You would think that a person running for re-election to the school board of Lakota would launch her campaign somewhere smart, like a library or even at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore. But no, Julie Shaffer is running for her fourth term, and from all that vast experience, she picked a wine bar to launch her campaign, which was mentioned in a Journal News puff piece by her long-time associate in the media, Michael Clark. I have a long history with these people, so the irony could never be more obvious. Considering what everyone knows about Julie Shaffer, you’d think she would have known better. There was a National School Board Conference a few years ago where she and others got a lot crazy, and she ended up disgracing herself in many ways. I learned about it from people who were with her and tried to help her clean up after the event. But it goes much further than that. All the local politicians know about it and confirmed it in the aftermath. So, I was never much of a fan of Julie Shaffer, but I treated her fairly in the beginning until she showed herself to be quite a left-winged radical with vicious political intentions that, of course, like they all do, hide it behind the smiling faces of kids. However, the more I learned about her over the years, the more she showed herself to be one of the big problems at Lakota as she intends to bring progressive mindsets to the students. She was one of the first to support genderless bathrooms at Lakota before the alphabet sexual deviancies were announced on the news every day as they are now.
Let’s just be polite about it: Julie’s condition at that National School Board Conference with other Lakota representatives was not pleasant. It involved severe intoxication and various states of undress, according to witnesses who were there and tried to help her. But there’s more, which came out during the latest drama with the former Lakota superintendent who apparently let people know that he had video of it all on his phone, and people were enjoying it. And knowing what everyone now knows about him; apparently, even he was embarrassed by the behavior of the Lakota leadership at that conference. I personally didn’t see the video; I had no desire to, even though it was an option from those close to the superintendent. We’re not talking about a “Girls Gone Wild” video in the sense that everyone was young and beautiful. These are middle-aged, beat-up potato sacks getting way too crazy when they should have been representing the Lakota district as proper education representatives. So just drinking too much would have been too much. Anything after that, which was a lot, was simply unforgivable. The whole video issue came up as many who had heard this story were wondering why Julie was so willing to give a free pass to what we learned about the former school superintendent. The belief was that she couldn’t afford to cast any opinions about his behavior because she had done equally disreputable acts. With all that in mind, it was baffling that she would launch her campaign at a wine bar to remind everyone of this embarrassing event. She’s a seasoned politician now, so she should have known better. But obviously not.
This raises the real issue; deviant behavior is often more than what you see on the surface. Over the years, Julie has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for progressive changes while hiding the effort behind a non-partisan school board. School boards are very partisan, often filled with radical democrats with big government ideas about everything and an eye toward spending to match it. And we see how she arrives at these thoughts when you learn about her personal lifestyle. Like many progressive big government people, Julie is attracted to an extensive social safety net because she has problems controlling herself. If you want to be taken seriously as a leader of anything, you just never conduct yourself like she was caught doing at a National School Board Conference. When she says in that Michael Clark “puff piece” that “I believe that this is a fight for the heart and soul of a district that has been a destination district for many years but is being harmed by extremism, politics, and divisiveness.” She’s running in a very conservative district with people who care about things like drunkenness, overt sexual displays of disgrace, and lousy judgment. And like a lot of Democrats, she has been hiding her political tendencies behind the unspoken rules of bipartisanship. These public schools are not for the kids, as people like her claim; it’s for the adults to have free babysitting and to act like a bunch of teenagers when left alone in a hotel lobby while traveling out of town. In that article, she said that “this election will be a decision by our community about what they want Lakota to represent in the future.”
And that’s why her behavior at school board conferences matters to the rest of us, although we may not want to disgust ourselves with the details. While Julie has worked to attack conservative voices in passive-aggressive ways for years, it’s evident that she has been fighting for the disgrace of children, not the preservation of them. And it shows up in her private actions. Then, like a lot of people who are so inclined to Democrat politics, they seek to hide their bad behavior behind big government mechanisms, which then shield them from reality. And there is a cost to all those big government ideas which Democrats use like a mask to hide what bad people they really are when they think nobody is looking. So, of course, they hate people who judge them for what they are. I wouldn’t call it “right-winged politics” as much as I would call it common sense. Anybody who wants to be a leader of anything should know that even at the late hours of the night when the alcohol with friends is flowing freely, it’s best not to participate and to lead by a higher example. I know many people who travel a lot, and they don’t end up in the compromised state that Julie was, where she had to be put back together by fellow school board members after disgrace had already chronicled the event for posterity. What’s even more stunning than all is that she would bring attention to it even during her campaign announcement. Talk about being tone-deaf. This will be a tough campaign for her, but she can only blame herself. She is offering herself as a leader of Lakota schools and is attempting to say that anybody who judges her behavior is a “right-winged radical.” But to the rest of the world, it’s just the rantings of people who can’t control themselves when they leave home. And the same can be said about her budget decisions as a school board member, where the same rationalization comes into play. And the track record is not a good one at all.
Rich Hoffman
