Vanessa Wells, shown in the video above, didn’t foresee herself running for school board at Lakota a few years ago.  She was a mom, just like everyone else sending their kids to school.  She and her husband moved to the Lakota district specifically because the school had a good reputation. Many thousands of similar parents could tell about their experience and reasoning for moving to the Lakota school district.  And that dream was alive and well up until the point in time that a politically immune resident’s son threatened to kill her daughter while in school at Lakota, and nobody wanted to deal with the problem.  At that point, Vanessa considered her options.  First, she decided to pull her child out of danger, out of class, and homeschool her.  That solved the immediate problem of the threat in the classroom and Lakota’s school board having no stomach to do anything about it.  As I say all the time, the kind of liberalism that grows in all public schools emphasizes the institution, not the essence of the individual child.  Of course, the Lakota school board wasn’t going to deal with a foreign agent and all the political attachments to the case by defending the rights of one individual child. That’s not the political climate of any school board or school system—to protect individual rights unless those rights advance a progressive cause, such as gay rights or race-baiting.  Threatening to kill another student when it’s a young white lady born of traditional white parents is grounds for dismissing the issue altogether.  After all, the radicals of the political left are threatening to eliminate white people all the time, and this was just one more of them.

Yet, for Vanessa, that wasn’t good enough.  She loves her kid the way all parents do; she has to defend at least her right to exist.  Hiding at home homeschooling was a retreat away from a system that our tax money is paying for, which has been openly hostile to the type of targets that Critical Race Theory seeks to attack. That’s what was being taught at Lakota schools under various masks they use to deter public outcry.  But the school system’s mission could never have been made more evident. They were committed to the progressive implementation of political goals aligned with the teacher’s union, and anybody who got in the way of that would be run over. Vanessa’s family was just the latest in a long list over the years who have found themselves chewed up and spit out by a government institution that is more committed to creating a real-life Brave New World rather than a bright-eyed child entering adulthood ready to meet the challenges of life. That’s when Vanessa decided to run for the school board and directly fight the corrosive elements that were making school life dangerous for kids like hers. To target Critical Race Theory at its source, the school board created the position of Elgin Card, and that was the feature of Vanessa’s presentation.

You can hear Vanessa explain her personal story and her experiences dealing with the school board in the videos contained here.  She also presented the kind of radicalism in Lakota school’s hallways advocated directly by the six-figure school employee, Elgin Card, which should concern everyone.  Additionally, Elgin Card’s social media screen captures further display the evidence of Critical Race Theory being taught directly in class.  In the videos here, it is evident that Vanessa isn’t alone in this concern.  Many people showed up at a local church to learn what they could do to stop CRT teaching at Lakota.  I was surprised by the showing because I knew many threats made by the usual teacher union surrogates on the same scale as what we see on the national level in politics attached to the Black Lives Matter Marxism movement.  It’s very much happening in all our school districts, specifically Lakota. It’s a big target, one of the most prominent schools in the state of Ohio in an affluent neighborhood.  So, by attacking Lakota, the Marxists behind the Black Lives Matters movement see an opportunity, and the harassment of any resistance to their plans was deep on their minds.  There were plenty of threats made to discourage people from coming to this filmed event.

But as you can see for yourself, a lot of people came anyway.  I was expecting a crowd of 25 or so concerned parents.  Even with all the threats leading up to it, those who showed up were visible from the footage.  That’s precisely why there aren’t more Vanessa Wells parents out there because when they stick their heads up, the radicals in the school district immediately move to cut them down.  Any way possible.  And they pride themselves in their ability in much the way that blue state governors have become obsessed with Covid mandates to boss around their populations.  The same thing is going on at Lakota.  When parents complain, the school board appeases them with a gently worded email, almost like patting a dog on the head to make them happy and stop barking.  But then they turn around and hire expensive radicals like Elgin Card at Lakota to implement BLM political Marxist strategies, essentially with an openly hostile approach to most of the Lakota student population.  Lakota isn’t seeking to teach diversity and fairness, as they claim.  They are seeking outright Marxism from Black Lives Matters which is evident by the screen captures of Elgin Card himself. That’s why it’s such a great benefit that Vanessa has decided to run for the school board at Lakota and offered to bring leadership to these matters where it is needed.  It would be great if more parents joined her, but she’s a great start. 

It wasn’t easy for Vanessa; I can tell you that.  But she’s a fighter; it’s in her nature. She’s also brilliant.  While it might make sense to just homeschool her child, turning away from a vast evil in her backyard didn’t make sense for her, so she’s working to improve the situation precisely what we should all be doing.  The clear answer to these problems is to replace the management that allowed them to happen, which is 4 out of 5 school board members.  Many people don’t know it, but up until this year Lakota, led by Brad Lovell, was planning to ask for even more money on a tax increase just so the board could hire more people like Elgin Card at more than $100,000 each to bring this level of radicalism to our community school.  Because of Covid and the election year theatrics, they backed off it for now.  But they indeed plan to as soon as they can.  After all, they have to pay for the teacher contract that they just voted for, and they can only pay for those raises with a tax increase which they are now committed to.  And think how many radical teachers are just like Elgin Card waiting to be activated.  Before this new diversity position that the school board created for Elgin, he was the principal at Lakota West.  So, there are more like him waiting for a chance to bring more radicalism to the children of Lakota.  At this point, the only legal means we have to defeat this attack is to replace the school board, starting with Vanessa Wells, and the courage she managed to muster to face an onslaught of evil intent to destroy us all, one child at a time.

Rich Hoffman