It’s been about a year now since Darbi Boddy was sworn in as the new Lakota school board member, and we have to ask, was it worth it? Was it worth all the trouble, the news coverage, the hard feelings, lawsuits, threats, scandal, petitions, and civil war with the rest of the board? Well, of course, it was worth it. Darbi Boddy has turned out to be precisely what was needed, and because of her, we are seeing many good things that would have never happened any other way. When Lynda O’Conner and I set out to have a conservative majority on the school board of Lakota schools, Darbi Boddy was precisely what I had in mind. Lynda obviously had other ideas, and we ultimately disagreed with the final result. In management, my philosophy is obvious and well-known; I like conflict because it gets people to the root cause of a problem. And many people in Lakota, not as conservative as I am, are sick of the government school system always taking too much money from the community and wasting vast sums of money only to teach children progressive politics that is detrimental to the human race. At the start of the year, we were all worried about Critical Race Theory and same-sex bathrooms at Lakota, and with my kind of management philosophy, Darbi Boddy was just the kind of firecracker that needed to be thrown into the hornet’s nest to flush out all the bad guys who were causing so much of the trouble. Darbi was worth the investment of the Republican Party, and the fundraising, and all the negative media coverage. Because she did what all good managers do, she used the conflict to root out the trouble and force everyone to live up to a performance standard, and that requirement has crushed the weak elements of the public education façade that were too expensive and brought liberalism into a very conservative community.
We will hear something of a purge from Lakota; many resignations will be notable, which will be excellent. In a liberal world, which is typical in government, they classify quality as in hiring more useless people to perform a task. So a value to them is in paying too many employees too much money to perform a needed task. And leading up to the last school board election, Lakota as a school system was pushing for another school levy, which had many people extremely upset. As expensive as Lakota schools are presently to the taxpayers, and for what they are teaching, which is all the crazy progressive garbage that we hear about negatively on the nightly news, the idea that Lakota would try to obtain a tax increase to pay for more wasteful employees was simply a horrendous enterprise. In truth, what too many wasteful employees provide any organization is inefficiency and corruption. We have seen plenty of that at Lakota, which was hiding behind a compliant school board that lawyers ran. One thing I learned during all this was how much lawyers have their hands in everyone’s pockets, and they are turning out to be a significant problem not just locally but nationally and internationally in politics as well. They operate without a political party to shape political activity in devastating ways and suck off way too much taxpayer money as a result. Looking at some of the invoices from legal work over just the last couple of months at Lakota shows all that needs to be known on this topic. The amount of corruption that lawyers were covering up and diffusing from the public was enormous and expensive. So when we were asking questions about where all the money was going, it wasn’t just on high-priced administrators advocating for progressive politics at taxpayer expense; it was in a more devastating way going to lawyers who have the sole purpose of covering up scandals and employee misconduct and preventing the public from having an opinion on that conduct. The result has been a loss of free speech, which is a significant violation of the constitutional parameters between the public and their employees of elected representatives, and the financial burden, as a result, was enormous.
It’s a shame that the other school board members on the Republican majority weren’t as good as Darbi. The other two turned out to be RINOs, John Boehner-type RINOs. The Republican Party isn’t as unified as it was when we had that last election, so it’s not clear how endorsements for the next election will happen. Based on the previous election’s results, it might not be needed. There is a power struggle in the Butler County Republican Party that was unified a year ago, which goes back to my management method of using conflict to identify weak spots. We have indeed found weak Republicans behind all the smiling faces of campaign mode. I was very proud of Isaac Adi when I took a picture of him with Jim Jordan at a GOP event not that long ago. I still think Isaac is a good person, even though he has worked against Darbi Boddy since the moment she was sworn in. A lot of people have learned over the last year just how conservative, or not, they actually were, and that will make this next election an interesting one now that the cards are on the table. It will be a different kind of election, and there will be a chance to get two more Darbi Boddy types on the school board, which will be a great opportunity.
Yet to the question, was it all worth it? Well, the answer is yes because the obvious thing that everyone is fighting for is a good education for kids, and taxpayers throw money into a pot to accomplish that task. And many parasites obviously want to suck up that money to support their often lazy and maniacal worldview. Just because Lakota will be peeling away a lot of employees doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. The best thing is to do more with less, let the trouble leave, and not replace them with more expensive employees. Just because Democrats had an insurrection in the Ohio House to essentially protect their extensive government views regarding the Backpack Bill, education is changing, and only good management will prepare Lakota for what is happening. Eventually, the money will go to the child, not the zip code. Lakota will have to be competitive and not just sit around with their mouth open and have lawyers shovel in vast sums of money and keep the public from interrupting the process. So far, after years on the school board, only Darbi Boddy has been a good school board member who has truly given the public what they have been needing, proper representation under a great deal of duress. Many people in Darbi’s position would have fallen apart, but she has been challenging and lived up to all the rigors I knew she would have to face going in. It has been bloody, ugly, and treacherous. But she is doing a great job and is poised to have another great year. Meanwhile, those most unstable under the pressure of performance are jumping ship, and for the taxpayers paying for all this mess, that’s a wonderful thing that we need a lot more of.
As we reflect on this past year and plan for the upcoming one, remember in April of 2022, Matt Miller and the school board chose to run the newly elected Darbi Boddy off the school board, just as they had previously with Todd Parnell the year before. There was a radical push by activists encouraged by superintendent Matt Miller to remove by force Darbi from the board. There were media hit pieces orchestrated by many of these same people who went way out of their way to publically embarrass Darbi; they were camped outside her home with the media cameras focused on her, and her child as Matt Miller sent a trespassing order to her for a school she was supposed to be managing. The radical unfairness started with Matt Miller and the current school board. But Darbi held tough and stayed sincere through all the pressure. She showed what could be possible if one good school board member asked the hard questions and challenged the management of millions and millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars. The radical leftist elements openly harassed supporters of Darbi Boddy and threatened them with lawsuits and other forms of intimidation, attempting to publicly shame them into hiding. But people stood up for themselves, and good things did happen as a result. Now, just think about how good the school board could be if Darbi had some support. And for those who are upset about all this, take some notes. Don’t play the game unless you plan to lose. Everything started with a vote and people picking their representation, then politics stepped in to try and erase that vote. The same methods can and will be applied to any office holder, no matter where or what they do, or how long they have been doing it. Remember that the voters are in charge of their political representation, which a government school certainly is. Politicians don’t decide fates, voters do.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 