I offered Matt Miller, the much-talked-about superintendent of Lakota schools, a way to fix everything. Through his lawyer, I offered some friendly advice which it was obvious that he chose to ignore by the way the Lakota school board meeting on November 21^st, 2022, went. I told him that many of the problems he finds himself in could be solved by restoring his relationship with Darbi Boddy. After all, he and his conspirators started all the anger. I know Darbi Boddy; she wanted to join the school board and work well with everyone there. But liberalism doesn’t work, and when she joined, there was still goofy talk of mask mandates and other Covid nonsense that came straight out of the crooked Biden administration, and people in my community were sick of it. And when Matt Miller went after her to push her into resignation, he opened up a whole can of worms, and he greatly angered the community, as did the rest of the school board who stood behind the effort. If that same school board is upset that all they have been able to do at meetings for much of 2022 is talk about community anger, they can only blame themselves. They brought all the politics into the matter and tried to destroy our newly elected school board member. Darbi is a fighter, and she wasn’t going to take that. Nobody should have expected her to. All this happened before anybody knew much of anything about the Lakota superintendent’s personal life. Once people realized what kind of guy he was, for the conservatives in the Lakota district, that was a final straw. But it all started with Matt Miller picking a fight with Darbi Boddy, then several other community members with what can only be called, “witness intimidation” which absolutely won’t be stood for, it could only be solved if he reached out and tried to work with her in some productive way at this point. Instead, he dug in even more, which was ultimately the wrong move. I tried to tell him. 

Over the previous weekend, I had been involved in a Twitter discussion with Sheree Paolello, the news anchor at Channel 5. The topic was over why the media wouldn’t cover the Matt Miller story at Lakota with the assumption that they had a moral obligation to protect children from indications that showed parents they should worry about it in the district. Sheree surprisingly defended her station. She answered that the police chose not to prosecute, so there was nothing illegal to pursue. The Lakota school board took no action to penalize the superintendent. And the media ultimately bought the school board’s report without question, even though a lot of information indicated otherwise. And there was so much anger from community members because all their safety nets had let them down.

For many people, the anger was that all these institutionalized systems had no interest in protecting the kids from the strange lifestyles of the Lakota administrators, but their complete concern was in protecting the institution itself from the judgment of the community. This is a strange case for me because I literally know everyone involved. I’ve met Sheree several times over the years, and I certainly know the reporter she referred to, Karin Johnson, who covered the Lakota story. I have a pretty good understanding of why everyone took the positions they did regarding Lakota schools.   It’s all about damage control and what they perceive that damage to be. For them, the school and its reputation are more significant than the individual kids and their families who attend the school. But the school itself, and institutionalism in general, is very progressive and ultimately anti-family, and that is the biggest takeaway from this ordeal. The parents want to believe that the school has the best interests of their children when they send them to school. But the school is essentially a liberal playground for progressive politics, and the kids serve as a shield against the bad behavior of the adults. And to Sheree’s point, none of that is illegal. It may be wrong, but it wasn’t a news story because it wasn’t illegal, as determined by a police representative who has a reputation for abusing the law for personal power reasons—for instance, the case of Roger Reynolds, which is happening in that same school district presently.

I remember the good ol’ days when if a public official, like a school superintendent, is, had an affair and got caught in a divorce, that it would have been enough to cause a scandal. This separation of personal behavior from professional roles is a new thing within the last decade. Most people in the Lakota district never accepted it and haven’t had much experience dealing with it. So they naturally assume that bad behavior would equal a bad report card professionally and that everyone would take it seriously.   But that’s not the kind of liberalism that is taught in all public schools these days. Progressive politics is all about a job as a right and mandatory pay without regard to performance. In the eyes of the typical liberal, they believe they should be able to do anything in their personal lives and still be looked at professionally by the title over their door, not the individual behavior they conduct. This is the source of much trouble across the nation right now at just about every level of government occupation, and it’s a value system that just isn’t going to work. This trouble started in the 90s when Bill Clinton tried to tell the nation he could still be president even though he had an affair with an intern. After all, it was just sex. He could still be president, right? And when progressive activists started protesting the removal of the Ten Commandments from courtrooms. The problem is, if you remove the Bible from society’s values, then no law and order have any meaning, leaving it to lawyers to define the words on paper, not the value behind them. And that’s how we get to the mess we are in now.

Most of the people who are outraged at the Lakota story of protecting their superintendent from the obvious bad behavior he created for himself are those who still look to the Bible for their fundamental value behind the rule of law. Suppose there isn’t a foundation of essential value. In that case, you can’t have a society, which is just another aspect of failed progressive philosophies taught in public schools to the detriment of the children involved, which is a major problem in our modern times. And those people expect that the people they are dealing with, the police, the media, and the school board itself, are functioning from basic understandings of value, and what reality presented to them is a point of view where values weren’t even a consideration. Instead, they get interpretations of the law that is not rooted in any Biblical frame of reference, so if the words aren’t explicitly written down to say something is bad or criminal, then even an average lawyer feels they can relieve a client of guilt under such circumstances, even if they know them to be extremely guilty by all other social measures. And so it goes and will continue. School board meetings will continue to be dysfunctional because the community has a much higher standard than what the institution of Lakota, the police, or the media are willing to represent. They accepted these new progressive values for social discourse, and that is not where the community is or will ever be. The core of our nation is the decision to move away from a Biblical foundation for value systems behind law and order. We all know progressives want to destroy that concept, but people are not ever going to accept that, just like they were never going to accept progressive mask mandates over a government-created crisis which Covid turned out to be. So, we have the clash that we are seeing in Lakota and other school districts across the nation. And that fissure is very real. It won’t be fixed by ignoring the problem or hiring a public relations firm to clean it up. People have standards, and they will apply them to the world around them, and they have been let down by the characters involved in this Lakota story, and they are furious because of it. 

Rich Hoffman