the legal people attack them and toss them off so they can avoid civilian oversight isn’t going to be tolerated.  And that is what this Supreme Court case of Ohio essentially means.  And the angry moms out there know it. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Misfits of Lakota Schools: God didn’t make everyone equal, and that is the root cause behind much of the hatred

I understand it; some people, when God was giving out body parts, ended up with whatever was left over in the scrap bin, and public education is filled with people who want to hide from the world because they are embarrassed. There is an apparent reason you don’t see too many fashion models working in public education. Instead, they mostly look like Rosie O’Donnell. That’s OK, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK to discriminate against people who got the good parts out of the body bin when they were born and grown into attractive adults. And really, when you peel away the hatred of Darbi Boddy, the second-year school board member for Lakota schools, and friends of hers, like Vanessa Wells, the attitude toward them doesn’t come down to political ideology, as much as it is they were fortunate to get the good stuff out of the premium box when God was building them. And, of course, with that comes good husbands, good families, and lots of opportunities in life that the broken toys don’t usually get. So a problem emerges in the public school system, starting with the people who work in the industry, the volunteers who support it and make it work; by design, the production of the institution is below-the-line thinking, negative reinforcement of all the unfortunate circumstances in life. The goal isn’t to be better and to be unique; instead, the objective that is taught to the kids is sameness, to mitigate exceptionalism, and to provide a safe harbor for all the misfits in the world who want a place to hide from the judgments that often come from a capitalist society.

It’s Doug Horton, the guy who tried to beat Darbi in the last election and lost badly

The anger at Darbi Boddy, which has been unreasonable from the beginning, has moved beyond policy differences a long time ago. After watching the situation up close, I am convinced that the hatred is the kind of hatred that jealous women often have for each other, when one woman is noticeably much more attractive than the rest. Of course, we live in a world where those kinds of things shouldn’t matter. But they obviously do, and it really hasn’t been fair to Darbi. Working with her, I think she is one of the smartest school board members I’ve ever worked with, and I have known a lot over the years. Her critics say that Darbi has too many handlers and that she gets stumped up sometimes when giving presentations. My experience with her is that it’s tough to represent many people with many different ideas about how things should be; it’s hard on a good day, and she does a good job of not losing herself along the way. I’ve seen her handle a lot of pressure as gracefully as anybody could ever hope for. But we’re not dealing with attractive people here, people with experience that typically have pretty people in them, and you can watch the behavior of the people working around Darbi when they think nobody is looking, and you can see the seething rage that has been applied in her direction for one reason only, if looks could kill, they would like to eliminate Darbi because of it.

Vanessa Wells is another story, whom Darbi designated to work with her to perform a curriculum audit, which is what the latest controversy at Lakota schools has been all about. Darbi brought Vanessa in to look for signs of CRT and other progressive intrusions into the school curriculum for many reasons, most notably because Vanessa is extremely intelligent and has a very high reading comprehension level. I have been working with Vanessa for several years now and have come to know her and her family very well, and I have seen them under extraordinary pressure. And they are sharp people, very sharp. It was very smart for Darbi to reach out to Vanessa to help with the curriculum audit because Vanessa has the ability to read documents at the level a lawyer would provide. If Vanessa wasn’t a mom raising her family with a lot of commitment, she could easily be a high-powered attorney for a firm somewhere. She has a natural passion for the law and can spot problems in documents that have been prepared from a lawyer’s perspective. But the hatred of Vanessa isn’t because she’s a conservative member of the community. Let’s just say Vanessa photographs well, and you can see other women seething whenever she makes a public appearance, essentially just because God gave Vanessa some obviously good body parts off the assembly line of human being design. The people who received in life body parts from the bargain bin, a messed-up foot here, a double chin there, are resentful and behave that way. It’s not Vanessa’s fault she got the good stuff. She’s smart and has the advantages that come from the good bin of human assembly by God, and she makes the most of it, which many people who tend to work in public education are obviously upset by.

Then there are the husbands; of course, attractive people like Darbi and Vanessa have the opportunity to attract husbands that a lot of women would love to have. Darbi’s husband looks like John Rambo and reminds me of a cross between that fictional Sylvester Stallone character and the real-life character of Chris Kyle. This is a problem for the radical left, who are only comfortable in life when they can make people afraid and submissive to their bat-crazy policies. You won’t find anybody, especially the Beta types from the political left, intimidating Darbi’s husband. He looks like the kind of person you would never want to mess with.  Then there is Vanessa’s husband, Justin. I consider him the modern model of this generation’s tough guy. Nobody is going to beat up Justin in some parking lot somewhere. He would fight anybody any day and in any number. But he doesn’t stop there; he is quite an online warrior. He will argue with anybody over anything, and he plays to win. He isn’t afraid of anybody and certainly doesn’t buckle under peer pressure. But best of all, he’s smart about legal issues and is so confident in his positions that he isn’t afraid to go to court. He likes to fight, and he will fight anybody over anything, and I have come to like him a lot over time. I really like these people. But it makes sense; attractive people tend to attract other, high-quality people and make good families. And in many ways, that destroys why many people who work in public education get involved to begin with. They want the taxpayer-funded institution to protect them from a competitive world where there are pretty people, smart people, and tough people. They are attracted to communism for all the reasons Karl Marx designed it, to give refuge to those seeking sameness because they didn’t get the good body parts at birth. They hate God for the unfairness of it. And they find themselves supporting liberal causes because they don’t have John Rambo to come home to every day; they have some washed-out George McFly sipping coffee at the dinner table who never punched Biff in the face. And when those people must work with people who have it all in life, they naturally are resentful, and their hatred manifests in negative ways that ultimately become very expensive to the taxpayer and destructive to the poor children. They are teaching the same jealous cycle that will ruin countless lives in the future. 

Rich Hoffman

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Darbi Boddy Knew: The stupidity of the current Lakota school board and their mask mandates

The Current Lakota School Board was Too Lazy to Know What they Needed to

In all the same ways that the Biden executive orders on mandatory vaccinations violated all kinds of laws, the government’s push to bluff their way into putting masks on school children in public schools has been reprehensible and frightening to people.  And it’s even worse when you are a person who knows better.  When you know the government has overstepped its mandate and is acting dangerously, they almost dare the public to act.  For them to gain so much power, they need a lot of dumb people, like what we have on the current Lakota school board.  They are dumb because they allowed themselves to be completely scammed by the Butler County Health Department, who is still angry that they lost their emergency powers when the House and Senate took those powers away from Governor Mike DeWine early in 2021.  Most people don’t see politics everywhere; my readers here do, but most people don’t, so they don’t understand what’s behind it all.  And that’s usually fine for average, ordinary people.  But for people who want to be in leadership positions, it’s reprehensible to be stupid. After a recent debate with the West Chester Tea Party featuring candidates for the Lakota school board, the current insiders showed clearly why everything is so expensive.    Why they have been caught tossing money at the teacher’s union recklessly, and how little they had managed anything at the government school.  When the question was asked, “how much authority do you believe the Butler County Health Department has over Covid policy in public schools,” the current school board did not know the answer, all of them.  Amazingly, the current board members and one of their hand-picked replacements for Brad Lovell all answered the same way: they did not believe they had any authority on the school board to resist a health order from the department of health.  But the challengers all got the answer right to a certain extent; Vanessa Wells, Karine Chausee, Issac Adi all understood that the health department and the government, in general, had no rights to mandate Covid protocols in a public setting.  But Jodi Boddy, who has put some effort into this issue, knew the answer in detail and said so on the video included in this article.  She is correct. The health department, any health department, just like the CDC, can make recommendations.   They cannot make law.  That is unless a governor under emergency orders so empowers them.  And as I said, those powers were taken away from Governor Mike DeWine because he had abused them in the way many blue-state governors had during Covid. 

Darbi Boddy Knows Better

I heard the Brad Lovell replacement, Douglas Horton, talk about how smart he was as a brand marketer at P&G, yet when he had to answer this straightforward question, he had no idea what the answer was.  And if he wants to lead a school board with thousands of people employed under it or attending the school, they look to him to know these kinds of things.  Darbi knew.   Kelley Casper is on the board now and was part of the decision-making process on the mask mandates. She dared to sit there and tell the crowd that the health department has the right to order them around on many things and that the ridiculous quarantine policy they had come up with was worse than making students wear masks.  Why didn’t she know that she didn’t even have to follow the quarantine policy? Nobody elected those health officials.  They are appointed to do a job, but the procedure is not set with them, except under emergency orders, and we aren’t under an emergency.  That is set at the state level, and as I said, DeWine lost that power.  Biden will lose his power, too, because he has no constitutional grounding for anything he is doing.  He counts on suckers not knowing better and trusting what they are told, just as Douglas Horton, Kelly Casper, and Michael Pearl did when the Butler County Health Department told them they had to dance to the quarantine protocols or wear a mask.  Because they were lazy and didn’t read and understand the law, they just accepted that what they were told was true.  Which, of course, is stupid.

Out of all the questions that evening, I felt that one about the health department showed clearly the problems with this current school board at Lakota.  They are not intellectually curious about what they are supposed to be doing.  They get pushed around by the state; they get pushed around by the health departments; they get pushed around by the teacher’s union and for what, because of something Michael Pearl said in his answer, that when his car breaks, he hires experts to fix it.  And that’s what the Lakota school board does with everything.  Darbi Boddy had done the research and did talk to health experts.  She knows the difference between a “recommendation” and an “order.” We don’t just get ordered around by unelected bureaucrats, but we do elect our school board.  We expect leadership out of them to ask those kinds of questions.  Yet, nobody involved with the current board knew the answer.  They know how to ask the lawyers for Lakota what they should do, and of course, lawyers will always take the safest path on everything.  After all, most of them are lazy too and want to get paid and move on to the next case.  So for dumb people who aren’t asking many questions, a lawyer will say “no.” “Don’t challenge the health department most of the time. Don’t challenge the state.  Do what they tell you to so that if some panicky parent sues the district, you can always punt to them as your guidance.” But that’s not very ethical; what about the poor kids who have to sit in a class all day wearing a mask for a virus that the government decided was going to be about the “Great Reset,” and was based on no science whatsoever but was instead about everything involving global politics.  Kids don’t need to be wrapped up in that mess.

We can only imagine how many other mistakes this current Lakota school board has made involving everything.  If they arrive at their decisions the way they did with Covid and the mask mandates, it’s no wonder things are so screwed up.  And they only have themselves to blame.  The information is out there; it’s easy to get.  Darbi Boddy knew the answer.   There isn’t a path for any health department or any government agency to win anything involving Covid in a court of any law.  Many of us are shocked by the overreach of government, but when we elect school board members, we expect them to work hard to know things.  And this mask mandate thing was an easy one.  At least one of those school board members should have understood that the health departments only had the power to recommend actions.   They could not order anything.  No court of law anywhere could hold a case for even the little things that Covid protocols have required. Biden thought he could get away with this mandatory vaccination action since it has worked to some extent with these school boards across the country.  That is what happens when you put people with very little intellectual curiosity into positions of power, like on a school board.  Lucky for us. Finally, we have a choice.  We have four good candidates to replace three seats in Lakota.  And, by the way they answered this one simple question, it’s obvious why all three of those current board members need to go and go fast. 

Rich Hoffman

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Get to Know the Candidates for 2021’s Lakota School Board: The chance of a lifetime, and its all in your hands dear voter

A Great Debate and a Time to Remember How We Got Here

The West Chester Tea Party hosted a friendly forum with the Lakota school board candidates for the November 2021 election without the Covid nonsense, which allowed people to meet the candidates.  The local Chamber will sponsor the next debate, and they are doing their event virtually, which will be a tremendous disservice.  Without a public meeting, people would not see how unlikeable two of the candidates are in real life, the incumbent Kelley Casper and the incoming bobblehead, hand-picked clone of Brad Lovell, Douglas Horton.  Yikes, listening to him talk was like a cat falling off the roof of a chicken coup and into a bucket of manure after a heavy rain.  It was not pleasant.  I wondered if I was too hard on him, but I think I wasn’t hard enough after meeting him in person.  If the event had been virtual, likely, these candidates might have hidden their unlikability. Still, you can watch the videos shown below to decide what you think of them by your own decision-making process.  I filmed each question independently, so the clips are short and easy to watch or refer to later.  I present the clips unedited and without any commentary.  The camera is sometimes shaking, but it captures the event as well as you can without corrupting the debate.  However, for the benefit of my readers, I will break down each candidate here with my thoughts to assist in the decision-making process. 

Lakota School Board Debate at the West Chester Tea Party


For the record, I openly support Issac Adi, Darbi Boddy, Vanessa Wells, and Karine Chausee.  I am dead set against Kelley Casper, Douglas Horton, and Michael Pearl.  I think Michael is a pretty good guy.  However, and you will hear it in his clips contained here, he’s a big government guy, one of those liberals that might be fine in a park or at a symphony but managing millions of dollars.  Forget about it.  As I said in the video above, you could tell who the incumbents were, people who are already savvy with how school board business works.  I consider Douglas Horton an incumbent because he was hand-picked by Julie Shaffer, a current progressive school board member who wanted a carbon copy of Brad Lovell.  When Douglas said during this debate that he was answering a call to be on the school board, it wasn’t God he was talking about.  It was Julie Shaffer, to preserve her big-government approach, her critical race theory disguised behind legal theatrics, and her big-spending tendencies to support the teacher’s union at all costs.  The challengers, the people I mentioned that I support, were nervous and often spoke from the heart.  I do not doubt that once they are on the school board and get used to speaking in front of people, they will smooth out just fine.  I have zero concern about any of their public speaking ability.  What does concern me about the incumbents is that they were too smooth and avoided answering many of the questions.  For instance, Douglas Horton said he saw no evidence of Critical Race Theory at Lakota even though he was sitting next to a display taken straight off the walls of Lakota schools showing Critical Race Theory.  So, let’s get into the candidates and talk about each. 

Lakota Debate Video 2

Issac Adi is an absolutely wonderful man.  He tells a bit of his story in the videos, but my experience with him is that he is as sincere and righteous as you’d hope from an angel.  Not only is Issac likable, but he’s also intelligent and engaging.  He is just the kind of person you want to be running a school. He’s fair, compassionate, judicious, open-minded, but he has a firm sense of worth that allows him to see wrongdoing at its source, and he’s not afraid to act on it when he does see it.  This is all new to him, politics, but as you can see in the video clips, he would undoubtedly add a breath of fresh air to the school board at Lakota and contribute solutions that have been needed for years.

Lakota Debate Video 3

Darbi Boddy is a young lady I have come to know over the last many months.  If anybody has her heart for doing what’s right in her community, it’s Darbi.  If I had to think of a politician, she reminds me of what many people think of as a star, Lauren Boebert, except Darbi is a lot smoother and has more tact.  She has natural instincts in politics and wants to align those skills to helping kids.  Those are rare traits in a person, someone who knows how to be politically diplomatic yet not to lose herself along the way.  I think it’s because she has a very nice family, a loving husband, and an otherwise supportive cast.  That has freed her to run for the school board and invest herself uniquely for any candidate. She’s not afraid to take chances, and if those chances do come up short, she is willing to outwork everyone else to achieve her objectives. 

Lakota Debate Video 4

Kelley Casper is one of those people you can’t wait to get out of the room with when you are stuck having to sit down next to her somewhere.  She oozes unlikability.  She is a big government type, which is apparent in her debate performance.  Her instinct is to punt everything to an expensive expert and let the world be run by the rules those experts come up with.  She is not a natural leader, and she seeks to cover that up by hiring people around her, which only adds to the overall cost of running Lakota schools.  Ultimately, when we talk about money and where it goes, things get expensive when there is a lack of leadership.  And Kelley has next to zero leadership ability.  And when I say next to, I mean in the negative.  She is used to dealing with the free babysitting moms and big-time union supporters.  When pressed by the Tea Party, her genuine nature showed, and it was ugly.  Very ugly as you can see for yourself.

Lakota Debate Video 5

Karine Chausee is an absolute sweetheart.  She is authentic, pure, and everything most young moms want to be.  She is running for the school board to help make the school a better place for all children.  But she does not want to be a politician.  She made it clear in the beginning that she didn’t want a party affiliation.  She wants to be as independent as a person as possible, and her natural independence showed clearly during the debate.  She didn’t even want to follow the rules of a debate format.  She wants to do what’s right for her community so her kids can live in it well.  She is excessively intelligent, way more than she lets on, and would be a great addition to any school board with fresh ideas out of the box, loaded with the passion for actually doing what she says she’d do. 

Lakota Debate Video 6

On the other hand, Douglas Horton was the opposite of Karine Chausee in every way and not in anything good.  He came across as arrogant, self-important, and out of touch.  When he mentioned in his debate performance that his kids never seemed to experience Critical Race Theory at Lakota, even as he was sitting next to copious examples of it displayed for the debate, I thought of the dad in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  One of those super-achievers at the office who didn’t see what was happening to his kids right in front of his face.  Aloof, distant, and seeing the world through a prism of big government, his answers in this debate were much like Kelley Casper’s.  When I said of him when he first announced that he was a bobblehead for the school board, a hand-picked Brad Lovell replacement, I thought for a second that maybe that was too harsh.  But seeing him in person, he’s far worse. I’m sure someone loves him in the world, but clearly, he’s in love with himself more than anybody else ever could be, and he would be a disaster on the Lakota school board.

Lakota Debate Video 7

Michael Pearl, however, who is an incumbent, is a super nice guy.  Very likable.  Full of life.  The trouble is, he’s a big government punt it to an expert type, just as Kelley is.  It’s no wonder he was picked to run the school board after Brad Lovell ran off the conservative Todd Parnell for a wrong statement following the arrest of a student of color at Lakota West.  It was an unfortunate statement that the current school board used to get rid of a known conservative on the board.  The current school board has done many things that could have blown up the way Brad used against Todd.  But that’s how Michael came to the board; they got rid of Todd and replaced him with the very progressive Michael Pearl, and for that reason alone, a conservative needs to replace the one elected there in the first place.  As nice of a guy as Pearl is, he’s still a big government guy who votes against conservative values whenever they come up.  He supports Critical Race Theory, which is evident by his comments, even if they don’t call it that.  And for that reason alone, he needs to be voted out and replaced with a conservative.

Lakota Debate Video 8

Then there is Vanessa Wells, whom I’ve known now for a long time.  She came to me with her story of a student who threatened to kill her daughter.  After listening to her talk, I thought she would be a good school board candidate.  Vanessa is very likable, very passionate, and is really smart.  Really smart!  As we talked, she decided not to be a victim and be part of the solution instead, so she decided to run for a school board seat.  If they wouldn’t listen to her, then she’d become one of them so that in the future, she could help some other parent who might go through what she went through.  After all, there are many stories like the one her daughter went through, but parents often find the red tape of doing anything about it too much to deal with.  So, the issues never get resolved.  She wants to be a school board member for all the right reasons, but her primary one is to be there for parents like her who have problems and don’t want the hand in your face answer that the current school board gives everyone. 

Lakota Debate Video 9

Essentially it all comes down to votes.  For many years conservatives have been trying to elect conservatives to the school board.  Typically, we allow the process to do what it does, and Republicans have played overly fair.  This current school board led by Brad Lovell used a progressive story, something that was communicated among peers to bust a fellow board member in what they did to Todd Parnell.  Sure, nobody should say that police should shoot someone, but context tells more of the story, and many people think what they think.  Todd represented people on the board who were unhappy with all the Critical Race Theory antics increasing for many years.  Currently, Lynda O’Conner is the only conservative on the school board, and Todd was the critical second vote.  You need three to do anything on the board.  So what Brad did by throwing Todd under the bus was essentially get a fourth vote on the board by bringing in a person of color, and a disabled person at that with Michael Pearl, to secure liberalism on the Lakota school board for many years to come.  So instead of coming into this year’s election needing only one more conservative voter to get a majority on the board, we are essentially starting over due to Brad Lovell’s activism. 

Lakota Debate Video 10


Even with Brad leaving the district for a big six-figure job in Sycamore, the board has picked Douglas Horton to replace Brad and keep the liberal majority controlling the board.  To keep all this liberalism intact, the school board has used Critical Race Theory elements to manipulate politics.  So they do not have innocent hands in the matter.  Kelley Casper was involved in the coup against Todd Parnell and vote stripping against Lynda O’Conner.  During the last teacher contract debate, only Lynda voted against the measure.  All the other members voted for a pay increase when it was apparent the district couldn’t afford it.  The denial activism ultimately worked against Vanessa Wells when a fellow student threatened to kill another student.  But the board cares a whole lot about a conservative who says that police should have shot a kid of color for bringing crime to Lakota schools was suddenly a problematic situation.  You see, it’s not about fairness in these matters.  It’s 100% politics, and all these incumbents participated in removing a representative from the board who had opinions that a segment of our society feels. They did it all in the name of Wokeness, to control our thoughts and actions by unearned guilt that we all can see on the national stage.  But this was all happening at Lakota, in our neighborhood, where we should and can do something about it.

Lakota Debate Video 11

I love elections; I love to see the choice of the people shaping our republic, whether it’s local, state, or federal.  I love elections!  But what I don’t like is what happened to Todd Parnell and Lynda O’Conner.  As conservatives, they play by the rules, and we had been focused on getting a third vote on the board for a long time now.  During the last election cycle, it was Jim Hahn, and he didn’t quite get there.  We took our lumps and decided to look to the next election, so long as Lakota wasn’t asking for more money, we didn’t get too crazy about it.  But, when this current school board targeted Todd Parnell with all the wokenss that has been eating away on the national stage, and they were doing it in our own backyard, well, that requires some action, which has resulted in this approach.  We have four outstanding candidates running for three seats to replace the current board who has been extreme activists against conservatives, which in Butler County is most households. 

Lakota Debate Video 12

So, there you have it. Finally, voters in Lakota have a choice, lots of good decisions, and now you can understand some of the backstories of how we arrived at this point and what’s at stake.  If you want to see conservatives control the school board at Lakota, pick one of these four and vote out the three liberals.  It’s very simple.  The key is voter engagement.  The teacher’s union has its network, and those people will show up to vote on election night.  There are lots of conservatives on off-year elections, which usually sit out on these occasions.  If you want to see a change this year, don’t stay home.  Get out and vote.  Take all the rage you feel about the Trump election, about Biden in the White House, about election fraud nationally, and show up and vote.  Could you do something about it?  If you don’t, it won’t be the fault of these friendly conservatives I’ve mentioned.  If the bad guys win, it’s because good people sat home and did nothing.  So do something and make a difference.  The fight is in your hands; make it count!

Lakota Debate Video 13

Rich Hoffman

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The Story of Vanessa Wells: United Nations and threats of murder at Lakota Schools

To listen to the whole episode on Spotify, copy and paste the link into your search engine

This is an excellent podcast of Vanessa Wells, one of the Republican endorsed candidates for the upcoming Lakota School Board election in November of 2021. The player should work but if you have trouble the link shown above may only play the intro to the show. If it does get stuck to get to the whole 51-minute interview, you can simply type in your computer browser open.spotify.com then put the show “Cancelled Out” into the search. Then simply look for Vanessa Wells, or otherwise, Ep. 27-3: Canceled Conversations: Vanessa Wells. Or if you have Spotify, simply look them up there and play it like a usual podcast. That may sound like a lot, but it’s worth doing. It tells how Vanessa became a candidate for the Lakota school board in 2021 by expiring every means possible to get justice for her daughter. After a child in the school had diplomatic immunity because the father was an ambassador of the United Nations, a little boy threatened to kill Vanessa’s daughter and further went on for quite a long time to threaten her in school, making the classroom experience a miserable one. Vanessa tried to get the school to act, but all they wanted to do was cover up the story and attempt to pressure her little girl into putting up with the situation. This happens far more than you might think, and to hear Vanessa tell this riveting story is well worth the work. Maybe it’s just my site that is having trouble. But at least the link above gives all the information you would need to listen to the full podcast on Spotify.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CTfhVUWpGggYXhLOlrc874__ybCp0PG4vEVAG40/?utm_medium=copy_link

This is an old story with Lakota schools.  They have an extensive profile, one of the largest schools in Ohio, and the school boards have spent much of its history trying to cover up stories that might make the school look bad. That’s why Vanessa decided she wanted to run for the school board because she got tired of dealing with the school board at Lakota and decided to be part of a solution.  If they wouldn’t listen to her, then she would just run herself.  She has told me her story several times, and I have written about it.  But to get the whole story packed into one podcast was unique, without interruption. It’s a story many parents can share with her.  She certainly isn’t alone.  But perhaps this year at Lakota, with voters’ support, she can finally be part of a solution that has long been needed. 

Vanessa is a fighter; in May of 2021, she had sued Lakota’s school board for transparency violations in hiding behind Covid to quell anger from parents over transexual policies and Critical Race Theory.  The president of the Lakota board at the time, Brad Lovell, who is moving on to a job in Sycamore Twp, was skipping through procedures designed to show transparency due to the pressure of the increased anger from parents.  Like many schools, Lakota was using Covid restrictions to manage the public forums, which caused issues that granted a settlement in the lawsuit.  Vanessa is undoubtedly not a pushover, and she had already taken severe steps to show leadership even when it was hard to do so.  Not everyone is bad on the school board; one person has been trying to improve the situation.  But two of the current board members, Kelley Casper and Michael Pearl, have been disasters of progressive causes, and they need to be voted out for their complicity in many matters. Vanessa’s situation is just one story of many, and time and time again, the board has punted rather than deal with the issues.  Vanessa is committed to making the hard decisions that will have to be completed and have already proven that she will not run away when things get tough.  In her short time as an activist at Lakota, she has more than shown the teeth of a committed parent, resident, and manager. 

In that regard, the podcast is worth the effort and time to listen to.  So many times in these school board races, we get phony people who want to use the position to get an administrative job, just like Brad Lovell did.  They say they care about the kids, but when their actions are put to reality, they only care about protecting the institution of public education itself, to hell with kids.  That is not what Vanessa does, and she has the track record to prove it.  But you don’t have to take my word for it.  Listen to Vanessa for yourself at the podcast listed here and judge for yourself. It’s a story made for Hollywood, and it’s happening in our backyard.  But unlike the woke movies of these days, there is a hero, and if voters have the courage to vote on election night, we might have a happy ending in Lakota for the first time in many years.    

Rich Hoffman