The Best Thing to Happen to Lakota: What success sounds like

I would have never been involved in the last election for school board members if Lynda O’Conner hadn’t asked me to. My kids are grown, my grandkids are being homeschooled, and I think public education is a trash heap anyway. You should join my Thanksgiving Dinners sometime and listen to us talk about politics. My kids likely will homeschool their kids all the way through graduation, we all despise it so much, and we hate the people even more.   Bible verses come to my mind a lot these days, given the amount of evil that is showing itself in the world, and this one from  Isaiah 49:26  states my feelings about the matter pretty well “And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I am the LORD.” Public schools are oppressive places filled with vile, evil people, and spending one cent of my tax money on them angers me greatly. It took Lynda over seven years to earn my trust enough to have something beyond a polite conversation, and in that process, I came to think that she might be able to help the public school system in some small way, which is always worth doing. I watched some of the school board meetings where other board members would gang up on her because she was the only conservative, and I wanted to help her. So I worked with her during the 2021 election, and Isaac Adi and Darbi Boddy were found and elected to the board, and Lynda then had a conservative majority, and I hoped that Lakota would improve into something functional. 

So it was a painful experience to watch Lynda immediately turn on Darbi Boddy in the way that she did and turn into everything I don’t like about public schools. It was ironic to watch the Lakota school board work so hard to get rid of Darbi because they simply didn’t like her by trying to force her to resign over an accidental porn link while communicating legitimate information to the public. Then to have Lynda end up with the same problem within a year, and to have those same school board members who were working against Lynda while Brad Lovell was the board president, into defending her as a sister. We were told that when it came to Darbi, porn links on websites were bad. But when it came to Lynda, it was an accident that wasn’t a big deal. And that is the kind of thing that I don’t like about public schools, where adults who have lived bad lives try to live through their children and play a make-believe game that if only the community would spend just a few more dollars on educating children, that everything in the world would be better. And up until this year, I thought that if good people were involved in school boards, maybe things could work in public education. But I have arrived at similar conclusions as one public speaker at the most recent March 6th meeting, Jamie Minniear, did at a school board meeting. Jamie took the emotion of the year and expressed it, I think, in a way worth noting, which I found reflected my thoughts as well. It’s hard to care about people in politics, but it happens, and that pain can’t be easily contained, which is evident in Jamie’s public statements:

“Lynda-I wasn’t sure how to best communicate my thoughts to you at this point. The lack of response to my many questions over the months, combined with your greeting me at Republican meetings in recent weeks as if all is well, is what prompted me to come here tonight. So much that has happened over the last couple of years with you, in particular, has been difficult to swallow. To say you have been dishonest is an understatement-in fact, I can’t think of anything you have been transparent and honest about. This started with you not supporting parent authority during COVID, then the Matt Miller disaster where you withheld public record requests, violated the 1st amendment by disallowing public comments about Mr. Miller, and in a shocking close to the string of dishonesty, in the face of you reading the superintendents admission to 1) having a sexual fantasy conversation about 3 Lakota students, and 2) his admission to publically advertising his wife to other men for sex on Craigslist-with that alarming information in hand, you said calmly at the November 21st board meeting – “… the board of education’s highest priority is the safety of its students, these claims against Mr. Miller were found to be false by multiple agencies,” Mrs. O’Connor, I ask you, how are the claims false when they are confessed to by Mr. Miller? Then, during that same statement, you went on with a celebration of Mr. Miller by saying, “the board would like to express its full support for Mr. Miller – Mr. Miller is an is an excellent leader in our district, and he is a shining light in Ohio.” How do you, with any sense of morality and respect for Lakota and the community, lift Mr. Miller up and celebrate him like a hero with Mr. Miller’s vulgar confession in one hand and the microphone in your other? You never discussed Mr. Miller’s confession. You first tried to hide it, then ignored it. But here’s the problem. When someone withholds and ignores information, it is a suppression of truth – this is lying. You withheld and ignored Matt Miller’s gross confessions. You lied to the community. In regards to the email you sent me yesterday trying to convince me not to come tonight. You are right about scripture saying go to a brother if you have a grievance with him. But there’s a second part to the scripture. Matthew 18:15-17 If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him—work it out between the two of you. If he won’t listen, take others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest, and try again. I and many others have come to you individually, as scripture says, but you’ve done and said nothing. Tonight, is the second part of scripture which is bringing it out in front of others to have an account of the issue and keep things honest. Finally, with no attempt on your part to bring clarity or honesty to what happened, I’m asking you to discontinue greeting or engaging with me in public. I’m not interested in pretending all is well.”

Matt Miller was probably the best thing to happen to Lakota; I agree with many apologists on the matter. We are a better community because of Matt Miller. But not because of his work at the school but because of the network of sexual swingers, radical liberals, tax increase supporters, and outright villainy that was uncovered; as a result, going from our sheriff’s department to our school board and all the lawyers in between. As a community, we learned a lot, but more than anything, we have been confronted with a kind of evil that has always worked in the background, and we wonder why our kids grow up destroyed and unable to function in the real world. Look at their parents. And in many ways, the Matt Miller controversies brought all this to the surface and showed people to be what they always were, which leads to always tax increases to fill the financial voids of their empty lives. This is something that went far beyond simple political matters and moved into the struggle of life and death itself and the role of goodness or evil on earth in conflict over a simple curriculum. And when we are told that there is no CRT or that highly liberal and political teachers aren’t sexually grooming kids, it’s coming from the same people who told us that Darbi was bad for accidentally linking porn on her website but that Lynda was good because she had porn on her website for two months because the domain expired and nobody noticed. Both were accidents, but one was deemed bad by the established system, by the same people, yet everything was fine when it came to Lynda. Just as they told us, there was nothing to the Matt Miller story, even as we read it with our own eyes in the police report. 

Rather than get emotionally discharged over all these slaps in the face, I have been reminding people that this is an election year, and Lynda is up for consideration. Obviously, it will take more than just putting conservatives on the school board to fix anything and to make what our tax money is spent on just a little better. It’s going to take actually good people, and in my view of the world, Darbi Boddy does that. I would love to have four more on the school board like her. But this election will be different; it won’t just be about names on a Republican slate card or even a party endorsement. This is literally a fight between good and evil. People who would lie to our faces, manipulate our trust, and then carry that sentiment over into the education of children as if they were too innocent to see how the adults are really behaving. If we want to have even a bit of hope for the future of children, then the adults have to start behaving much better. And what we have seen coming from the Lakota school board over this last year has been bad, and kids are smart enough to understand why. It wasn’t Darbi Boddy who lied to the public and misrepresented herself. She is only guilty of not playing the game because she ran on a platform of not playing games. Because games are expensive and they don’t help educate children. But the hurt regarding Lynda is that many people wanted to help her do good things at Lakota, and in the end, she pushed away her supporters and was supported most by those who worked against her. And that level of betrayal is a timely enterprise because it happened when it counted most, during an election year, so people can now at least make a clear choice without a lot of friendly emotions getting in the way. We have seen the truth, and now we have an obligation to act on it. Which we will. 

Regarding the 2-hour and 18-minute mark of the March 6 Lakota school board meeting video, it is easy to see what we are dealing with.  When my name was brought up, several people asked me how it felt to have people laughing at me during this meeting.  I replied in every instance that I was very honored to have those people feel so strongly.  Those types of personalities, such as the person pictured with the “removedarbiboddy.com” shirt, are what have infested these public schools with so much terrible behavior.  I thought Isaac’s reaction was interesting, especially after all the times he thanked me for all the nice words I sent in his direction.  But watching him in that format and actually leading the crowd says everything anybody needs to know.   There are the things that people say to get elected.  Then there is what they do to stay in favor of the mob.  And make no mistake about it; the mob is in charge at Lakota schools and all public schools.  Wanting to be liked by the mob is how we lose people like Isaac and Lynda to them.  So it is great to see someone, Darbi Boddy, sit in the middle of that mob and show such resilience.   And by doing what she has, we see more people following in that lead and ultimately changing the culture at Lakota into something that those laughing will be forced to take a lot more seriously. 

Rich Hoffman