Lakota School Board member Darbi Boddy will be allowed to attend the board meeting on Monday as long as she steers clear of Isaac Adi, who has a civil protection order against her.
Court motions have been flying this week as Boddy has fought to be able to do her elected duty and attend school board meetings. Late Thursday, Butler County Common Pleas Court Judge Greg Howard granted Boddy’s emergency motion to partially suspend an order she stay 500 feet away from Adi, with conditions.
“Upon her arrival for any such meetings, respondent shall enter the meeting place immediately upon arrival and not communicate with the petitioner unless necessary during school board meeting business,” Howard wrote. “At the conclusion of an school board meetings, respondent shall wait until five minutes after petitioner departs the school board meeting before she departs.”
Her attorney suggested this solution when asking the judge to allow her to attend meetings. Adi obtained a civil stalking protection order from Howard on grounds Boddy has been harassing him and causing him mental distress.
The protection order was issued by the Butler County Common Pleas Court after evidence in the case was presented before a judge. The order itself says Adi filed the request for the protection order after Boddy's actions caused him distress that resulted in hospitalization.
The order says Boddy, despite two investigations that revealed nothing, continued to claim Adi was in support of a pedophile, calling him out in various public spaces.
According to the order, Boddy called Adi out during an April conference in Florida before "reading from a prepared statement to a crowd, which on at least two of those occasions consisted of 200 to 300 attendees."
One of those instances happened during a question and answer session at the conference, "which based on the evidence submitted was no an appropriate time to do so," the protection order says.
Another incident happened in June after a meeting with other school board members. The order says Boddy followed Adi after a meeting and filmed him at close quarters while expressing she was upset about derogatory remarks about her.
Then, in August, after Adi had already filed for the protection order, Boddy began filming Adi again, while asking him about why he stepped out of a committee hearing to take a work-related call, the order says.
Boddy has been a controversial member of the Lakota Local Schools board for some time. In the last year and a half, she has been issued a trespassing notice for entering a school property without being properly authorized to do so, posted a link to a pornographic site on her Facebook that she claimed had been the result of "a typo" and compared the district's suicide prevention and mental health groups to the Salem witch trials.
In addition, Boddy has waged war on many programs and student-led organizations within Lakota Local Schools and proposed rules in an attempt to ban transgender students from playing girls' sports and using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
Boddy's role as school board member has even had an impact on staffing within the school district. The district's previous superintendent, Matt Miller, wrote a letter to the board of education in January to explain that his recent resignation was a result of "the increasingly hostile work environment caused by Ms. Boddy."
