It’s an old trick at Lakota schools; I remember how it was back in 2012 when they couldn’t pass a school levy; I was a part of that, too, so I remember it well. They moved to the same auditorium at Lakota East and encouraged the teacher’s union mob to come in and drown out the opposition at the podium. The goal then as it is now has nothing to do with safety, as the Sheriff’s department recommended due to the size of the school board meetings being so heavily attended due to the controversies of the last year. Usually, school board meetings are boring, and nobody attends except the teacher union element. But normal people have not been going for a long time because they really don’t care about school business.
In most cases, their kids have grown up, and they really don’t care about Lakota schools so long as they don’t look at the amount of money they pay for their property tax. But when it comes down to the kind of topics we have had at Lakota since Darbi Boddy was elected very popularly by the public, she easily beat Kelly Casper in the vote count, and due to her popularity in the community, she would do better now than then. I know many moderate-minded people who are not crazy, over-the-rainbow people who are happy Darbi is on the school board because they see she is asking questions they don’t want to ask themselves. So because of Darbi, the meetings have been more heavily attended, but the school board itself isn’t happy about it. They want the good ol’ days when nobody was paying attention. They certainly don’t want to deal with all the public speeches. So using “safety” as the excuse, they moved the meetings to the largest possible location within the district, hoping to pack the house with intimidating school board supporters from the teacher’s union, to drown out the lone voice on the board with such an ominous presence, and to do what they weren’t able to do in federal court, shut down public comments because they have been making them look bad.
There is another element as well to the move to a larger format; there are two board members who are up for election, Lynda O’Conner and her good friend Julie Shaffer who has her own history of behaving poorly in public settings, which we will get into the details during the official campaign. They don’t want rival candidates using the school microphone to make campaign pitches, so moving to such a large format makes it much harder for normal people to speak in front of such a large crowd. Public speaking is hard for many people, and the size of the format makes it much more difficult. This move to such a large auditorium is a veteran move by the sitting school board members who can use the rules to help their own re-election chances. The last thing they want is more Darbi Boddy types making campaign pitches at school board meetings to preserve their chances in the upcoming election. Of course, these moves by the current school board, blaming it on the Sheriff’s department for the action, have nothing to do with safety or overpacked crowds at the previous venues. It has everything to do with controlling the messaging at Lakota in the wake of their superintendent controversies, the teachers who are sending shirtless pictures to students, in the constant seduction that goes on between students and teachers that are out of control. What we hear about on the news is just the very tip of a very deep iceberg. What did people think would happen when society lowered the bar of sexuality and mixed teachers in their twenties as employees with a population of kids in their teens and low barriers to entry for sexual predilections? It’s been a disaster, and the school board doesn’t want to deal with it.
When people talk to me about it, I tell them I tend to only go to those dumb meetings when someone needs to be defended. I went to one last year to stand by Darbi. What’s nice about her is that she doesn’t need much defending. She is perfectly able to take care of herself. But as far as hoping to change any minds at Lakota schools from a public comment perspective, the school board has shown no interest in hearing from the public over the years. They are heavily politically motivated and resent the tax-paying public, who tend to be very conservative. That’s why meetings from the past were so poorly attended. But when controversies get out of control from them, as I was a part of in 2012 when they were trying to pass a school levy for the fourth time, and I was in the way, or this time when they are trying to suppress evidence of CRT, and a progressive political agenda in general that Darbi is trying to expose, then their only defense is to attempt to use peer pressure from the masses that they control to drown out the criticism. And that’s what they are up to now.
What they really hate is when you remove from them the mask they all hide behind as a school system. I remember an event Julie Shaffer and Lynda O’Conner were involved in where they did to me much what they have been doing to Darbi Boddy. It happened not over the school levy issue but when I was the spokesman for a group we had formed called Yes to Lakota Kids. They like to hide behind kids to validate their existence, and because they couldn’t pass the levy, they were taking away sports programs and busing to punish the public. In my group, we raised money to take that fake sentiment away by paying for the fees Lakota was imposing, which took away their cover. That’s when they became most vicious and went on a crusade of personal destruction toward me in unforgivable ways. It took Lynda many years to get me to speak to her, with her trying hard to win my trust back. But now, what she has done with Darbi, she has lost a decade of work for all the same reasons. We’re dealing with some really broken people here, and the reason they want to control the message, to stop public comment, is to hide their use of children to justify their social liberalism and to control the campaign platform of the political opposition that is very intense going into an election year. So many people want to run that we are having the opposite problem that we had when Darbi and Isaac were running. Sorting through everything has been challenging, but people are upset. We need the “right” people to run. But they don’t need to attend the school board meetings to make themselves known. Nobody really cares about those. It is not smart to attend school board meetings when political rivals control the ground you are fighting from. It is much better to take your voice away from their control and take it into the community where they can’t defend their position with silly tricks, as they have now done early in 2023, then tried to blame it all on “safety.” So many bad things happen in the world that is blamed on “safety.” And this Lakota meeting format is undoubtedly one of them.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 