I shouldn’t have to say it, I don’t take pleasure in saying it, but I warned everyone about the former Lakota teacher George Merk nearly ten years ago. Click here to read what I said then. Now he is facing four felony charges for pandering sexually oriented material involving a minor. He left Lakota back in 2014 after being suspended for the same issue in 2013. And now, he was arrested after his most recent teaching assignment with the Greater Ohio Virtual School, so this guy has been out there for a while doing this sexually perverse activity, and many people knew about it. And they hired him anyway. This is the problem with public schools and their union-controlled employment forces, they work so hard to keep out prying eyes to protect their members, but often kids are left vulnerable in the vacuum. And the institutions put the employees before the kids’ safety way too often. And many parents know it, but they need to send their kids to school, so they try to overlook the problem the best they can. But when they see how Darbi Boddy was treated as a school board member at Lakota for trying to police the halls and see for herself what kind of bad behavior is actually going on behind the security parameter, then people get mad. Because they hear stories, lots of stories of swinging teachers, crazy naked pictures sent on school phones, and abuses of power that are beyond forgiveness using authority of position in ways detrimental to the community, to say the least. And when some loser like this George Merk character keeps emerging with the same problem year after year for decades now, and nobody does anything to protect kids from him, natural anger emerges, and people want justice.
For all those who are asking about situations that are just beginning to come out in the open at Lakota, I would remind everyone what I say all the time; people are innocent until proven guilty. Even when there is evidence, sometimes people make up things about other people out of complete spite, so we can’t just take people’s word for something. Co-workers and ex-spouses can and do harbor malicious feelings and will sometimes make things up completely to harm someone they want to destroy. But when they present evidence, that evidence must be considered and investigated. I can say that I know for certain that several investigations are going on that the police are handling. And we need to give them the room to do those investigations. The crimes of the past that occurred with Merk are not happening presently, people are speaking out, and action is taken to conduct proper investigations without the hint of a cover-up. (Yet) But given the past, especially at Lakota, and all public schools for that matter, I can understand why people would assume that the police would sit on these kinds of crimes and why school boards would not want a public relations nightmare by knowing about bad things, and not doing anything about them to protect the children in the school. It has happened plenty of times in the past. Nobody in their right mind should have hired George Merk for anything. But the schools will say that they are desperate for labor, for people who will show up for work, and all too often, teachers are a certain kind of person who is all too tempted to drift into sexually perverse lifestyles. And once that path is started down, like drugs, it’s hard to get it under control.
We just had the John Gray incident in Goshen, where he was president of the school board and very involved in education issues in Ohio. I have known him, actually, quite well. A few months ago, he was caught trying to meet an 11-year-old girl for a naked backrub in Indiana, and it took citizen journalists to catch him. If people didn’t speak up, he wouldn’t have been caught. In public, nobody would have thought that he would be any kind of person who would even think of doing such a thing. But, apparently, it’s been going on for a while with him, and he had access to children for a long time. I have noticed that public education types; they tend to lean more liberal than the rest of society; they have expendable income and time to use that money on a leisurely lifestyle. And often, they fill their time with overly sexual lifestyles. Whether it’s the swingers club in Milford or a wine party at someone’s house where sex partners are passed around like baseball cards because all the adult participants are bored with life and looking for some way to spice up their marriages to match their porn addictions, it doesn’t take much to end up crossing a line when it comes to kids. I’ve covered many stories of sexual impropriety in public schools, which has been just the tip of the iceberg. I would never consider knowing what I do about public schools and sending any child I love to them. I consider them dangerous places. Very dangerous places and the less oversight there is, the worse the sexual problems get—the less the teachers and administrators try to hide it.
That’s why the attack on Darbi at Lakota opened up such a can of worms, because people don’t go to the meetings to be seen in public, but they watch online from the comfort of their homes, and they see the hypocrisy. They like that Darbi was looking out for their fears of what is happening in these public schools’ halls. Even where my mind is on these things, I would say we shouldn’t just throw the baby out with the bathwater. For many parents, public schools have become a necessary babysitting service that they need. But I would say that much more oversight is necessary because without a very vigilant management group in public schools scrutinizing everything, the perverted minds of a certain percentage of the employee population will be up to no good. And when no good becomes boring, and wife swapping isn’t exciting anymore, then sex with kids starts to become the next gateway drug. And unfortunately, the evidence points to the fact that this is a massive problem, not just an occasional one. I’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time, and people like this George Merk loser are typical, not unique. It is possible to discover them before they bring harm to innocent children. But to do that, school boards, parents, and even other teachers need to start thinking about what’s best for the kids, not what’s best for the institution itself. When we learn about people like George Merk, the damage is far less than the attempted cover-up of the bad behavior. Until government schools stop covering up the sex-obsessed employee base with all their indulgent behavior that is too politically progressive for most parents, if they knew about it, then we will continue to have these types of embarrassments in public education. We can’t change the direction of society; we are no longer the kind of society that kept the Playboy and Penthouse magazines on the top shelf away from kids. We are a society of porn addiction, and too often, those who are most liberal in our society and make the most money, like government employees do, and have time to think about these kinds of destructive things; we must correct the behavior with more oversight, not less. And only when we have done that can we say we are doing what’s right for the kids in the school.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 