Tag: public education

The Misfits of Lakota Schools: God didn’t make everyone equal, and that is the root cause behind much of the hatred

I understand it; some people, when God was giving out body parts, ended up with whatever was left over in the scrap bin, and public education is filled with people who want to hide from the world because they are embarrassed. There is an apparent reason you don’t see too many fashion models working in public education. Instead, they mostly look like Rosie O’Donnell. That’s OK, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK to discriminate against people who got the good parts out of the body bin when they were born and grown into attractive adults. And really, when you peel away the hatred of Darbi Boddy, the second-year school board member for Lakota schools, and friends of hers, like Vanessa Wells, the attitude toward them doesn’t come down to political ideology, as much as it is they were fortunate to get the good stuff out of the premium box when God was building them. And, of course, with that comes good husbands, good families, and lots of opportunities in life that the broken toys don’t usually get. So a problem emerges in the public school system, starting with the people who work in the industry, the volunteers who support it and make it work; by design, the production of the institution is below-the-line thinking, negative reinforcement of all the unfortunate circumstances in life. The goal isn’t to be better and to be unique; instead, the objective that is taught to the kids is sameness, to mitigate exceptionalism, and to provide a safe harbor for all the misfits in the world who want a place to hide from the judgments that often come from a capitalist society.

It’s Doug Horton, the guy who tried to beat Darbi in the last election and lost badly

The anger at Darbi Boddy, which has been unreasonable from the beginning, has moved beyond policy differences a long time ago. After watching the situation up close, I am convinced that the hatred is the kind of hatred that jealous women often have for each other, when one woman is noticeably much more attractive than the rest. Of course, we live in a world where those kinds of things shouldn’t matter. But they obviously do, and it really hasn’t been fair to Darbi. Working with her, I think she is one of the smartest school board members I’ve ever worked with, and I have known a lot over the years. Her critics say that Darbi has too many handlers and that she gets stumped up sometimes when giving presentations. My experience with her is that it’s tough to represent many people with many different ideas about how things should be; it’s hard on a good day, and she does a good job of not losing herself along the way. I’ve seen her handle a lot of pressure as gracefully as anybody could ever hope for. But we’re not dealing with attractive people here, people with experience that typically have pretty people in them, and you can watch the behavior of the people working around Darbi when they think nobody is looking, and you can see the seething rage that has been applied in her direction for one reason only, if looks could kill, they would like to eliminate Darbi because of it.

Vanessa Wells is another story, whom Darbi designated to work with her to perform a curriculum audit, which is what the latest controversy at Lakota schools has been all about. Darbi brought Vanessa in to look for signs of CRT and other progressive intrusions into the school curriculum for many reasons, most notably because Vanessa is extremely intelligent and has a very high reading comprehension level. I have been working with Vanessa for several years now and have come to know her and her family very well, and I have seen them under extraordinary pressure. And they are sharp people, very sharp. It was very smart for Darbi to reach out to Vanessa to help with the curriculum audit because Vanessa has the ability to read documents at the level a lawyer would provide. If Vanessa wasn’t a mom raising her family with a lot of commitment, she could easily be a high-powered attorney for a firm somewhere. She has a natural passion for the law and can spot problems in documents that have been prepared from a lawyer’s perspective. But the hatred of Vanessa isn’t because she’s a conservative member of the community. Let’s just say Vanessa photographs well, and you can see other women seething whenever she makes a public appearance, essentially just because God gave Vanessa some obviously good body parts off the assembly line of human being design. The people who received in life body parts from the bargain bin, a messed-up foot here, a double chin there, are resentful and behave that way. It’s not Vanessa’s fault she got the good stuff. She’s smart and has the advantages that come from the good bin of human assembly by God, and she makes the most of it, which many people who tend to work in public education are obviously upset by.

Then there are the husbands; of course, attractive people like Darbi and Vanessa have the opportunity to attract husbands that a lot of women would love to have. Darbi’s husband looks like John Rambo and reminds me of a cross between that fictional Sylvester Stallone character and the real-life character of Chris Kyle. This is a problem for the radical left, who are only comfortable in life when they can make people afraid and submissive to their bat-crazy policies. You won’t find anybody, especially the Beta types from the political left, intimidating Darbi’s husband. He looks like the kind of person you would never want to mess with.  Then there is Vanessa’s husband, Justin. I consider him the modern model of this generation’s tough guy. Nobody is going to beat up Justin in some parking lot somewhere. He would fight anybody any day and in any number. But he doesn’t stop there; he is quite an online warrior. He will argue with anybody over anything, and he plays to win. He isn’t afraid of anybody and certainly doesn’t buckle under peer pressure. But best of all, he’s smart about legal issues and is so confident in his positions that he isn’t afraid to go to court. He likes to fight, and he will fight anybody over anything, and I have come to like him a lot over time. I really like these people. But it makes sense; attractive people tend to attract other, high-quality people and make good families. And in many ways, that destroys why many people who work in public education get involved to begin with. They want the taxpayer-funded institution to protect them from a competitive world where there are pretty people, smart people, and tough people. They are attracted to communism for all the reasons Karl Marx designed it, to give refuge to those seeking sameness because they didn’t get the good body parts at birth. They hate God for the unfairness of it. And they find themselves supporting liberal causes because they don’t have John Rambo to come home to every day; they have some washed-out George McFly sipping coffee at the dinner table who never punched Biff in the face. And when those people must work with people who have it all in life, they naturally are resentful, and their hatred manifests in negative ways that ultimately become very expensive to the taxpayer and destructive to the poor children. They are teaching the same jealous cycle that will ruin countless lives in the future. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Darbi Boddy Protects Lakota from Trans Activism: What is really going on in the classrooms that would shock parents

At this point, the constant barrage of anti-Darby Boddy sentiment at Lakota schools is laughable. At the school board meeting on 4.17.23, the second-year school board member, who has been the center of controversy, proposed the board vote on banning transgender bathrooms and athletes at Lakota schools, and the reaction was predictably hostile. School board members Kelly Casper and Julie Shaffer, who have supported transgender bathrooms in the past, were openly hostile toward Darbi for even bringing it up. And the rest of the board noticeably leaned left on the issue, leaving Darbi in a 4-to-1-squabble over an obvious problem. Of course, the media picked up the story and attempted to sling it negatively toward Darbi Boddy, as they have for the entire last year.   But the real problem on the board, just as it is with their grasp of financial concepts, is that the Lakota school board cares much more about its public image than the actual quality of the school. And I have news for them. They can play keep away with the facts all they want, but the reality is that eventually some version of the Backpack Bill will pass in Ohio and the money will go away from the school and will follow the kids. Public schools as we know it will change forever; it’s an inevitable fate. And only one of the school board members at Lakota, Darbi Boddy, is trying to prepare for that inevitability by asking questions that will eventually make Lakota schools more competitive. When the community brings issues to the school board, their reaction has been to hide and keep away from the facts, trying to limit public expression at extreme measures to hide the actual problems from themselves.

For instance, there has been talk for several years now, going back to the previous board president, where Lakota spent much of its excess budget on woke administrators to fill positions like equity inclusion and other ridiculous progressive government roles. The school board attempts to say that they are not a political body of administration and that everything they do is “for the kids.” And anyone who questions that premise they berate like a bunch of thugs robbing a Walmart in Chicago, as if the potential for violence and name-calling might hide the reality of their true intentions, which is extreme political activism, such as is the case with gender-neutral bathrooms in a public school, which Julie Shaffer has undoubtedly supported in the past, who is now up for re-election this year. But like in the case of Kelly Casper, who was openly very rude to Darbi Boddy during the Monday school board meeting, she has been pressing the issue that Lakota has cut all the meat off the bone that they could, so why couldn’t Lakota get more state money to cover their costs. Lakota has too many administrators who perform woke, purely political tasks. Every administrator Lakota hires toward woke causes costs around $100,000 yearly after salary and benefits. Then obviously, ten useless administrators will add a million dollars to the payroll. The question then becomes, how many useless administrators are there at Lakota schools? Around 30%? That is the financial problem at Lakota. It’s a spending problem by big government hacks, not an actual budget problem that requires more state revenue. Lakota needs to go the other way on their cost structure for the eventual day when a Backpack Bill in favor of School Choice passes, and Lakota will become an option instead of a zip code-mandated limit. 

Then in that regard, Darbi is asking all the right questions. Darbi wants to show the voting public that Lakota is taking a stand against transgender activism because that is something that people with kids are concerned about, and if Lakota makes that stand now, they might want to send their kids to Lakota still later. Transgender issues are in the news, so now is the time for Lakota to state its position to ease parents’ minds. But the other board members dug in and lashed out at Darbi for even bringing up the question, with big spender Kelly Casper calling Darbi on stage a “petulant 2-year-old,” obviously trying to score points with the radical teacher union base she most represents. But behind the entire meeting was anger that Darbi even brought up the issue because the board, just as they had done over their superintendent antics, where there were reports of alarming activity that they ignored which drove the need for a public position, and they wanted to pretend as if there was no merit behind Darbi’s vote recommendation. As if reporting any of this transgender activity to the acting superintendent might actually result in action, which we all know by now, it will be ignored because it might damage the school’s reputation. Yet, parents are concerned; I received information that can be seen here from a kid in the 6th grade at VanGorden Elementary at Lakota who brought home the book Gracefully Grayson by Ami Polonsky. That book was given to the child in school, and they brought it home for their parents to discover, and it is all about a boy who feels like a girl, so he takes the journey to become one. It clearly says on the back of the book, “What if who you are on the outside doesn’t match who you are on the inside?” This is what is being taught in Lakota schools, and the school board should be aware of it. According to them, they aren’t aware, which shows how out of touch they are with reality. Only Darbi Boddy is trying to do anything about it. Darbi is right; we need a new board built around people like her because the rest are part of the political problem and spending disasters. 

But even worse than all that, all this transgender talk is technically a religious issue. It’s not just a political platform for liberal politics. The same people advocating for transgender bathrooms and student-athletes are the same who would say that the Cross of Christ or Bible studies in any public school would be a violation of church and state. Yet it’s perfectly ok to plaster the walls of Lakota with rainbows and Pride paraphernalia to show equity inclusion. But the trans movement is religious; it’s the Cult of Ishtar, which is a thing of its own. Where religion becomes part of a political movement, which trans rights clearly are. If a school is going to allow for rainbow representations of a sexual lifestyle in the Pride movement, then they must also enable open displays of the Ten Commandments and the Cross on the walls. You can’t have one without the other. But the instances are that one is allowed, but the other isn’t, and that is indeed the core problem we are dealing with at all public schools. We are supposed to accept that transgender issues are a moral mandate while other religious practices are rejected as a separation of Church and State, which is reprehensible. And the Lakota school board, except for Darbi Boddy, wants to ignore this massive problem just to protect their ability to get more tax money from the public in the future because they waste so much money they have no other management option based on the politics of the system itself. And to that point, only Darbi Boddy has been willing to tackle the problems at Lakota to make it a more viable destination for the education dollar spent. The rest just hope the problem will disappear, especially if they ignore the evidence, which is ridiculously complicit in progressive politics that is the foundation of everything that goes on in public education.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Matt Miller Resigns and Blames Everyone But Himself in the Process: Darbi Boddy is far more valuable for Butler County real estate value than Sheriff Jones

I wasn’t planning to say much on the Matt Miller resignation. Obviously, he just wasn’t a good fit for our community, and like it happens to a lot of people, his divorce essentially destroyed his life. Many people have false beliefs about the importance of what a superintendent does for a community and the changing nature of public education. Included in this article is a good piece by Jesse Watters on Fox News about CRT in Ohio schools and just how much radicalism we are dealing with. As a former teacher and an obvious supporter of left-winged radicalism in public schools, Matt Miller was a prominent progressive politically, and that came out during his tenure little by little. In the beginning, he did a pretty good job of hiding it, but during Covid, he showed himself to be precisely what many of us worried he was. The mask mandates were a disaster; he pushed conservatives off the school board, then finally what we learned about his personal life through divorce records, the community had to take a stand, which they did, and he had to resign. But before he left, he dropped a media bomb, essentially attempting to set up a lawsuit against the school board and anybody else they could drag into the issue for creating an unsafe workspace for him, which was evident in an article from the Cincinnati Enquirer that made its way to Yahoo News by his attorney setting up the litigation indicating playing himself a victim and that all his problems are someone else’s fault. He took a job within Butler County for much less money. 

I give people a lot of advice, free of charge because I want to see them have good lives. I even very recently gave some excellent advice to Matt Miller himself through his attorney, Elizabeth. My advice to the school board is not to settle any lawsuit with Miller and to take him to court. What everyone knows about the case, including the school board, which can be seen on ProtectLakotaKids.com, is that there isn’t any path for litigation once the discovery process is revealed in court, so there is no reason to settle anything. Just a few months ago, when Matt Miller threatened everyone with lawsuits, including me, I told him with written documentation that he could solve all his problems if he only worked with Darbi Boddy. He had gone way too far in trying to remove her from the school board, and to destroy her life, just as he did with Todd Parnell and several other very liberal school board members. It didn’t work; he should have tried to call off all the radical dogs who were petitioning to remove Darbi and make her life a living hell. If anybody should be filing lawsuits, it’s Darbi. I think she has a great case against a lot of people. But that’s not her nature. She’s tough and respects toughness. If only Matt Miller had offered peace, he wouldn’t have had to resign. All he had to do was work with her. He didn’t have to like her. But of course, he didn’t listen; his legal counsel ignored the good advice as well, and now they find themselves where they are. And it’s nobody’s fault but their own. Matt Miller’s career wasn’t destroyed by Darbi, Darbi’s friends, the Tea Party members of Lakota, or even conservatives in general. His ex-wife destroyed his career for the way he managed his family in his interactions. And what he did was not reflective of someone who should be managing anybody, anywhere. Once people learned in his own words through a Butler County Police report the details of his marriage and divorce, they couldn’t work with him any longer, and they certainly didn’t want to pay him the amount of money he was making as a Lakota superintendent. 

Yet there is much more to the story that obviously Tom Ferrell and other area Republicans reflect when they showed concern that Matt Miller was leaving Lakota schools because of a political upheaval that pushed him away. Tom is a trustee for Liberty Township. I know him; I think he’s a good guy. But he thought Matt Miller was like the second coming of Christ, like many do, and they worry that with some national figure like Matt Miller gone, that Lakota will suffer. So rather than make fun of all those people for their beliefs, I’ll give a little more free advice that is actually worth a lot of money. But it shreds a popularly held misconception that government schools drive real estate value and that if Lakota doesn’t have an excellent grade card by some expensive superintendent, people will move away and destroy our real estate industry, and our community will be destroyed. The radical union element created those beliefs, just as they have secretly pushed CRT and generous progressive lifestyles on Americans for years. They have told us that zip codes get funding, and any interruption of that will destroy our entire society. But it won’t. It’s time to call that bluff and let reality tell the rest of the story. Don’t get suckered by the progressive playbook, and that’s clearly the condition of Liberty Township Trustee Tom Farrell and likely most of the Lakota school board, and many parents who drank the Matt Miller Kool-Aid and think the sky will fall just because he resigned. The sky is just fine. Here’s the hard truth of reality. 

I’ve lived in Liberty Township most of my life. I’ve traveled all over the world, and I have come to realize that it’s one of the best places on earth, so I have stayed in the same area most of that time. But I have watched several regions, like Fairfield, Princeton, Middletown, and Hamilton, rise and fall as real estate destinations. And do you know why people move and what makes real estate value occur, which no realtor wants to admit to in public? It’s running from liberalism. When any area starts getting too many liberals on their school boards or as trustees, city councils, and mayors, when liberals begin running the show, conservative money moves to where they aren’t. It has nothing to do with the quality of the schools but the degree of liberalism. Even though many of the Matt Miller supporters moved from liberal areas to be recruited by a liberal public school, Lakota and those pretentious types are now crying like babies because what they want out of Lakota is more liberalism, and they filled the houses that were built for them.  Yet, they could all move away, and their homes would be sold to more conservative people who do want to live in the area because they don’t want to live where liberals are ruining their zip codes. If you study the matter all over the nation, from New York to Los Angeles or to Seattle, Washington, you’ll find the same truth; people leave areas where liberals are in charge. Butler County, Ohio, has thrived not because of Lakota schools.  Lakota schools has thrived because of the people who moved there, despite the liberalism that came from the employees. Butler County has always been a haven from liberals, and that is its actual value. I should know; I have watched it grow over many years. I used to have cows next to my house. Now it’s a bunch of crybabies, Matt Miller-supporting losers. I would be happy to see them leave and to take their liberal voting record with them. I could put my dog in charge of Lakota schools, and our community would still be a valuable place to live, a destination for most of the world.   The school and its employees are a hindrance, not a help. 

Back to Tom Farrell, and politicians like him, the best thing that could have happened was Darbi Boddy. Having peaceful school board meetings is not a value; it’s a lazy approach to management. But when people hear people like her defending conservative values from liberal invasions, that helps real estate value more than any other criteria. There is nothing better to show concerned parents that they are moving to a safe community than Darbi Boddy fighting to keep their children safe from the evils of liberalism, CRT, genderless bathrooms, and pushing gay lifestyles on young children, not even before they enter puberty. A few years ago, Jesse Watters’s piece would never have appeared on Fox News. Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes would have laughed it off as a conspiracy theory, just how radical these public schools really were. Today, people generally understand that these public schools threaten their families and their lives. And they are terrified of the effects of liberalism, and they ultimately do vote with their feet. I would recommend that people like Tom Farrell update their understanding of what makes a great community. I would also suggest that Tom update his Facebook photo. Times do change, and we need to reflect that in our assumptions. And in this new world, Darbi Boddy is much more valuable to the Republican Party and to regional politics that drive real estate values than Sherriff Jones and a well-known police department. Darbi has done more to keep kids safe, and that’s what most moms care more about than anything. And people won’t leave Lakota because of Matt Miller. But they will flock to Lakota because of Darbi and her crusade to keep kids safe and to provide a good education environment by fighting off a liberal progressive agenda, which is the primary concern of this new real estate market. 

Now there is one more thing to discuss, and again I wasn’t going to talk about it because it sort of falls in the realm of soap opera gossip. But Matt Miller made it the centerpiece of his exit statements and the accusation against Darbi that her supporters may have broken into his home. This also plays into Karin Johnson from Channel 5 News, who wanted to clarify to Darbi after my video started circulating that she did not coordinate her video profile of Matt Miller serving trespassing notifications to Darbi at her home in front of her child, as a coordinated effort with the school. Karin says it was a pure coincidence. However, this is where the story gets a little wild. Karin Johnson was also involved in publishing the video of Darbi Boddy taking a picture of a young student in the halls of Lakota, dressed below the dress code standards, which again looks like a very coordinated event from the school to the media. It turns out that the young person photographed by Darbi was the daughter of Matt Miller’s housekeeper, and she is the one who has made the statements about a break-in at Matt’s home. This same person also claims to have adventurous relationships with Matt Miller himself, as she has bragged about it to several people. When I learned all this I didn’t believe it. But then I read the police report, so nothing would surprise me now. And these people think they are going to last two seconds in court? The media was worried about lawsuits because of these people? Give me a break. Lazy media, lazy lawyers, lazy school board, lots of lazy people let this whole thing spin out of control. The story gets pretty bizarre from there. Apparently, this is the same person who was charged with domestic violence, knowingly causing physical harm on the 16th of January, 2023. So let’s do some basic math here; Karin Johnson is involved in all these Darbi Boddy hit pieces, this housekeeper gets into trouble with the police on Monday the 16th, and Matt Miller resigns on Wednesday the 18th. And by the 20th, Matt Miller puts out his exit letter talking about how Darbi Boddy destroyed his life and may have even broken into his home, according to the testimony of his housekeeper, who happens to be the mother of the person Darbi took a picture of in the hall as a dress code violation, that was used by Channel 5 to attempt further to pressure Darbi to resign from the school board. Hmmmmm, I don’t think we need Sherlock Holmes here to smell what is cooking in the politics of Lakota. And you know what, if Darbi hadn’t taken any pictures and didn’t just show up to see what was really happening in the halls of the school, we wouldn’t know anything. Imagine just how much is still hidden. The only reason we know any of this is because we had a school board member who went to look for herself, and through the coverup, we learned a lot about what is really going on in our public school and their media friends who help conceal things the tax paying public would otherwise be very concerned about.

Truth is always stranger than fiction, and as far as legal challenges are concerned, Darbi Boddy has a lot to be very angry about regarding her treatment by lots of characters. And her case of advocating for much more transparency among school board members policing the schools for radical elements that are usually hidden from the public has a lot more merit. As I always say, don’t judge people by what they say but by what they do. And many people are doing a lot of things, and we wouldn’t know any of it if not for Darbi Boddy. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Billboards and Marriages in Lakota: The commitment to goodness that makes any community great

First of all, I want to congratulate a very nice couple I have come to know through all this crazy Lakota stuff. Good things do happen, and sometimes not in the most obvious ways. When it comes to marriage, sometimes people shouldn’t be together, and some people should. And I am very happy to see that Matt Miller’s ex-wife has found a nice person to partner with in all the most brutal ways humans do: through marriage. During Christmas of 2022, she remarried to a very nice guy whom I have come to know through all these trials and tribulations involving the Matt Miller case at Lakota schools, pretty well. And I think they are both very nice people who deserve a chance in life, and it makes me happy to see them make that commitment. A chance at happiness is always worth the shot. Even when we fall short of our goals, just the opportunity for happiness makes it all worthwhile. And speaking of happiness, I was very happy to see the billboards for ProtectLakotaKids.com go up all over the district. Nothing makes me happier than to see people stand up for themselves and to see the Lakota community respond with those billboards after the threats that have been made against whistleblowers who have been appalled by what they learned about Matt Miller during his messy divorce. There has been a lot of really bad behavior against whistleblowers that I have found objectionable, as if the original problem wasn’t bad enough. So just a few days after Christmas in 2022, billboards advertising the website went up in several locations around Lakota to break the apparent media confinement that the Lakota school district utilized to protect their employees from public opinions they were clearly justified in having. Robbing people of that voice has been the worst thing of all.

I was one of the people who received that lawsuit notification letter; honestly, it really angered me. At best, I see it as a case of witness intimidation. I felt I had been more than fair during the process, but after I saw what was said to the police, that crossed the line for me. I didn’t ask for Matt Miller’s personal life to be so well known to my own. But once you know something, you must do something. A community must do something if things are obviously wrong, especially when kids are involved. And what we witnessed in the aftermath are all the bad things that I have always said were wrong with public schools, and much more. The letters from Matt Miller’s attorney that went out to so many critics of Matt Miller can only be viewed from one point of perspective, and that is witness tampering, which I consider to be a serious matter. A severe matter. I do not take it lightly. When kids are involved in anything, the public is obliged to justice; they don’t just shut up their windows and hide from authority figures. Now, if the answer to such questions is no, everyone can return to their lives. But if it’s yes, well, now something has to be done, and that was the path that was taken. And when the law circles the wagons as they did with Matt Miller on several fronts and makes threats against witnesses, that presents a big problem that must be solved. 

I have received countless comments and concerns about the lawsuit letters, and my response to them all is that this is why we have a First Amendment. People have a right to feel as they do about things. And authority figures do not have a right to suppress opinions. Now, of course, we are reading and seeing all over the nation these days examples of just that kind of intrusion against the First Amendment. The same progressive society is taught at Lakota schools and is the general philosophy of the staff and administrators at that public school and all public schools. Yet many of those same people have offered generous donations to fight the lawsuits that Matt Miller has proposed and the Libs of Lakota “Skippy” gang. My comment to them has been to hold their money, buy some nice Christmas presents for their kids, and let’s let this thing play out. Offers of $25,000 and more have been available and will continue to be available because many people out there like to fight back against these kinds of things, especially if they can invest in the face of a movement. They may not want their names in the paper, but they want to do something, and frequently, valiant funding efforts are just the sort of thing they are willing to do. So defending lawsuits or taking legal action against Lakota schools isn’t a financial restriction. But as I have been telling them, there is more cooking than the pie that is in the oven, visible with the light on. I think there are much more severe considerations, and this witness harassment is serious stuff. Playing and reacting to their game of information suppression isn’t the way to deal with this kind of problem. Instead, different strategies should be utilized.

But regarding the offers, as I said, this is a First Amendment case that any first-year law student could figure out. It’s the foundation of our society to be able to use free speech to regulate the action and offer criticisms to authority figures, ultimately keeping them in check. Once that fear for them is removed, then they have nothing to control their behavior, which is why liberals are so keen to do so and what the overall message behind the legal actions of Matt Miller was intended to do, smash free speech, suppress opinion, and harass the witnesses to actions they found objectionable. 

So it brought me quite a lot of delight to see the ProtectLakotaKids.com billboards go up all over town. With the wet blanket controls that can be hired these days from law firms, PR firms, and even law enforcement, the institutions of liberalism have illusioned themselves with the belief that they can control all thought and deed on a matter. But the billboards are an obvious removal of that control and putting free speech in the realm of market capitalism in all the ways that socialism is terrified of. The freedom to choose and understand information is a capital all its own, and when all the trusted authorities have said to the public, “nothing to see here” except what they are telling not to see are obvious problems like a superintendent having fantasies in a sexual way about children, then something has to be done. Everyone, including me, wanted some context to the Matt Miller statements uncovered in the police report. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until the fact proved otherwise. Then, at that point, you are complicit in the action if you fail to do something about it. And instead of allowing themselves to be stuffed down into a public relations-controlled conspiracy, people have utilized other measures to get the message out, and these billboards are the start of it. And seeing them made me proud of people for standing up for themselves. Ultimately, that’s what counts and how bad things can be made good again, like the marriage of Matt Miller’s ex-wife to new opportunities. Nobody can get a chance at happiness or justice if they don’t commit. And when people take that step, whether it’s a billboard to push back against witness intimidation or a new life with another person, the action of doing something good and right is worth all the value of the world and is a good sign of things to come.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Lakota School Board is Not in Charge: Lawyers and public relations officials are, elected representatives are just a mask

The school board meeting for Lakota on December 12th, 2022 was unique for several reasons, most of which was the obvious realization that our elected members are not in charge; the lawyers are. As I listened to comments about the new Senate Bill 178, which will take away much of the power of the Ohio Department of Education and give it to a director reporting to the governor for direct accountability, it was quite clear that even with all our work in Lakota of electing a conservative board, that no matter what we did, the system hid itself behind a veil of lawyers and public relations personalities. The school board itself was just a ruse, and you could hear it in Isaac Adi’s voice in that meeting in the way he spoke to Darbi Boddy. I had spoken to both of those personalities extensively before the election of 2021, and to hear Isaac talk, it was like a completely different person, shaped by the system itself, to fit the mold of corruption that resides behind all of public education. It caused me to reflect on the ten previous years that Lynda O’Conner worked hard to prove to me directly that she was one of the good school board members. And after all the many hours of conversation, the moment we delivered a conservative majority to her, she became obsessed with controlling Darbi Boddy, which was never my intention, and the power of the seat obviously went to her head. Ultimately, the truth is that the only value of the school board was ceremonial, not in real management decisions, and these people understood that which is why the titles of their positions were so crucial to them. Because the lawyers were really in charge and always residing behind a veil that the school board showed the public, and behind that veil, so much bad action occurred, which conceals the reality of public education today in America. 

And part of the veil was what we saw from Matt Miller himself, the current Lakota superintendent who got himself in trouble with a messy divorce, then sought to harass witnesses in the community with legal threats to keep his actions from being discussed in public. As an example of the legal firewall they utilize, included here is a copy of the investigation into Matt Miller by the school board. Notice how much of it is redacted? So much for the transparency that Lynda O’Conner talks about. For some who received those intimidation letters, it was a scary experience. But I am proud of those who continued on unafraid of the obvious intimidation tactic and proceeded to make a national story out of the content that was learned about the sexual lifestyles of Lakota administrators and the various mechanisms that had been exposed during the process. Over the last few weeks, the Libs of Tik Tok picked up the story and several radio stations. Charlie Kirk has carried it, as did Louder with Crowder, who works for Glenn Beck’s Blaze news network. I thought most effective was Kristi Ertel’s interview with Brian Thomas on 55 KRC. Because Kristi is a very conscientious Christian woman, a rock-solid character, she represents what’s best about the Lakota community. When people like her can’t accept the nonsense that the Lakota school system was trying to feed the public, you know something is really wrong. I have a long history of opposition. So when I say something, people tend to refer to it in the context of a long-standing opponent. But when nice people like Kristi Ertel are on a big radio station in Cincinnati talking about how she can’t accept the moral dilemma that Lakota employees have imposed on our community, then it becomes clear that this is a different kind of time we are living in, where the veil of the lawyers isn’t working any longer. The school doesn’t know what to do about it, because the school board isn’t in charge, and they never were. 

The tactics used to derail the public from public opinions into the ostentatious liberal lifestyle of the Lakota superintendent and the general administrative culture have only exacerbated the suspicions that were always there. I remember the many meetings we had early in 2021 to identify possible school board candidates, which were organized by Lynda, who obviously always wanted a conservative majority so they would nominate her as the school board president. It was always odd to me how once Lynda knew she had the vote of Issac and Darbi to appoint her as the new president, then Isaac as the VP, Lynda quickly turned on Darbi to see her removed from the board, which essentially started all this trouble. That is how the information about Matt Miller got out to the public. Otherwise, people wouldn’t have been very interested in the superintendent’s sex life. For the sake of context, it looks like things worked out for the best because now people have seen the teeth of Lakota and the actual quality of the employees, not the garbage that the public relations firms present through tricks and nonsense. At those early meetings, Darbi was there, organized by Lynda. So were Vanessa Wells, Kristi Ertel, and many of the kinds of people who have come out very upset about the Matt Miller behavioral problems. And it’s clear what Lynda was after during those meetings in hindsight. In all her conversations with me, she knew the school board wasn’t really in charge. It’s the lawyers who run the school. The school board has no value at all other than to provide a mask for all the garbage that was going on behind the scenes. So when there are protests about S.B. 178 removing our vote from a Board of Education, the truth is, that vote is worthless because our elected representatives aren’t in charge of doing anything anyway. The lawyers do everything, and all these school boards constantly punt all the hard decisions to them along with a hefty legal bill, which then provides cover for the multitudes of bad behavior that the employees of public schools engage in.

I’ve told everyone concerned about legal action from this experience with Lakota that frivolous lawsuits are often viewed by the courts harshly, and this one is a clear case of frivolity. Most First Amendment cases are. As many who have nationally picked up on the story know from experience, reporting on a story isn’t a violation of slanderous behavior. Once a story is a story, it’s a story. And the police report in which Matt Miller was interviewed in a public context made this a story.   From my perspective, the divorce records didn’t make it a story. It became a story once the Lakota superintendent admitted to the contents of the police interview, which then turned all this into a crisis instead of a messy divorce from poor decisions on his part and became a community problem. Whether or not Matt Miller is one of Sheriff Jones’ “boys” protected by the sheriff’s department is irrelevant. The criminal element is just another consideration. The moral representation of what is expected from public employees in a school full of children is essential. And it has been good to see that people like Kristi Ertel and many others have not allowed themselves to be intimidated into shutting up when voices are needed to undo the many wrongs of this case. It’s obvious the school board won’t do it, and they never had the power to. And knowing that it’s up to the community to do the work that we had trusted the media, the police, and our elected officeholders to do. What we have learned is that we’re on our own.    

Rich Hoffman

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Why I Support S.B. 178: Education needs reform, and the Department of Education is in the way

To answer the reasons I support the Ohio Senate Bill 178, the logic of supporting bigger government to get to smaller government has to be understood. What S.B. 178 proposed by the Ohio Senate will do is essentially remove many of the current Ohio Department of Education Board’s existing powers and put them in the hands of a new director-level cabinet position appointed directly by the governor. The point of the matter is that the current Ohio Board of Education is a worthless body of government that spends most of its time debating diversity and transexual issues and does not have a track record in providing proper education to the future kids of Ohio. And there is no prospect of solving that problem soon, or ever. By design, the Board of Education is a flawed concept that should never have been implemented in 1953. In my view, all the Departments of Education, from the state to the federal level, should be eradicated. Education needs leadership to reflect performance, and the most obvious way to do that is to attach the responsibility directly to governors, who are then better controlled by state legislatures. I see this Bill as a step toward removing power from bureaucratic Boards of Education and replacing them with leadership opportunities. What the Senate in Ohio wants to do is a great thing. I know some of the people involved and understand their intent. Granted, the path to Hell is paved with good intentions, and to many critics, this S.B. 178 can look like just another path to get to Hell. But I would say that public education is already in Hell, and at this point, any path made can only take it out or fail altogether. But an attempt at reform is better than not trying at all. And suppose Ohio is prosperous in this endeavor. In that case, it could pave the way for real education reform and the complete removal of all Departments of Education and replace it with more leadership-directed accountability. 

As many are aware, I am weary of giving the governor of Ohio any more power. The Director position of Health run by Amy Acton directly for Governor DeWine was an unmitigated disaster during the Covid nonsense. So putting that same level of attention into the field of education might look insane. But the way these Department of Education Boards run is far worse. Even during Covid, if I needed to get a hold of someone in the governor’s office, I could. I made my voice known and knew what doors to knock on. And that’s what I’m looking for with this S.B. 178 Bill; I want accountability and a door that I can knock on and get results. I don’t expect the door knocks to be friendly, actually quite contentious. A dispute-free world is not what I think S.B. 178 will do. But with the current Department of Education in Ohio, we have zero accountability. If you talk to one person, they will blame someone else. And when you speak to someone else, they will blame the original person you were talking to. Dealing with the Ohio Department of Education is an insane level of progressive nonsense in which I see no value. It certainly doesn’t help children; it has taken education and made an advanced mess of it. And there are so many problems with education; with the way the teacher unions ultimately control the Departments of Education all over the country, there is no desire for reform from their point of view because they have things set up the way they want them. 

I see S.B. 178 as an opportunity to give a strong governor a chance to make significant reforms in education. I wouldn’t say that Mike DeWine is a strong governor, but the example provided by Ohio could give great governors like DeSantis in Florida, or Noem in South Dakota, and other strong states a blueprint that would eventually pave the way for a new way of dealing with education needs in each state, and provide a competitive atmosphere that is desperately needed. For anything to improve in education, competition and high expectations have to be a priority, as the ability to survive the radical labor elements which will be against anything, and everything must be part of the plan. I come from a business background and understand that good leadership does not come from group consensus building. It comes from solitary leadership that is accountable for success and failure. Otherwise, failure, such as what we have seen in my home district of Lakota, will be absorbed into a culture of complacency. I have tried to reform the group consensus model in my home district by helping to get conservatives elected to the school board there, but the results have been that no matter what is done, the system itself protects itself from any reform, and failure is guaranteed from the outset. Nothing can save Boards of Education anywhere because they are designed to fail by the premise of their existence. I have been saying for a long time that the concept of public education has to be scrapped completely. But many aren’t ready for that conversation. So scrapping the way that decisions are made for education would be an obvious next best step. Many of the names who have spoken out for S.B. 178, which I have put here for the convenience of understanding, I like and think are sincere in their efforts.   I also am very supportive of the several names who have sponsored the 2000-page Bill, which at this point, I have read. It took me a while, there is a lot there, but the gist of it is an opportunity to replace a Department of Education with a door I can knock on and get results. And I’m all for that.

So for the small government critic who says that this S.B. 178 is just another big government solution that takes away voting accountability from the Department of Education, I would say that for many people, the reality is that most people don’t just jump into a swimming pool. They will dip their toes in the water and get in ever so slowly, getting mad at those who do jump in and splash them with water. S.B. 178 is like a handrail that those types of people can hang on to while they ease themselves into the water, the water being education reform. I would like to jump in and pull the plug draining the whole thing at once. Then, fill the pool with fresh water in which everyone hasn’t used the restroom in. Because from my point of view, there is no way to clear that water now that years of corruption and progressive intention have dirtied it up to the point of no return. But to pull the plug, you have to get in the water, and S.B. 178 provides those who still believe in a government solution to education something to hang on to. In this case, leadership is directly attached to the state governor.  Ohio looks to have opportunities beyond the next four years of DeWine to have strong, conservative governors, so I think there are better opportunities for S.B. 178, knowing some of these legislators personally, to have success than in just continuing to do what we have now, which is just a liberal extension of the Biden administration and their further destruction of children’s minds. I think we need action faster than later and more profound and bold rather than timid and safe because the clock is ticking. And at this point, I am willing to give a bold option a chance, not for the adults who are thriving off a corrupt system, but for the kids who need real leadership and an opportunity for a better tomorrow. 

Rich Hoffman

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Where the Caves of Lakota Go: The evils of following process instead of logic

At the last Lakota school board meeting, approval on the payout of a lawsuit for $15,000 had to be voted upon over the procedural misconduct to remove public comment from an October meeting that had occurred. It was an easy victory for the person who filed the legal action; everyone knew it at the time, just as there are many explorations into further actions due to the actions of the board. I remember when this whole story about the superintendent of Lakota schools broke and his messy divorce, and his personal behavior that clearly didn’t align with the values of the community he worked in as a public figure, I was curious how the information would flow through the known communication channels of our community. After all, I knew all the characters involved at every level, so I was curious if the dye was poured into the cave water, where it would come out on the other end. Would it be where we expected, or would it duck and dive only to come out someplace surprising? And in the process of these many months, it looks like as the dye moved through the Caves of Lakota, through the various government bodies of our community, we ended up with a new decision, what to do about the obvious case of “intimidation of witnesses” as defined by the “intent to coerce a witness not to report information.”  And perhaps the most audacious exchange at that meeting was not the sudden revelation about financial stability through 2025, suddenly, but the lashing out of board member Kelly Casper toward Darbi Boddy about who board members represent and who they don’t. Darbi got it right, and Kelly had it all wrong when Darbi said of herself that she represented members of the community who had elected her for the purpose of board business in so many words or less. Kelly disagreed and stated that Darbi was elected to represent everyone in the community. And in that simple disagreement, we could clearly see the misunderstandings that had been costing Lakota schools so much mismanagement, expensive mismanagement. And why bad things happened in the first place that taxpayers were always on the hook for fixing. Darbi Boddy was sent to the board by the public to get control of the school board. Not to get along with the people who traditionally screwed everything up. 

In the case of Lakota, the bad, expensive things that have happened to support the antics of their superintendent, who has mismanaged his life and then turned on the community with hostile threats to suppress the information, the most significant faults were in the desire for people in the process to follow the directions that were written by liberalism and that there value system was in obeying the rules, not in deciding if the rules were applicable, or needed to be challenged. We see this in trustee meetings all the time when they rubber stamp the latest Agenda 21 roundabout or a bike path meant to prevent cars from burning fossil fuels just to get a loaf of bread at the grocery. Community planners are all trained at the same liberal sources baked into everything they do; all over the country, progressive policies are then approved by conservative politicians who believe their job is to be good administrators of the rules and to follow instructions. They never seem to understand or question whether liberals or conservatives wrote the rules and if they should be following them. Not that I was surprised, but I watched with great curiosity at every level how all the people I knew, from the police department to the school board, and the media, followed strange liberal rules and procedures right into a situation that escalated everything into a public menace that only enraged the public, and did nothing to quell the original problems. 

And it was that pesky problem again, which always comes up when the rule of law is applied to mass society in the wake of so much progressive influence over several years now, decades, really. As the Bible has been removed from being a foundation of law and order, the values that built America, to begin with, we have seen bureaucratic pinheads stepping in as the administrative state to replace the Biblical concepts of God in society, and therefore all sense of value for what a community can agree on. No wonder Nancy Pelosi could lie to our faces during a press conference about her crazy husband, that keeps getting into all kinds of trouble, or the mass media conspiracy regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. Or that there was no evidence of election fraud, even though the evidence, like this case in Lakota, was dripping everywhere with plenty of things to consider. The liberal denial of a fact was proposed because logic had been surrendered to the values of process control. Value wasn’t based these days on the judgment of an individual mind; it was built entirely in progressive processing around compliance with what was created by controls. Therefore, the value wasn’t in thinking about what was happening, but it was complying with the rules which were created to follow. So long as everyone followed the rules written for them, they could feel that their actions were moral and fulfilled a sense of justice from their point of view. But those in the community who expected community values to be conservative and to respect at least the foundations of Biblical understanding, the glue that holds western civilization together, found the decisions reprehensible.  More and more these days, these Biblical references come up as the source of the solution to our many social problems. I had always considered that everyone, regardless of their politics, functioned from that basic premise. However, I started to notice when I was in a hotel in 2014 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that it was missing the Bible in the hotel room and that more courtrooms, school systems, and even swearing-in ceremonies were going in the direction of the sports players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. There was a real progressive push to remove western civilization from the practice of any value judgments. At the heart of that was the Bible, essentially 1400 years of establishing laws that built western civilization. And once those values were removed from the decision-making process, even conservative people, or people who think they are conservatives, found that value judgments were reduced to just following the rules of a process. And if liberals wrote the processes, then it didn’t matter if the people participating in those decisions were liberals or conservatives; they would all act the same if the path to resolution centered on compliance with a process instead of the judgment of the parties involved. And in that way, we learned that there were many hidden chambers where the dye went before it came out of the cave in strange places. And that information is extremely valuable. Then, looking back at how the community has divided over this issue makes a lot more sense. The compliance track thinks it is permissible to punish the community for deviating from the process that allows public officials to game the system at significant taxpayer cost. While the public functioning from traditional value judgments of right and wrong as established Biblically, as the foundation of our entire society, found the proposals reprehensible. The good news is that while functioning at the Supreme Court level, our court system still lives by such Biblical ideas and that the rule of law is our Constitution. Even while the progressive-minded would like that not to be the case and would love to throw their political enemies in jail, or take them to court over frivolous litigation, the truth of the matter is that in those places, the Bible still matters.   Because if people don’t believe in that, then you can’t have the basic tenants of civil society. And under that view of the law, harassing the public for discussing evidence is witness intimidation, which opens a whole new can of worms.

Rich Hoffman

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Public Schools are Dens of Evil: They are anti-Family, and anti-American

It has been nice not to talk about Lakota schools much over the last several years. As a public school in my community, I think it would be fair to say that I hate them. I see them as a massive waste of time. Their employees are detriments to our community, and the institution itself is an infusion of liberalism into an otherwise very conservative community. I tend not to pay much attention to them so long as they don’t ask for money by way of increased taxes. But, over this past year, I have had my fill of their bad management, wasted money, and perverse lifestyles, and it has reminded me of why I have hated the concept of public schools for much of my life. Lakota had been experiencing declining enrollment in a community that has been aging. But the property values have been going up, so the revenue at Lakota was good and kept them from asking for more money for many years now. But they recklessly spent their surplus and have been behaving like drunken sailors and living the lifestyle of it as well. Now, much of that bad behavior has come to the surface and been a grim reminder of precisely what is bad about public education. And for me, it’s that public schools, all public schools, are anti-family. 

No matter how much history you study, how much sociology is explored, and what the contents of philosophy are, there is nothing more important to a good society than the quality of individual families. Without the concept of a good family, people are doomed, and countries are sure to fall. Speaking with the benefit of hindsight, which I have been saying for more than four decades, those who have advocated easy divorce, free babysitting in public schools for parents too busy for their children, and reckless sexual lifestyles, a culture of intoxication, and gay relationships as marriage alternatives have had the malicious intent to destroy our country, by destroying our families. It’s obvious now to most people. It wasn’t always so straightforward because it used to be that families were so strong that people took good ones for granted. And these progressive lifestyles have been slowly introduced to us over a long time through our governments, our legal system, and specifically through public education to erode the concept of the American family. For me, family has always been the most important thing in life, and I have made great sacrifices to have a good one. My wife and I homeschooled our kids when they were little in spurts. We had no family support, and socially it was very difficult. By the time my kids were seniors in high school, they were finishing off their time with computer classes and spent their senior years living in Europe to complete their educations. I always gave them the kind of education I knew they were not getting from public education or society. They are in their 30s now, and they are great kids. They are so much better because they didn’t get destroyed in public education. Looking back on it, I wish I could have kept them entirely out of public education because all it did was harm them; it certainly didn’t help.

The public education concept of letting very liberal strangers babysit and raise a family’s children has been horrible for our country. At the same time, the parents live messed up lives putting their careers, and their sexual desires ahead of raising their children in a healthy lifestyle were bad from the beginning. A marriage is a man and a woman who get together and have children. Then they fight it out for many decades together no matter what happens to provide for their children a good and stable life. Being married isn’t about your feelings or your sexual desires. It’s not about getting attention from someone outside the marriage. You get married, stay true to your spouse, and work together to raise good children in a healthy and intellectual environment. You talk as a family. You make decisions as a family. And you stick together and make a great country by being a good family.

Public education seeks to make a menace out of that concept and is a vehicle for local distribution of liberal values that are anti-family in nature. When we hear transgender discussions or sexual alternatives being introduced to kids, we see the arrogance of a public school embedded in our communities, living off taxpayers’ property values and seeking to undo the community from within with anti-family values. And they have smiles on their faces while they do their deeds. And the proof of that arrogance comes out in the lifestyle of the progressive employees. We have certainly seen the evidence at Lakota schools more than we ever wanted to know. But worse, they are intent on justifying their bad behavior with the overall mission of public schools in general, an attack on the American family and the desecration of all that stands behind the value of a mom and a dad working hard to raise good kids to make a good world and a good country. We often find with public schools that the employees themselves openly seek to destroy this concept in everything they do. Over the years, their behavior has led to the destruction of our society in all the ways we can see today. 

The idea that children belong to the state is the central premise. Of course, they never come out and say what they are thinking because if they did, the public school ruse would fall apart, as it has in Lakota. Their assurance to the busy parents is that their children are cared for by the public school and that the shared partnership of the children is something the parents can rely on. From there, over the years, the parents feel that they can do what they want and live out whatever they desire without consequences to their family because the good public school has the raising of children taken care of. But often, all too late, they realize that the public school is the cause of their problems and without the leadership of a good mom and dad and the protection of decades of long-lasting love and affection, the children end up destroyed in the process. They grow up and vote for big government to replace the parents they never had. This poor education took advantage of them like some pervert dressed in a Santa suit. They ended up empty in a wasteland of possibilities that never came to them, making them ill-prepared to have their own families. And this mess all starts with the garbage we teach our kids in public education and the losers who teach them in those horrible places. I would call them the dens of evil because their purpose is the undoing of the American family, which is the key to any great society. And their purposeful destruction of the family concept is all the evidence anybody needs of their actual intentions. Their lifestyles are only the evidence of such a dark and maniacal device, intent on the complete destruction of our way of life and putting in place a mother government that seeks to rule us all with a jealous zeal to satisfy an insatiable and corrupt heart. 

Rich Hoffman

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Remember When Lakota Paid $175,000 to an Employee over Ethical Violations: The cost of mismanagement of public employees is extraordinarily high

For the quick answer that is being talked about because of the Lakota superintendent’s lawsuit threat letters, the response to them would, of course, be frivolous litigation aggressively pursued based on The New York Times v. Sullivan case of 1964. In that well-known case, criticism of public officials protected by the 1st and 14th Amendments ensures that legal recourse is off limits for pursuing damages. The price for a life in public office and the comforts that come with living off public funds is that criticism is healthy for an honest exchange of information. No matter how crazy the information may be, which hasn’t been the case with this Lakota superintendent case, it is protected under the American Constitution. There is consistent case law that resolves the issue to the extent that any challenge to it would perfectly justify a knowingly frivolous abuse of litigation and the time of the courts themselves. And with that known, the aggressive attack on the public by sending out threatening letters to around ten community members just because they expressed themselves about the kind of private conduct that Matt Miller has utilized in his life has only caused a lot more anger. Because of this aggressive act, and what has been learned about what the school board knew and when, now there have been explorations of class action litigation against Lakota schools themselves for the reckless spending of taxpayer funds that have gone on not just in the actions of protecting their superintendent from public judgment, but in several other instances as well. Currently, a group of people are adding up all the costs and instances so that a coherent story can be pieced together by the evidence, and further action is pending in those assemblies. 

Yet, along the way, it has been noticed that a lawsuit filed by former teacher union leadership member Emily Osterling won her $175,000 in 2019 for wrongful termination back in 2017. At that time, Matt Miller put forth an 11-page resolution that listed a series of allegations, none of them criminal, pertaining to Osterling’s dealings with students and their parents. The resolution illustrated behavior that was willful and persistent violations of board policy pertaining to staff ethics as well as Ohio’s code of professional conduct for educators. And federal laws govern how she educates and serves the students. Well, that got some people’s attention since we had all just been told that any of the Lakota superintendent’s actions revealed from his very explicit divorce records that his conduct wasn’t illegal. And that morality wasn’t a consideration of employment. Upon learning about all this behavior, many people in the Lakota district were shocked that Lakota didn’t have a “morality clause” in the superintendent’s contract like other schools do. And in that oversight, they have allowed a very aggressive, a very progressive activist and an unwelcomed figure into our community at a high cost, with no way to get rid of him. And that has brought up the excessive cost of keeping that employee with indirect costs that go far beyond his actual salary and benefits. By the time his cost to Lakota is added up due to lawyer fees, public relations firms, and other burdens connected to other instances of similar mismanagement, it looks to be in the many thousands of dollars. Even millions if we go back to all the circumstances since his hiring in 2017 when that Emily Osterling case occurred. Now I’m not suddenly a supporter of teacher union members. But the point of this matter is how Emily Osterling could be held to some standard of values and even terminated from her job when Matt Miller was not held to the same standard as a superintendent for essentially doing much worse. 

Matt Miller was always nice in my presence, so I was shocked to learn that several school board members thought Matt would sue the district over his contract for a lot of money if he were terminated over the revelation of his divorce revelations in 2020. I had my doubts about this until I saw how he behaved toward the community who learned about his private life and expressed themselves as to why they didn’t like it. The letter I received was very aggressive, and my policy on that kind of thing was to hit back many times harder. That’s when discussion about a class action case started to take root in gathering up all the facts and the timeline. And after reading that letter, it was obvious that the school board’s worries were justified. However, to understand the law, it would have been better to settle the issue in court than to dig deeper into the trouble with attempts to cover it all up with PR firms and lawyers. Understanding the constitutional limits of legal recourse, it would have been perfectly justified to counter any such attack with frivolous litigation given the context of his contract concerning community reputation, which was his burden to maintain healthily. 

With the standard set by the Emily Osterling case, it’s evident that a community precedent had been established in removing her as an employee. It didn’t hold up in court, and they ended up paying her out a lot of money. Add her case to the many others out there and we have a serious case of mismanagement at the school board level over a long period of time. The job has been too big for them to handle since they give everything to some professional class to take care of, which ends up costing a lot of money. Of course, there will be justifiable legal costs, with legal firms and PR outlets, but what we are seeing is a massive amount of waste, waste we wouldn’t have noticed unless Lakota’s superintendent decided to attack members of the community in these bizarre ways as if he were entitled to employment, no matter what his personal conduct revealed. Much of this he has done to himself through his own mismanagement of his own life. Then Lakota, as a district, has had to spend a lot of money to protect him from his own actions. Then when you add up all those costs to all other similar disputes with other employees and public relations problems, you get quite a large number. And that large number results from massive mismanagement by a public-school culture that is out of control and not aligned with the community that pays for it.

And in many cases, the only correction we have for such bad behavior on a massive scale is the constitutional protections of The New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964. No wonder progressives everywhere want to shut down free speech. But all the law of our country is built around constitutional law, not the protection of public employees by a judgmental public. Without those judgments, there is literally nothing to keep public employees honest. And what is such an insult with this case at Lakota, despite learning that the very things that are happening now and being justified as correct were the same things that same superintendent did to get rid of other employees, for ethical standards. And to keep people from talking about it, he sent out nasty threats to people hoping to crush criticism which in his case, the criticisms are more than well justified. The best advice anybody could give him would be that he shouldn’t be making news if he doesn’t want to be in the news. And threatening the community for their anger at his actions is making news, not the kind Lakota would like to have. But it’s just the latest in a long history of mistakes that have cost a fortune and have nothing to do with funding education for children. 

Rich Hoffman

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A Class Action Legal Need Against Lakota That Should Happen: I’ll gladly be the first to put my name on it

Of course, there has to be legal action against the Lakota school system and directly against their public employee Matt Miller, the controversial superintendent. A reasonably sized class action lawsuit is around 20 people, and there are more than enough people involved already to participate in one against these parties after the desist letters issued by the superintendent’s attorney Elizabeth Tuck were sent out to at least 6 to 7 different people issuing threats of financial destruction for essentially being concerned about the actions of the superintendent. The issue was always about children, character, and legality, which was quite clear from the public speakers at Lakota during their meeting on November 7th. Under any circumstances, concerns about abused children are the first priority. When it was learned that this public employee, Matt Miller, participated in sexual fantasies about kids who attend the school he manages, people were upset about it. This was, of course, the talk of the evening at the various election night ceremonies that I was involved in, and these letters from Elizabeth were the topic of much anger. There would have to be an answer now that the action was taken. It centered around the language of the threat letter itself, where it emphasized that Matt Miller had spent 30 years building community goodwill and his professional reputation and that the people are receiving one of these threat letters initiated, published, and disseminated false, destructive, and defamatory statements about him as part of a malicious conspiracy to damage that goodwill and reputation and either effect his termination or extort him into resigning. Well, that’s what started this whole process because Matt Miller was guilty of doing all those things to Darbi Boddy, the newly elected school board member, so if that were the standard, well, then he would be vulnerable to that action as well. Reviewing that part of the letter reminded me of a discussion I had with school board members a few years prior regarding Matt Miller.

At the time, I could have cared less about Matt Miller or why the board was worried that he would sue the board for millions of dollars for a contractual breech over his actions that were revealed during his messy divorce. To be somewhat fair to the school board, who didn’t know much about legal matters and consulted their attornies on the risk of enforcing some judgment about their public employee that might be protected in his contract for lack of some “morality” clause. So instead, they turned to cover up as much of his behavior from the public as they could. That’s also the same dumb advice they received recently when they tried to shut down public comments at school board meetings. And the same boneheaded tactic behind these letters of intimidation that were issued by the Tuck Firm representing Matt Miller in an attempt to repair a reputation that he damaged by his own actions. The effort behind it all has been to contain bad behavior, not correcting it.   And when you start adding up all the fees for PR firms, lawyers, and the other elements of what public employees cost a community when they go bad, the cost is extraordinarily high. Likely, Lakota schools had paid out as much money as Matt Miller could have sued the district for anyway, so where is the advantage? I’ve read his contract, and it could be argued that what he has cost the community should be compensated by him back to the taxpayers because of his behavior and could certainly be argued by a competent presentation of the facts to any court. 

What we see at many levels is mismanagement of the Lakota school system by public employees, and the school board, who simply hired too many firms to bridge their lack of knowledge on these kinds of disputes, and to hide all that mismanagement from the public.  To compensate for that expensive level of incompetence, they have turned to harassment to shut down critics who expect much better from their school district. For my part, I have no tolerance for someone who engages in sexual fantasies with children at any level, and they shouldn’t be running a school because of that condition. If it’s not against the law, it should be, and maybe there needs to be a legal case to make it a law for the future. Perhaps it’s not against the law because nobody ever thought anybody would do such a thing. Regardless of what people think about the law or the definition of evidence, there is a police report where Matt Miller admitted to doing this very real act, which is part of the public record. So this interpretation of evidence that Elizabeth Tuck has proposed in her intimidation letter is full of opportunities to clear up any loose ends that might be debated in the future. Especially when kids are involved, any recipient of knowledge that may be illegal or harmful to others must see something and say something, which is what occurred. The behavior was conducted and is the responsibility of Lakota’s public employee, and that employee is liable for damages that they have incurred upon the public with their actions. And the school district is liable for the damages imposed on the public for their lack of management of their employee, who clearly feel entitled to a job at taxpayer expense no matter what personal conduct they have decided to participate in. The person who committed many bad deeds does not get to attack the people who find his behavior reprehensible, and everyone just quietly hides. It has become known that there are many threats imposed on the Central Office over this issue, so this is an extensive campaign of intimidation that cannot be tolerated in our community. 

There’s a lot to consider in taking action to recover losses caused by Matt Miller to the community. The school that mismanaged that employee and allowed that person to commit all these acts against an elected school board member, loss of reputation, defamation, destruction of Darbi Boddy’s brand, and the reputation of others, logic has to be put into the language of legality, which many people glaze over when the subject is brought up. But the same effort that we raised money to elect school board candidates to now articulate the case from very competent legal minds is not unreasonable. I already have several contributors who are eager to start that process at a high level. When it is considered how much the Lakota superintendent has cost by his lifestyle actions in reputation management as opposed to direct contract enforcement, there is a very justified approach to resolving this manner properly, where the public is in charge and not the activism of employees who initiated the guilt on every level, especially in the defamation of character that was invested into the destruction of Darbi Boddy which started all this in April of 2022. Matt Miller would have been good to just stick with the fruit basket he gave to the new school board members in January. But when he made a move to get rid of Darbi Boddy, well, then her supporters were going to fight back. That was politics, and all is fair in it. But when fantasies with kids became known, well, that changed everything. And at that point, there is an obligation to the preservation of children. And if Matt Miller turned out to be innocent, and the police cleared him, everyone could have gone about their day. But he admitted to it in a police report, which is real evidence even if his legal counsel doesn’t want to acknowledge that it exists. That evidence is available with the Butler County Sheriff’s department, and it’s on Protect Lakota Kids.com.  And it will undoubtedly be part of any court cases that are being conducted going forward, along with a lot more information that perfectly justifies a public uproar. But the one who puts himself in all this mess doesn’t get to lash out at those who find his behavior reprehensible. There is a cost to what he has done to the community, and now, because of this culture of harassment that has come from his direction, we must correct that behavior because the school board didn’t do their job and manage him properly, as they should have years ago. Instead, they spent a small fortune trying to cover it up, much more than a legal dispute over his contract would have cost initially.  Further, I would propose that the gains acquired from this class action legal resolution, after the attorney fees are paid, would go to a war chest for future school board candidates, to give Darbi Boddy help in the future.  That would be a way to take this very negative situation and make it into something the community can be proud of.  There are more than enough occurrences of a lack of public transparency and a desire to keep the public in the dark to allow competent legal representation to acquire positive gains.  I will be the first one to put my name on it. 

Here is the whole meeting for context

The school board and its out-of-control employees should have never tried to defame, destroy, and remove Darbi Boddy from her elected position. That is what started all this, and now they have shown where a lot of lost money has been going, and it hasn’t been for the kids. It’s for bad management and entitled employees who behaved in self destructive ways which forced the school district to clean up the public perception, at great cost to the taxpayers.

Rich Hoffman