During the school day

An interview with LifeWise Academy CEO Joel Penton, chaos looms in GOP caucus vote, Senator Blessing gets in his bag, and Columbus eyes major downtown fix.

Joel Penton, the CEO of LifeWise Academy

A friend asked me if I planned to hang around the Senate Education Committee meeting yesterday.

The headliner of the afternoon was SB-229, which would force every school district in the state to allow students to attend off-campus religious instruction during the school day if that was something in which even one of their parents might be interested.

You can watch the entire meeting via my friends at the Ohio Channel.

I don’t like to hang around the committee rooms stuffed with right-wing types as it’s highly unlikely those populations are up-to-date on their coronavirus vaccines. I already have enough brain damage without risking more from a third infection.

But I also can’t stomach the preening arrogance of State Senator Andy Brenner (R-Powell), the chairman of the Education Committee. It’s insulting, albeit par for the Statehouse, that a Liberty University graduate holds so much sway over public education policy in Ohio.

Brenner has been at the forefront of every effort to hamstring public education going all the way back to his days pushing the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which only turned out to be the largest public school swindle in Ohio history.

(And, in typical fashion, none of the scammers in ECOT’s executive class went to prison while all of its political enablers have earned promotions in the overflowing sewer system masquerading as our state government.)

So, yeah, it’s probably better for my business to stay out of the room while Brenner smugly dismisses qualified opposition witnesses whom he thinks should be much more gracious to share a room with such a towering intellect.

While the opposition side featured a wide coalition of teachers, parents, advocates, school board members, and ACLU lobbyist Gary Daniels, the whole 2.5-hour meeting can largely be distilled into these 10.5 minutes featuring opponent Michael Ahern, a retired EPA worker:

Ahern threw quite a bomb into the proceeding at the end of his three-minute testimony when he revealed that, before the meeting started, he observed a committee member’s staffer congratulate LifeWise CEO Joel Penton on the pending passage of the bill.

Chairman Brenner simply ignored the revelation because there was nothing shocking about it from his point of view. The bill will be passed out of his committee on party lines in the next meeting.

Jesus of Nazareth could open the Statehouse ceiling, descend to the witness podium, deliver three minutes of sublime testimony filled with searing facts and logic, and Brenner would ignore it all the same if it clashed with his rigidly uncurious worldview.

But despite the preordained nature of the meeting, I waited outside the South Hearing Room to get some face time with Penton, the former Ohio State football linebacker still wearing his 2002 national championship ring from his redshirt freshman season.

The entire 14.5 minute interaction can be seen below, with the only edit being my speeding up the clip when Penton takes a quick phone call:

Guys like Penton never want to talk about how much money they’re making off their little operation. Especially when they present themselves as humble servants of God.

They’ll always point to their 990 form, which you can view through the excellent information depot that is Pro Publica.

Penton, according to the latest filing, made at least $110,464 last year in total compensation. That’s not a bad salary in a state with a median income of $35,981 according to the United States Census Bureau in 2022.

Penton loves to present the notion that private donors and churches fund LifeWise Academy. He touts the idea that LifeWise, which is an untaxed non-profit entity, was funded through the grassroots of America, with the “typical” donation being $20 to $30.

And maybe he would have a point if the $13 million in revenue came from a median donation of $25.50 or a similar number.

Curiously, however, Penton refused on numerous occasions to name LifeWise’s top donors—something that would give searing insight into the types of people that think it’s an organization worth funding. And, unlike he claimed and as far as I can tell, that specific information is not on LifeWise’s 990 form, either.

Even funnier, Penton refused to give the dollar amounts of the top three donations to LifeWise—something I suspect would reveal numbers much, much higher than the “typical” $20 to $30 donation. Because LifeWise is one arm of the billionaire-funded machine aimed at shredding public schooling in America.

My point to Penton was the same as it is with other Holy Rollers of Penton’s flavor: Organized religion gets less popular in America every year. The Holy Rollers have lost every cultural battle for the last 40 years. Their response has been to leverage Ohio’s gerrymandered state government, with Senator Brenner being the perfect example.

Penton wouldn’t even stand by comments from an interview earlier this year, originally reported by Laura Hancock of cleveland.com, that he “opposed” homosexuality and transgender people, because he knows how that plays with everyday Americans in 2024.

I would have respected him more if he stood by his bigotry rather than try to spin it as him “loving all people as Jesus instructed,” which obviously isn’t true.

Through that lens, LifeWise is just the latest innovation where religious fundamentalists can target, recruit and propagandize children when they should be socializing with their peers at public school.

If parents want to totally control their children’s educations and turn them into socially stunted weirdos, then they can homeschool them as Penton does all his children despite having zero qualifications to do so. Or they can send them to private schools—it’s never been easier to do that in Ohio.

The public school day should belong to the schools which the state staffs with vetted professionals who have undergone rigorous training and education—none of which can be said about LifeWise’s operation.

After all, we have to live around these children when they get older. It behooves society that children spend time with educational professionals rather than being taught that Jonah survived literally being swallowed by a whale or being pressured into recruiting their friends to the “academy.”

At the end of the conversation—in my defense, Penton just kept engaging me as is often the case when you just respectfully keep asking questions—Penton asked if I had any “self-awareness” about “holding a camera” and “following people to their car” as if I was some pervert that had ambushed a private citizen while he was bringing groceries into his house.

Well, he might have gotten the pervert part right in that assessment.

When I posted that 24-second clip to Twitter, someone asked if Penton was drunk. No, he wasn’t. He just had the look of someone that had been in the blender for 14-straight minutes. And I wish that was the kind of barrage Penton faced whenever he appeared in public. Maybe he would grow some shame and get a real job that is more honorable than a fundamentalist midlevel marketing scheme aimed at children.

Christmas comes early!?

Folks, I received a shocking Twitter message from one of the most respected State Legislative officers in the Patriots Caucus at 12:40 a.m.