The Joan Powell Legacy: Big spending, high taxes, manipulation, and cover-ups.
I always thought it was strange when I gave an interview once to Michael Clark at the Cincinnati Enquirer how the reporter asked me so many questions about Joan Powell—and what I thought she should do differently to help repair the image at Lakota schools. He came across as having a “man crush” on her, which didn’t seem possible—but to each their own. Later it became obvious that Clark and Powell where intellectual adulterers—cut from the same cloth philosophically. So it should come as no surprise that Clark was salivating over Powell upon her exit from Lakota schools at the end of fiscal year 2013. CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO SEE CLARK’S PARTING TRIBUTE TO POWELL.
http://westchesterbuzz.com/2013/12/17/powell-leaves-lakota-board-leaves-legacy-of-leadership/
For everyone else, Powell was a menace—a power hungry despot that played a lot of political games and used her position at the school to assist her real estate career. I summed up Powell’s career more appropriately than Clark on 700 WLW where Doc Thompson and I poked fun at the kind of things that the Lakota school board wanted to cover up—like the infighting that was going on. Watch the video below to reminisce over those events.
For the collective good of Lakota Linda and Powell put their differences aside and pulled everyone together for another levy attempt at the end of 2011 going into 2012. Powell being an old veteran on school boards run by radical left wingers like Jamie Green and Sandra Wheatley clearly sided with the labor union advocate groups against tax payers, and instead of listing to the voters in the previous three elections decided to go on a public relations campaign against me specifically working very hard behind the scenes to eliminate opposition to her will and unite the community in the same way that she pulled the board together. The situation backfired leaving Lakota to not attempt another levy for 2 more years in spite of having the media, politics, and many latté sipping prostitutes in her back pocket for support. Instead Powell would sanction the spending of many, many thousands of dollars carrying over into the deep six figures hiring specialists that would improve Lakota’s public relations and hopefully win a levy not based on merit, but on pity.
Lakota simply threw looted money at their problems, and then asked for a tax increase to cover the costs. It was a situation of pro public education radicalism at its worst. Powell never portrayed herself as a radical, but her behavior certainly represented such views. This is the legacy of Joan Powell at Lakota—a big spender who used the school to sell homes to panicky young parents who needed a day time babysitter for their children—and Lakota schools through taxation was cheaper than their other options.
Reporters at all the major television stations and of course the papers never felt comfortable covering these follies because of the perception of public education as being the centerpiece of a community. To admit such things as being faulty would be to admit that there are serious social issues afoot that are contextually destructive. So rather than analyze the pro tax radicalism of Joan Powell and past Lakota school boards—they only measured the success rate of levy passage as an indicator of a successful school district. For instance, this is how Clark from the Cincinnati Enquirer framed one of the successful hurdles overcome by Joan Powell during her reign, “The longest operating tax levy losing streak in Lakota history. From 2004 to this fall, voters rejected six of seven school tax hikes. But in November voters narrowly approved a new school operating tax.” The assumption in that comment is that it is taxes that make a successful school, and if every few years taxes are passed—then the school will be considered productive. There is never the question asked as to how long such taxes could be extorted from the public before the whole house of cards comes crashing down—or how many homeowners were forced to leave their homes because of the high taxes. Or, how many businesses folded because of taxes, or how many didn’t sign a lease because the tax rates were too high. The opportunity cost assessment of tax increases were never analyzed by the mainstream media. The only measure of success was whether or not taxes were obtained so that school boards like the one that Powell was president over could throw money at labor union collective bargaining contracts and buy a few more years of peace from that radical progressive element.
For all those reasons the best Christmas present the Lakota school district could have received is the retirement of Joan Powell from the school board. The remaining board members have issues—and lean way too far to the political left—but are not relics from the old corrupt days at Lakota the way Powell was. The challenges to the board from No Lakota Levy have made them function better as a leadership body. People like Powell and the current superintendent Karen Mantia resist that improvement—but the tide is slowly sweeping their type out to sea. That is not to say that all is well at Lakota—but the old guard progressive types like Powell are fading off into nightmarish memory. She is the last of the heavy radicals who occupied the board at Lakota and paved the way for the ridiculously high teacher salaries, the misspending, and the many cover-ups.
The way Powell did it was reporters like Clark ate from her hand like a tamed dog sitting by her side waiting for table scraps of information carefully arranged by Lakota’s public relations people. Without that cooperation Lakota might have actually lived within its means, not dumbed down so many children, and ruined the lives of so many people caught in cover-ups. The path to hell is always paved with good intentions—and I believe that Powell was full of good intentions. The remaining question is—good for who? The answer will come in time. With Powell gone from the board one of the most divisive and manipulative public figures in Butler County is no longer able to do such corrosive damage directly. For me, the best Christmas present I received in 2013 came from the ending of her time as school board member and president. A Lakota without Joan Powell is one that has hope—unless your perspective is a giant state-run school teaching progressive instruction taking society into a Brave New World. In that case, Joan was a Madonna and symbol of radical advancement of left-leaning policies designed to shape the entire world. In that regard, Joan was successful—for those kinds of people.
I will always enjoy knowing that Joan spent several hundred thousand tax payer dollars and two years worth of effort to move voters 4% points only to extort more money from the local residents. Now that is a legacy!
Rich Hoffman
