I Support Darbi Boddy More than Ever: How education costs get blown out of control and why Matt Miller is not worth $200K per year

Part of the entire problem with public education was on full display this past week at Lakota schools, where the school board voted to urge a fellow board member, Darbi Boddy to resign. Darbi made a mistake that many quarterbacks make in sports, which is the point of the sport, to apply pressure to the passer and see if you can force an error. The pro levy, big government, Joe Biden “mask-wearing even in their car with the windows rolled up” type of supporters who think they run the school has hated Darbi Boddy since she was elected. They have been trying to get rid of her since the election. For the first time in their lives, the public beat the pro-union supporters when Darbi Boddy won, whom I supported and continue to support emphatically. They were reminded that they do not run the school; it’s the people who pay the taxes.   And Darbi started off her job on the school board after being sworn in during a January meeting, asking lots of questions and being what the other board members thought of as disruptive. So that same radical labor union side of the Lakota business that makes everything cost so much and really has any kind of management crippled to do anything positive, set in their minds to put a lot of pressure on Darbi Boddy, and she got wrapped up in reacting to that pressure when she accidentally placed a link on her Facebook site that led to pornographic material. It was the kind of mistake that even a good quarterback throwing an interception with pressure from linemen trying to sack him could have made. That’s the point of the pressure, to pressure their target into making a mistake. Darbi was trying to point out how vulnerable kids are to sex in schools and the kind of grooming that goes on through liberal textbooks, like what they have found in Florida. And that’s how she ended up making a mistake with the link and how the pressure applied could then be used to make a case for her removal.   The masked parents and other union-supporting radicals could care less about the link. They want to get rid of Darbi Boddy, which the school board then obliged for their own reasons. Thankfully, Darby Boddy is tough and is refusing to step down. Because she shouldn’t, I would say that the Lakota school board needs four more members just like her, and after this event, it’s clear that we should be working to make that happen. 

The main problem in public education is that an expert class runs it, and that was indeed the case here. The board likely referred to “legal” over the Darbi Boddy incident. They recommended that the board distance themselves from the controversy with some legal pronouncement of advising her to resign. This is the same woke advice they would give any human resource department and has been just another corrosive element to American culture for many decades now. A woke administrative class that runs things behind the scenes throwing logic out the window and paying tribute to some progressive form of chaos, hides the fact that none of these people know anything about anything. Since she has been on the school board, Darbi Boddy has been excellent at questioning those very types of issues. She has been giving Matt Miller a hard time at every meeting, not so much on purpose, but to wrestle power back away from his position and to apply it back to the school board where it always belonged. Before Darbi Boddy was elected to the board, all five of them would punt every decision to the school superintendent, and he would answer as the head of the administrative state. Almost everything he reports to the school board is the judgment of the administrative state which has really spun out of control since Covid started. The teacher’s union tells Matt what to say. The CDC tells Matt what to say, as does the local health department, which never had any authority to tell anybody what to do. Then they punt all this administrative opinion to legal, who then ultimately controls everything with liability worry. The” experts” say something. Now it becomes pre-court testimony that everyone just throws more money at to avoid. And in that way, logic gets thrown out of the window, and everything costs a fortune just to do basic things. 

That’s also why Matt Miller is not worth the $200K a year we pay him. I think he’s a nice guy. But he’s not worth that much money. And neither are the teachers who use him as their spokesperson. The whole game is rigged against the taxpayers, and the only school board member I see doing the work the way school boards should operate has been Darbi Boddy, which is why they want to get rid of her because she asks too many questions that they can’t answer. We could get a parrot to repeat whatever some “expert” says, pay them in birdseed, and save the $200K. I’ve been watching several of the meetings by the Lakota school board because I keep hearing how out of control Darbi has been, how disruptive. I saw a person asking the kind of questions I wanted to know and a person doing the job correctly. But the labor union side of government schools doesn’t want the job done correctly. They want to support the administrative state because it’s big, easy money for them. And they don’t want any change, no matter how needed it may be. The parents want the free babysitting service and to believe that if they send their kids to Lakota, all their crappy parental skills won’t screw up their kids growing up. The school officials want low expectations that are easy to achieve and won’t expose how incompetent they are as people. And the teachers, of course, want to continue to be overly paid and do as little work as possible, which was the case during the eternal pandemic they never want to end. Nobody is showing any leadership except for Darbi. 

The moral outrage was laughable that the pornographic link Darbi accidentally posted was something detrimental to the education of students at Lakota. At that very minute, 3:15 PM on a Wednesday afternoon, teachers were likely trying to get naked pictures of students on their phones, there was porn being watched in the back row of several classrooms, and even the school board members themselves had much more salacious stories to tell that weren’t accidents, but deliberate acts of stupidity and poor judgment that have gone unpunished for the most part. (click the links for examples over the years) Fake moral outrage toward Darbi to hide the vast amount of real trouble that is just under the surface. I found the whole episode disgusting and very disingenuous. Many of the people who pushed for the resignation of Darbi Boddy have been telling the media that they have 1500 signatures gathered to push her off the board. Well, news flash, Darbi just won an election where she had gained around 7000 votes from the public, and that public generally likes the job she has been doing. In a community as large as Lakota, 1500 names are a small minority. They do not represent the kind of people who live in the district. Darbi won more votes than even the incumbent on the ballot. And that’s how elections work; if people don’t like the performance of the people they elect, they can be voted out for the next term. What the people showed who pushed Darbi to resign for this really minor mistake is that they wished to remove their vote from the public, which is about as disingenuous as it gets. That lack of respect is the real problem, and it was quite clear in what Lakota schools did to Darbi Boddy on April 27, 2022. They owe her and her voters an apology at the bare minimum. And they also need to figure out if they can live with the high standard they have now set for themselves. Because I already know the answer.

Rich Hoffman