Should You Attend School Board Meetings: The Lakota school’s trouble is why “yes” is the only answer

I know the school board meetings are boring and cumbersome with regulations. The thing I have never liked about the one we have in my district of Lakota is that you only get 3 minutes to talk, and usually, my political enemies are the ones who sit as the judge and jury as to what gets said and to what degree. If you go outside of their accepted limits, they call the police on you to shut you down. Well, that doesn’t work for me; I’m accustomed to being in charge everywhere I go on every topic, and yielding that control over to a political rival on the school board is not something I consider smart. But I have attended plenty of school board meetings and spoken at them when needed. I understand why more conservatives don’t attend school board meetings, yet liberals do. I simply don’t have the time to give to three hours of just doing that one thing while a heavily rule-compliant school board meanders on with loathsome rules and regulations. I’m used to doing three or four things simultaneously from sun up to beyond sundown, so it’s difficult to slow down enough to attend a school board meeting that you know will not affect things at all. Nothing you do at a school board meeting will change a thing that is going on at the school. School board meetings are designed just like elections to make people feel like they have input into how things work in public schools. Yet, they are simply consensus-building exercises meant to bring people over into the way of thinking of a liberal board of education by grinding people down with the sheer boredom of it all. 

The situation has been so bad that I decided over a decade ago to create my own media format to talk about school board business and, in general, politics and current events that weren’t being covered by the media we have had. I always attended school board meetings; I also did a lot of radio and television, interviewed, and wrote for newspapers. In my early days of doing public school work, it became obvious to me that the entire argument that would solve many of the problems was not on the scale of the discussion. For instance, the part A of an argument was set at the wrong point, and part B never went far enough. So I stopped doing media and writing for other publications and instead created this blog site as its own mass media source. Since then, it has had millions and millions of visitors who know they can get more of the news than is typically talked about and that they can send me information that will actually get attention as opposed to trying to force information through the public education filter that everyone can clearly see is a scam. But even with my own thing, I still occasionally attend school board meetings and try to make the system work, even knowing in the back of my mind that it’s probably a useless enterprise. I do that so that nobody can say that I didn’t try. I do try; I just have changed over time to create my own media because I couldn’t trust the established media or the school board members ever to do the right thing. 

The Lakota school board meeting in September 2022 was OK. Some of the controversial superintendent issue elements were discussed, but as usual, a lid was put over the whole event in the standard way that occurs in all government schools. But I would say that what happened was worth the effort because community members did get to voice their opinion, even if the school board’s goal was to drown out the whispers through procedural bureaucracy, which often hides all the bad behavior that so many people are concerned with. Usually, the only people who go to the school board meetings are liberals who don’t have anything else to do anyway. They don’t mind sitting around and wasting time because they like to complain, and those meetings are designed for them to do so. And to get their complaints recorded by someone. They are like those people who carve their names into some wood at a popular tourist destination to show that they were there. The school board meetings give them a voice and a sense of purpose in life, and they are happy to stay asleep so long as they can complain about what they see and feel. Conservatives aren’t like that. They are usually busy with something, so they don’t have the time to deal with that level of nonsense. Suppose they think the school board is a waste of time, which they are designed to be by the OSBA (Ohio School Board Association). In that case, naturally, they will stay home and do something else, yielding everything to the crybaby liberals. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way.   The Lakota school board meeting on September 12^th is a good example; there were enough people there to at least get the media’s attention. It was interesting to see how the board responded to evidence that I had already seen and what they considered “credible” or “relevant.” It was also interesting to hear their interpretation of the police report, which they say “cleared” the Lakota superintendent of wrongdoing. I’ve read the same report, and it hardly does that. But without the school board meeting and pressure from the conservative community in the school district, much of this would just be shoved under the rug as it always has. I have watched stories that were undoubtedly in the public interest be crushed by liberal school boards for years, which, as I have alluded to, managed alternative media sources that would dig into a story more than traditional media does, which essentially takes their complete dialogue straight from official public comments because they are too lazy to do any further investigation. This is undoubtedly the case with Lakota, and the people up to no good expect lazy reporting and phony legal protections to conceal bad behavior that taxpayers should know about. Notice how the John Gray story from Goshen where the school board president just disappeared off the news. Apparently, it wasn’t illegal to conspire to meet an 11-year-old girl for a naked massage so long as it hadn’t happened yet. School boards have evolved into cesspools of cover-ups because only liberals attend the meetings. But maybe we should change that. I am happy that enough people showed up at Lakota’s meeting to get some attention and apply pressure where it needed to be applied. Otherwise, bad things do happen a lot. And ultimately, kids do count on us to give them a good world to live in, including their public education environment. You can’t just trust that everyone will behave. You sometimes must look at them in the face and make them answer your questions, even though many rules are designed to protect them from the taxpayer. It drives me nuts too, but it’s worth doing. 

In saying all that, I continue to be very proud of the good work that Darbi Boddy is doing as a Lakota school board member. I think we now see why they hate her so much. To answer the questions of the rest of the board, who are very liberal and have been working very hard to get rid of Darbi. Wasn’t it political for the Lakota superintendent to try to push Darbi to resign over much less charges? Who started that fight? Hmmm………maybe think about that for the future. Because I am very much looking forward to the next election where we can get more school board members like Darbi elected and really make these meetings more constructive. Eventually, we’ll publish all the evidence, but right now, it’s more interesting to see how various people handle the evidence, and public judgment later likely won’t be as kind as people are now–because they haven’t seen it yet.

Rich Hoffman