From:Leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Mr. Hegarty:

3. [Provide] The name of the person(s) in the administration who "never shared [the school-generated] prediction with the community."

This is the construction in my previous email about the Board’s petitioning the county for money based on invalid projections of enrollment that you said “makes no sense.”

My four-year-old grandson would understand its meaning.

That you don’t means you must come by my office for a chit for an MRI of your brain. The X-ray guy shall send the results to me for forensic diagnostics on which parts of your grammar primer you must review.

Before I review your brain pathology, however, I can advise that you start with a chapter in any reputable grammar book called “Sentence Sense.” You must also diagram the above construction and identify all the parts of speech in Study Hall.

The reason you allege not to understand the meaning is that it points to your dereliction in providing the public accurate information. You forget that you work for us citizens, not as spin doctor to gloss over the Board’s and administration’s mistakes and chronic incompetence.

We taxpayers pay your salary, not the Board or administration hoo-hahs.

Keep that fact in mind, young man, and keep a civil tongue in your head when addressing one of your taxpayer bosses.

We will meet in the School Board parking lot for more homework assignments when I have sent your MRI to the CDC for further analysis. I hope the results are not dolorous for you. I wouldn’t trust any Florida state agencies with this task. Those issue sloppy trend prognostications based on the ephemera seeping from the bureaucratic minds that batten off taxpayers in those faux jobs.

As you were,

lee drury de cesare




Mr. Hegarty:

Thank you for your unwonted prompt reply to my public-information request.

The recent trip-up on the local School Board’s request to the county for more money via increased impact fees presents a paradigm for the slovenly administrative review the School Board and administration give its business. It echoes the Board’s flatfooted puzzlement at the crooks' running the real-estate division while the Board and Ms. Elia, then head of that department, remained in La La Land.

Both Olson and Faliero in their recent appearance at Tiger Bay’s candidate forum averred that the Board or administration could have not in a million years diagnosed the crooked maneuvers in the real-estate caper. They averred that to do so would have been a feat that escaped the abilities of human intelligence—theirs, to be sure.

But then there exists the refutation of a St. Pete Times reporter’s walking in off the street and discovering the real-estate money heist costing tax payers thousands of dollars that the on-scene somnolent school watchdogs immured in bureaucratic ennui had not noticed right under their noses.

And God forbid that the Potted-Plant board ever ask relevant questions about administration conduct in this or any enterprise in which it performs its too-frequent choreograph of tax-subsidized incompetence.

The Board and Elia don’t hire people for intelligence, training, and competence. They hire them for mindless obedience to the administration overlords, besotted with power and not about to give it up, to look the other way, to cook the books, and to deny accountability when the chickens come home to roost.

The print press, slowly sinking into the maw of history as blogs supersede them, conducts editorial candidate reviews not knowing diddly about what’s going on in the schools. With their reporters’ expose of the real-estate scam on their desks in their editorial aeries, they endorsed Ms. Olson, saying that she “keeps up with national trends in education.”

What about Ms. Olson’s keeping up with local trends, indeed, with on-site trends slap dab in her purview on the Board? What about her and La Faliero's keeping up with the trend in the school real-estate department under Ms. Elia to rip off taxpayers while the Board and the administration continue its tinsel-power extravaganza in the ROSAC redoubt and to hell with the nitty gritty of school business—criminal or otherwise?

And what about the Board and administration’s crafting a careful statistical justification for a change to justify its hitting up the county for more money for the School Board and Elia to squander in incompetent performance?

lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
727-398-4142
www://grammargrinch.blogspot.com
www://leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Ms. De Cesare,

Below are the answers to your questions.

1) The district's chief business officer, Gretchen Saunders, mentioned in a meeting with other district business officers that she thought enrollment might be lower than projected this year. In that same informal conversation the representative from Broward County guessed that Broward's enrollment might be a little above the projection. The Broward official was quite wrong. Enrollment in Broward is significantly below projections. Ms. Saunders' off-the-cuff estimate appears to have been pretty accurate.
Those informal conversations came well after the state's enrollment and budget projections had been made.

2) Projections are made by using historic and trend data in the state's computer model. It relies heavily on trends, not on recent developments. Because of the great weight given to trends, the state originally projected that Hillsborough County would grow by about 7,000 students. We disagreed and convinced the state to adjust the growth projection downward to about 5,500. It appears the numbers will come in even lower. Enrollment projections, which usually are accurate, are the result of a team effort involving the Florida Department of Education, the FTE Estimating Conference and individual school districts. I know you asked for a name but, as you see, projections are not made by one person, or even by one organization.

When the School Board asks the County to up the impact fee from $200 to $4000 (I believe those are the figure I read), I suggest that the state’s “trend” figures should get further scrutiny from an expert. Ms. Saunders' “off-the-cuff” estimates that “mention” that she guesses the figures to be inaccurate do not serve in this instance.

If the school administration doesn’t have one on its top-heavy staff--which recently added a discretionary featherbedding School Bus Tsar sinecure for Dr. Hamilton instead of paying the drivers a living wage and buy new buses-- amongst all those bloated-pay executives that throng ROSAC--then the Board needs a consultant to fill in for the lack of staff competence. The New School Bus Czar, Dr. Hamilton, has already one lined up draw pictures to tell him how to get the buses to run on time. Surely the enrollment projection is a more important matter than Dr. Hamilton’s inability to figure out bus schedules. ldd



3) The question makes no sense. I didn’t save the email. Please resend me a copy so that I can determine if I need a brain scan or if you lack the ability to thread your way through subordinate clauses in a sentence. ldd

You had one other question about who was responsible for conveying the information to the public. That's my job. When asked by reporters and others how many students we expected this year, I provided the official state projections. Those are the numbers we used in conversations with county officials and anyone else who wanted to know about our growth projections for this school year. It also has been my job to provide the actual student enrollment counts, which have come in lower than expected.

Did you not think to ask your School Board bosses any questions about their methodology at arriving at the flawed figures on the off-chance that the print press would pose more probing questions in this area?

The trends method sounds like a ho-hum dart-throwing approach. An Ouija board could have given the same prognostication.

When the school system asks for a whopping bump-up in money from the county, it ought to exercise some imagination about what data are needed to convince. If more exact analysis lies beyond Ms. Saunders’ competence of analyzing county data to test against the gauzy “trends” suggestions, why can’t she get some outside demographic help for analysis of these data in the name of accuracy?

If any local press were astute enough to ask you that question, wouldn’t you have to have admitted that the Board did not require more statistical accuracy for its money petition to the county and that the School Board and administration counted on the County’s being patsies because of the political-propaganda poison of the its denying the children classrooms and blah, blah, blah? ldd

Stephen Hegarty
Office of Communications
School District of Hillsborough County
901 East Kennedy Boulevard
Tampa, Fl. 33602-3507
office: 813-272-4060
fax: 813-272-4510




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From: Stephen Hegarty [mailto:shegarty@sdhc.us]
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 7:42 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Cc: Joan Gentry
Subject: School District Response


ot.com







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stephen Hegarty [mailto:shegarty@sdhc.us]
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 7:42 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Cc: Joan Gentry
Subject: School District Response