Tuesday, July 04, 2006

TEACHER TESTIMONY ON ADMINISTRATION HIRING FIRE DRILL



I got the information I allude to below in comparing the Hillsborough County school administration's hiring practice to those of City Hall in Chicago, which just got a jury guilty verdict for a number of the culprits in the trial against the illegal jobs program run out of City Hall.



A teacher writes below and gives us some insight into what kind of administration taxpayers pony up a quarter of a million dollars a year in superintendent pay and over $100,000-plus a pop for his or now her incompetent, go-along-to-get-along administrative subordinates.



The taxpayers think they are buying competent administration with this Keystone Cops hierarchy. It gets instead the academic weaklings that flock to adminstration, bloat their salaries, and mismanage the school administration to a faretheewell.



Where, you ask, is the Board in these bizarre administrative hijinks? Out to lunch, as usual, potted plants as usual, playing the ceremonial role as usual, merely rubberstamping the hiring decisions that determine the quality of people who lead the school system for the community's children.
The teacher writes:




I remember the story.




I believe that Name removed at person's request because the education network used this incident to deny her a job. was up for the position, and they did not award it to her despite better credentials and qualifications.


Instead, they gave it to Renalia Dubose.


Then, Renalia Dubose left the district to work for some district (maybe Citrus County).

Name removed at person's request applied again for the job, and they gave it to Brenda Kearse, who was a principal who was angering all the parents at her school.


They had to get Brenda Kearse out of the school she was in and move her downtown supposedly so that the problem was solved, so they moved her into that slot and bypassed Removed name at person's request despite a committee pretty much deciding that was the best candidate.


When this happened, [an outraged teacher] put her foot down and called during the school board meeting and said she would call the press immediately, if she didn't hear from Dr. Lennard immediately after the school board meeting.


Dr. Lennard called her back, and she said it wasn't right b/c the committee had decided on Name removed at person's request and she was the best qualified, and if he didn't do something about this, she was calling the newsstations and spilling the beans.


Dr. Lennard ended up making sure Name removed got an equal type position that paid the same but wasn't the position she applied for. That satisfied Brenda, I believe.

Meanwhile, Renalia Dubose who held the position in question earlier returned to Hillsborough County, and they rehired her and put her above Brenda Kearse (now that Brenda Kearse had Renalia's job).

I am not sure, but I think they simply created an extra position so that Renalia Dubose could have her old job back but Brenda Kearse did not have to step down.


(Such duplicating of jobs would explain why Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Otero hold the same job for which the taxpayers pay a double salary because the supeintendent lacks the leadership to fire one of the men.)


The whole thing boggles the mind.


By the way, a deep throat says Renalia Dubose left Citrus County (or whatever county she left Hillsborough for) in bad shape, b/c she didn't do the job well. Well, she was rehired by Hillsborough and put above the Brenda Kearse (who had replaced her).


Boggles the mind.
**************************************************************************************
Mr. Neal: The Board must approve the hiring decisions of the school administration. So it is responsible for them. And what about the Board's approving the ad for Ms. Elia's job having the Ph.D. reduced to a master's degree to fit her lack of it?

I don't know where the Civil Service Board fits in here, but I am convinced that the School Board participates in school hiring violating Title VII. But thank you for the courtesy of your reply.
Lee Drury De Cesare
-----Original Message-----

From: Tom Neal [mailto:NealT@HillsboroughCounty.ORG]
Sent: Friday, July 07, 2006 1:12 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: Monkey Biz

Mr. De Cesare: Reference your e-mail wherein you state the School Board routinely violates Title VII in hiring.
Please be aware the Hillsborough County School Board is not a part of the Hillsborough County Civil Service System. Suggest to direct you concern to that agency for resolution.
**************************************************************************************
July 7
School Hiring Sounds Like Chicago's City Hall Patronage


When my husband and I went to Chicago last year for me to attend another Wagner Ring Cycle, the hiring corruption scandal at City Hall was just beginning to boil. The verdict is in, and the prosecution headed by Patrick Fitzgerald, the Plame-leak prosecutor, has convictions.


It’s hard not to compare the Chicago City Hall hiring practices to those that infect the administration of Hillsborough County schools.

If a prosecutor reviewed the hiring practices in the administration of the Hillsborough County school system, I believe she or he could make a case for its awarding jobs and promotions—especially of the top administrative jobs--on the political recommendations of the internal power pod, not on the ability of the candidates.

Here are some excerpts from the NYTimes account of the prosecution’s success:

After a six-week trial and three and a half days of deliberations, the jury of 10 men and 2 women agreed with the federal government's argument that the city's longtime practice of awarding jobs and promotions to politically connected candidates and campaign workers was a crime.


"I think what we saw in this case was the revealing of the Chicago machine, the inner workings of the Chicago machine," said S. Jay Olshansky, the jury foreman. "There clearly is one. It has been in existence for quite some time."

Mr. Olshansky said he had been appalled to learn how city hiring worked.
Prosecutors said Mr. Sorich and Mr. McCarthy had concocted "blessed lists" of preselected winners for certain jobs and promotions based on political work or union sponsorship. The scheme involved sham interviews, falsified ratings forms and the destruction of files to cover it up, they said.

Over at least 13 years, prosecutors said "the fix was in" for non-policymaking employees, including plumbers, tree trimmers, aviation security officers and carpenters.

The favored candidates included one who had been in Iraq when his interview supposedly took place, one who died before interviews were conducted and another who was known to have a drinking problem.


"It was not about the qualifications of the men and women who applied for these jobs," Julie B. Ruder, an assistant United States attorney, said in closing arguments last month. "It was about politics. It was about clout. It was about who you knew and whose palm you greased."

I don’t know whether there are political forces that work to promote hiring below the administration level, but I believe they work especially at the upper level of administration. I heard that no matter the recommendations of a review committee for a job, Dr. Earl Lennard overrode its recommendations to hire his pick. That I would call political hiring.

When I wrote for La Gaceta, I recall a woman’s telling me about one particular case in which Lennard overrode the recommendation of the hiring committee.


I had the woman who knew about this situation call Patrick Manteiga, La Gaceta publisher, to confirm what she told me so that I could write about the situation.

I have a call into this woman to tell me the names involved again so that I can cite them on this blog.

Of what I have observed and inferred from reading files in the Public Affairs Office, I believe patronage hiring explains Ms. Elia’s appointment to superintendent, Connie Mileto’s appointment to lobbyist, Linda Kipley’s appointment to Professional Standards director, and Steve Hegarty’s appointment to the head of the Public Affairs office.

What makes this situation so repulsive is that these are the people whose bloated salaries taxpayers subsidize. They are supposed to preside over our children's educations in a way that mirrors the height of Western ethics: fairness being a pivotal ingrediant of that tradition. They tell our children that the best person wins. And then they fix their own hiring game in backstairs deals that mock that ideal.

I am trying to extract information about Le Jack Davis, who got the head of computers without having credentials in computers some Deep Throat told me. I have emailed him for his credentials. No answer. That means he doesn’t have them is my inference.

I believe that after his taking over, the computer system bogged down and didn’t deliver the teachers’ paychecks on time. Mainframe breakdown suggests incompetence at the top.






Tuesday, July 04, 2006

http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_121.asp

Ms. Stein:

Your article shows bias favoring Elia. It selectively leaves out things the public should know about her history and emphasizes the faux heroic stature the press seems hell bent on portraying of any pygmy who occupies a public position.

The above URL catalogues the ’61 study by Harvard’s Dr. Rosenthal that touched off a widespread and continuing academic investigation of objectivity. The results show time and again that objectivity is a myth. It’s an epistemological impossibility.

We bring to everything we encounter our own mindset and filter what we see through the alembic of our individual personality structure. That’s why eye-witnesses’ accounts often differ on the stand in court. Freud’s theory of transference outlines how we project onto almost everyone we meet the people from our very early childhood.


Moreover, the elements that a reporter chooses to write about and those she chooses not to write about constitute bias. The way she writes about selected data shows bias in the how she writes it: diction, structure, tone.

I interpolate comments on your piece on MaryEllen Elia from my bias. Your view of her comes from a different world than the one in which I see this woman.

She got her job in an unfair back-stairs arrangement. The Board even did away with the Ph.D. requirement to coincide with her lack of it. The Board knowingly wasted $35,000 of taxpayer money on a scam of "nation-wide" advertising.

This action shows the Board's contempt for voters and fairness with its complicity in routine set-up hiring, the pattern that extrapolates to other administrative jobs with their bloated salaries to continue the inside power-pod cabal of which Elia is the latest reification.

Linda Kipley of Professional Standards got her $120,000 job with a home-ec degree and no advertising in violation of Title VII. The Board stamps "Equal Opportunity Employer" on all its official documents and then ignores equal opportunity. Connie Mileto got her Tallahassee $120,000 lobbying job with kindergarten credentials and influential administrative support, chiefly Dr. Hamilton according to ROSSAC gossip. The "nation-wide" searches end up in this cynical scamming of the public that wants the most qualified people in those tax-paid jobs, not buddies or buddies of buddies of the pod cabal.


Moreover, if the administration hears one peep from the employees, it gears up to fire them or to terrorize them into thinking they will get fired unless they roll over and shut up. I saw how this worked with Bart Birdsall when Elia's buddy Pat Bean, I infer, kicked gay Joe Stines's complaint against Birdsall over to Elia for government-sponsored punishment.

The administration also did not like the publicity Birdsall caused on the gay issue. The administration wants to spin all data coming from its bunker to make it look like masters of the universe.

At the time of Birdsal's inquisition, the computer system was messing up, and teachers weren't getting their checks on time. But Elia diverted attention from that vital problem to have the computer people strain Birdsall's emails to find something to charge him with on a mainframe fishing expedition. The charge against Birdsall would have been misuse of the school emails had this fishing expedition strained any shred of evidence.

I heard that the top computer guy--Jack Davis, I think--had no computer training when he got that job. It was another buddy bump up. No wonder the computer system was having trouble processing teacher pay checks. The head guy had no computer credentials.

If the administration could have found a kindergarten or home ec teacher, Jack would have been out of luck. The administration and Board are keen on promoting to top jobs any stray kindergarten or home ec teacher strolling about the ROSSAC corridors looking for taxpayer riches. Dr. Jack Lamb defends this scam protocol as "working one's way up through the system." He doesn't define "system."

On the gay issue, School Board conduct has been despicable. Candy Olson told Bart Birdsall that getting anti-bullying training in the schools to diminish the mistreatment of gay children would "have to wait for another election cycle," presumably hers. She had also emailed me that a teacher enjoyed free speech when I complained about a his proslytyzing a gay student with a Bible on the teacher's desk. The teacher told the boy that he would go to hell for his sexual orientation She didn't think Birdsall had free speech, however, when he wanted to use his citizen's right to protest the County library exclusion of gays.

I have literally chased Dr. Earl the Pearl Lennard down a hall to extract his promise to do something about the savaging of gay children in the system. He promised and then reneged, of course. Dr. Lennard reigns the most profoundly mediocre man in Hillsborouh County, yet the Board crafted the ad for his superintendent job to include vo-tech credentials because Dr. Lennard emerged from the bowels of the vo-tech hotbed of academic activity in the Hillsborough County school system.

This was probably the only time a nation-wide-search ad encompassed knowlege of the lore of shop and other vo tech arts as a superintendent vital credential.

Meanwhile, Hamilton had launched on the school-wide mail two vulgar emails filled with solecisms that would shame an illiterate and vulgarity that offended against academic decency. I filed charges for Hamilton's misusing the school emails with Kipley but didn't get even a courtesy response from Ms. Home Ec. I thought thank-you notes would be in the home-ec curriculum. The double standard says teachers and other low-level staff must toe the line, but administrataors can romp around the rules at will.

Dr. Hamilton likes to swashbuckle about what a tough SOB he is. I asked the SOB at Tiger Bay what his thesis was about. He said he didn't remember. That probably means he didn't write it. Anybody sentient who labors over a thesis recalls the painful experience. A disproportionate number of the academic weaklings who go into administration have ghosted theses.


Kipley tortures teachers in her role as seneschal of Administration Cell Block Abu Gharib. The School Board knows this fact; the administration knows it; so does the sychophantic CTA, in bed with the adminsitration while milking $500 a years in dues from ill-paid teachers. But all look the other way and don't even give the charged teacher a summary of what his or her rights are going into these obscene torture and dignity-destroying hell-holes that Kipley presides over with her bosses' complicity. This is ugly stuff, and Ms. Elia is in charge of it.

Elia lied to me and Birdsall after she spoke at Tiger Bay, saying she didn't know how the to-and-from lines of email messages worked when she routed the private-from-home emails of Birdsall to Kipley. She didn't tell Birdsall then when he asked her about filing a grievance for his treatment by Kipley that there was a grievance time limit, but she triumphantly announced it when he did file the grievance so that she could dismiss his grievance against Kipley.

This is the superintendent that the Board pronounces strong, intelligent, and forceful. They see what they want to see and avoid what they don't want to see. If
Elia were Daffy Duck, this Board would find the same excellencies in Superintendent Daffy.Ms. Elia is not intellectually up to this job. Her academic background is second rate. She's even ignorant of basic comma rules. She doesn’t write her own stuff. Your quotes of her speech at the end of your article show she lacks enough dignity of public expression to be a superintendent that oversees education. You can judge her writing ability by the blowsy piece she was arrogant enough to put out defending her cave-in on the holidays.

When she discovered she couldn’t write, she started to use Steve Heggarty, who also doesn’t know how to use commas and writes poorly. He was a long-time reporter at your paper to its discredit and is a thorough-going twit, suck-up, and sychophant who got his job by backstairs ass-kissing.Most mainstream reporters are power groupies, timid, conventional, and insecure like their bosses, who were once reporters. During WWII, The NY Times avoided covering the horrific treatment of Jews by the Nazis because of the social insecurity of the Sulzbergers and had reporters with Jewish-sounding names alter their bylines so that the names didn't look so Jewish.

Look at the coverage of the war run-up and more recently the press's collective horror when the comedian reamed Bush out on the podium at the Press Club dinner. I've had that experience in the Women's Movement: you speak to a group of conventional women, and when you tell them the truth about discrimination, they recoil and murmur behind their hands to each other that you are unladylike. The press clones hadn't spoken truth to power and said they were appalled at the truth the comic spoke on the podium about the emperor's having no clothes. The collective press said that the truth-telling comedian wasn't funny instead of admitting its horror at hearing the truth that the Washington press corps was too gutless to utter.

The only reporter who liked the comic's truth was good old Helen Thomas.


Traditional power holders—even if they are not admirable in any way and are, in fact, scoundrels—mesmerize reporters’ tribal awe and allegiance. Fawning press minions write template puff pieces about them to a faretheewell. Any reader without information that the public wrongly relies on the press to possess and report would infer at the end of your piece that Cato the Elder in a skirt headed the school system. One disgusted teacher sent your article to me with the comment, "This makes me sick."

Friends, foes agree on EliaThe county school chief isn't afraid to make decisions. Some people like that, but others think she should pull back a bit.Where was this decision-making ability when Elia headed the building department and let the real-estate scam prosper under her nose? Your newspaper catalogued the scandal before she would acknowledge it. Rumor says she didn’t get to make decisions in that job until Dr. Hamilton gave his go-ahead. He is supposed to have hung over her shoulder and not let her make a move until he approved it.

Heeding Hamilton is not strong behavior on her part. Strong behavior would have been for her to tell him to get lost. Hamilton is both Lennard’s and Elia’s Rasputin--his chosen role. Now there’s an interesting pathology hunkering in ROSSAC: a fellow who lusts for power, doesn’t have the nerve to seize it himself, but manipulates whoever holds formal power to exercise power vicariously.

I have a Dr. Stein as an email buddy. He has a daughter who is a reporter. Are you she?

LETITIA STEIN Published June 25, 2006TAMPA -

Fans and foes of MaryEllen Elia agree on this much: The Hillsborough schools chief makes things happen.There is less consensus on whether that's been good for the district. Pronoun reference: What is the antecedent of “that”?

Student achievement rose significantly during her first year as superintendent.





Why does Elia get credit for this? The teachers raised the scores. No wonder teacher morale is low. They don’t get credit for what they do and get threatened with firing if they complain.



Elia steals the success of teachers' hard work but refuses to take blame for the real-estate scam that happened on her watch. I recall the Board's putting a clause in Lennard’s contract that gave him a percentage of some variable when school scores went up. The teachers who raised the scores didn’t get the bonus: Lennard did. I bet Elia gets the same sham bonus with the teachers’ getting nothing. Such misplaced rewards keep teachers’ morale low.

But Elia ticked off numerous parents with the abrupt way she redrew school boundaries.

The gossip says that Elia as buildings chief added classrooms where they weren’t needed, so one motive for her redrawing boundaries was to cover up this situation. She backpedaled on a plan to remove some religious holidays from the school calendar, pleasing conservatives but disappointing others.

She put out some ill-written bluster saying she was tough and that people who didn’t think she was didn’t know her. It sounded like the loser post-fight rhetoric at Madison Square Garden. Did you, Ms. Letitia, ask how this backing down when bigots called Muslims “towel heads” who didn’t deserve equality with Christians showed Elia not tough but cowardly?

Her push for higher impact fees to pay for school construction has divided the County Commission.

Why didn’t you ask School Board members why citizens should approve this impact-fee since the Board has managed the budget so ineptly? Are taxpayers supposed to subsidize incompetence?

Her bosses on the School Board say they are pleased with Elia's performance - for the most part. They like her direct style, intelligence and strong will.Her “direct” style?

Tell that to Patrick Manteiga. Elia squeezed La Gaceta's publisher in camera with insidious hints that she would cut off his school advertising revenue and sic two of her casting-room-couch minions to sue him and shut down La Gaceta if the paper did not quit criticizing her. This style is sneaky, not direct. If Elia had been direct in this threat, she would have shown up in Ybor City and announced it in the middle of 7th Avenue and expected to be boiled in a pot of black-bean soup by irate Hispanic chauvinists.

Not one Board member, all of whom took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution, expressed a murmur of public concern or rebuked Elia for this First Amendment trashing. I think Elia is crafty, not intelligent, sneaky, not astute.

I am a teacher. I know dumb, and I know smart. I don’t count Elia smart. “Strong will”: where was that strong will when the bigots backed her down on the holiday schedule to include Muslims?"


She makes the tough decisions," said board member Carol Kurdell. "Sometimes, you just have to have the courage of your convictions."

Carol Kurdell is one of the dumbest Board members since the beginning of time. I saw her at a government conference I attended with my then-mayor husband at which she pooh-poohed my challenge about Lennard’s illiteracy in a question-and-answer session at which she extolled the wonders of the Hillborough County school system and launched into a saccharine encomium on how adorable Dr. Lennard was.

There is a ridiculous tradition that at least one of the female School Board members must be in love with the male superintendent. Kurdell must have been that besotted Board member when Lennard ruled ROSSAC. A woman would have to possess whacked-out endocrine glands to consider Earl the Pearl Lennard a sex object.


Even so, some board members think it's time for her to pull back on the throttle. Controversies have roiled the district all year, including embarrassing disclosures about land acquisition practices that may have wasted millions in tax dollars.



You use conditional "May have wasted"? Your paper’s series on this real-estate scam said it did indeed waste tax dollars. The Board didn’t do its homework--won't read, won't ask questions--and rein Elia in when she headed the buildings department responsible for the real-estate scam. Why don’t you mention that fact? Leaving it out makes it appear that mysterious, unknown forces caused the problem, not Elia. That scandal sits squarely in Elia's resume and didn't prevent her getting the top job. So the Board fosters incompetence and does not consider it barrier to the top job.

What issues does the Board want her to “pull back on the throttle” (hideous cliché) on? Why didn’t you cite some?"


Sometimes, she needs to slow down a bit," said School Board chairwoman Carolyn Bricklemyer, in a critique echoed by several of her colleagues.


Why didn’t you have the presence of mind to ask, “What is it she needs to slow down about, pray?” Why did you let the Board quidnuncs get away with this bromide with no particulars?

Others think Elia can do a better job of communicating her goals for the nation's ninth-largest school district.

She could start by learning to use commas and construct a potent essay. Present evidence says she can’t write her way out of a paper bag.

"She might have had a vision in her mind of what she needed to do," board member Jennifer Faliero said. "But the board and superintendent must work together."

I wish La Faliero was as smart as she is pretty. This fuzzy statement represents her weakness of dingbat illogic. Why on earth didn’t you ask for a concrete example of what she meant by this gaseous piffle? Why didn't you ask La Jennifer what specific projects Elia and the Board need to work together on?

Elia, 57, sailed into her $215,000-a-year job July 1 last year despite a national search for a replacement for Earl Lennard.

Why is there no comment from you on how she "sailed past" much better candidates from distinguished schools and distinguished backgrounds? Have you reviewed that finalist file over whom credentials-lite Elia triumphed? You should unless you are as lazy as the usual reporter who covers schools.

And this "sailed past" is exactly the kind of biased diction I refer to above. My verb would be "sneaked past." Besides, I heard that there was some committee flimflam that I think La Jennifer expedited--the lass is incorrigible--to hire Elia before the committee had a chance to review thoroughly all the candidates so that Elia squeaked in on a procedural snag. You might ask a Board member to take a lie detector test on what really happened in that committee.

Rumors had swirled for months that an insider would get the job. The district had not picked an outsider to be superintendent since 1967.

Did it occur to you, Ms. Stein, to ask Board members why they bothered to spend tax money to advertise a job nationally for which they had already picked the winner? Did you ask what was the source of the malignant tradition that has stuck the Hillsborough County schools with the inside cabal candidate, no matter credentials and deeply mediocre? Did you ask why they did not insist that the winning candidate could punctuate because students have to learn to do so?

Elia was a "comfortable fit," having been with the district for 19 years, most recently as head of its construction and maintenance operations.

Now there is an instance of biased diction. “Comfortable” to whom and why? Comfortable because she continued sleazy business as usual, kept the administrative parasites in place, and mastered the art of pretending to suck up to the Board while using these ninnies as potted-plant pawns in her continuing push for power over tax money?

The New York native now heads one of the nation's fastest-growing school districts, This comma is redundant: it cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase. with 6,000 new students expected every year. She says of her start: "It certainly has been an exciting year. Close your quotation marks.

"Sometimes in hindsight, you say, 'Jeez, I could have done this; I could have done that,' “Elia said. "It's always really healthy to reflect on the good and the bad."

"Jeez"? Now that’s an elegant expletive from the superintendent. If this represents the intelligence cited by the Board, God help the district. One does not expect a classics scholar, but can't there be a superintendent capable of a more eloquent expression than "Jeez"? She sounds like a Tampa-docks rhetorician.

She sounds a triumphant tone when it comes to her top priority: raising student achievement.

ONE WISHES SHE WOULD RAISE HER OWN ACHIEVMENT : MASTER COMMAS; THEN LEARN TO WRITE A COHERENT, LITERATE PARAGRAPH.

Elia doesn't raise student achievement, although she appropriates credit for it. Ill-paid, ill-treated teachers do if it's done at all. Elia doesn't have enough management sense to give the teachers even a little credit. She hogs it all.

She inherited three F schools, all of which improved during her first year.


The teachers improved the schools, not La Comma-impaired Elia.

Schools earned A's and B's this year, and fewer received C's and D's.

Thanks to the teachers, not Elia.

Elia organizes much of her efforts around goals. When her high-profile job put her in front of television cameras, she decided to lose weight.

Thank God. She looked like a Mac truck: poor role model for the obesity epidemic in schools. Notice that she does not lose weight to model good health habits for the children; she does it to look better in front of the TV camera in her characterisitic me, me, me focus.

Now if Dr. Lamb and Kurdell could lose about two tons, that would be an even better role model for the students. I understand Valdez is slimming down, but Olson still looks like a sack of potatoes with all the lumps in the wrong places. She is a terrible role model for the children. Both her opponents are in much better shape.

She has lost 40 pounds in six months. She won't reveal her target weight, No comma: you shouldn't split a compound verb. but aims to look like she did in her 20s.

That’ll be the day. As a registered nurse, I observe that this fast loss sounds like the formula for lose it fast, gain it back. She needs to get on an exercise program and stay away from public-trough pig outs.

Her energy level has never flagged. She arrives at work most days between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. She's lucky if she makes it home by 8 p.m.

I count this PR hype fed to a naïve reporter. I doubt Elia spends sixteen hours a day on the job. If her day is this long, it includes time to learn comma protocol and to read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations so that her rhetorical resources rise above the level of "Jeez."

Elia says it helps to have grown children. Albert IV, 32, graduated from Berkeley Preparatory, a private school, and Harvard University. He lives in Boston. Tara, 27, went to Plant High in South Tampa. A graduate of Florida State University, she works with her father, an insurance agent.

One wonders how a Yankee mother named a daughter Tara, a sacred totem of Southerners--especially us Georgians-- besotted with Gone with the Wind.

The family expects long hours from Elia, who has always worked more than her share. But the intensity of this job has surprised even her husband."MaryEllen doesn't slough things off," said Albert Elia III. "When there's a problem, she will just wrestle it and wrestle it and wrestle it until it gets solved."

She relishes the work. Elia gets a charge out of charting the direction of one of the nation's largest school systems."It's a high," she said. "You figure out effective ways to support your goals. That for the most part is to move people to see what you see."


She has not articulated those goals. The reporter was not astute enough to ask for the goals and ask La Elia for the “vision” that she sees. I believe she sees bloating her salary even more and that of her cabal buddies. She also has as a goal keeping the Board bamboozled and in the rubberstamping mood it has acceded to so far so that she can continue her ill-gotten power romp.

The only problem: Sometimes they won't. Count me in the “won’t’ group.

Three months into the job, Elia and the School Board approved a school calendar that eliminated vacation days coinciding with Yom Kippur, Good Friday and the Monday after Easter.

Hundreds of angry e-mails flooded the district. County Commissioner Brian Blair railed on Fox News Channel against what he called a move to abandon the nation's Judeo-Christian heritage. A majority of county commissioners rallied behind him.Within a week, Elia backed down. She asked the School Board to reverse itself, saying the fuss was distracting from the education of children.


"Fuss" is what she calls justice? This is behavior the Board labels “strong”? Only two Board members stayed strong on this vote: Edgecomb and Bricklemeyer.

Board member Candy Olson was among those who changed her vote. But she's not sure Elia made the best decision, saying it kept elected officials from an open debate.

How in the world did you let flip-flop Candy get away with her usual fence straddling? Why didn’t you ask her if she demanded that the Board have an “open debate” before Elia made her pusillanimous volte face? She's supposed to be Elia's boss, not vice versa. Apparently, Candy does not know this fact. No wonder Elia runs all over the Board with its members dumb enough and feeble enough to call this role reversal "strength."

"Sometimes she's a little too quick to respond," she said. "But that's an awfully good problem to have in a large, bureaucratic district."

Did you ask La Candy for an explication of this sibylline horse merd? This woman is incapable of uttering one sensible sentence.

Looking back, Elia faults miscommunication. She says school officials needed to better explain the move to the new school calendar, which is similar to the one in Pinellas County.

If Elia knew her ass from her elbow in public relations, she would have had the public-affairs office get on this early and often. Such gaffes show her lack of corporate sophistication and just plain brains.

Board member Jack Lamb agrees. "I think we have to share the blame in getting the message across," he said.

Good old obtuse Dr. Lamb has been on the Board since Pluto was a pup. Now the old duffer sits sole Y chromosome amongs all those women. It’s hard to be mad at a fellow who looks like a sumo wrestler. I am going to needlepoint Dr. Lamb one of those sumo diapers. He will look swell in it at Board meetings, waddling about the podium in his beyond-plump glory.

Stephanie Georgiades says she has decided to run for the School Board this year because of one issue: Elia's decision to redraw school boundaries in northwest Hillsborough.

Hurrah for Stephanie. She knows how to hit the comfy incumbents where it hurts. I wish I didn’t live on the Gulf of Mexico but in Stephanie’s district so that I could vote for her--except I think my buddy April is running there. This is a dilemma but also an embarrassment of riches.

This spring, Elia presented an ambitious plan to shuffle children from crowded schools to ones with empty seats. The proposal affected 1,500 students and 20 elementary schools.

Nothing models Elia’s clumsy contempt for parents and children like this arrogant move. It was obscene to watch.

Parents were told about the changes one month before the final decision.

I was at the Board meeting at which the agonized parents pleaded for reconsideration of their children's wellbeing. They said Elia had not listened to them in the sham community meetings and had even rescheduled meetings at the last minute so that they couldn’t attend.


I believe the parents.



"I don't know that she can actually put herself in the position of these students and their parents," Georgiades said. "You can't just push these decisions through, especially when they are affecting so many homes."

That’s exactly what Elia did with the Board’s complicity: bulled them through. Faliero tried to object but lacked the skill and poise to do so effectively. Valdez opposed the changes in her district but lacked the force of intellect and courage of conviction to speak up firmly in the meeting for Valdez's families and children whose lives Elia was tearing up.

The public needs courageous, outspoken Board members who will confront the administration in the heat of the argument and set it to do what the Board wants it to do, not vice versa.

Community opposition was fierce. The heat came especially from Dickenson Elementary, a high-performing school slated to be shuttered, and Westchase Elementary, where nearly 150 students were moved to Lowry Elementary.School Board members balked at closing Dickenson, where many poor students had beaten the odds to earn an A school grade. But they approved most of Elia's proposed changes.

This circumstance shows the teachers made the difference that helped the children earn an A grade, not Elia."

Just because you don't agree doesn't mean you haven't listened," said board member Doretha Edgecomb, who praises Elia's listening skills.

Edgecomb is a disappointment. I expected more verve and imagination from a Black woman. But I suppose if a Black woman has tread the mine fields of Whitey’s world to make it to principal, that she has innured herself to falling in with the majority and not staking out an outsider position, however ethical.

Ethridge, in short, is not Eldrige Cleaver, not Flo Kennedy, not Shirley Chisholm, more’s the pity. I understand Ethridge's self-serving complicity, but I can't admire it.

Why oh why are there no courageous people on the Board who will speak up for the students and the taxpayers? They all buy in to the administration racket. Taxpayers must target the culprits on the hustings and vote them out of Board office so that some new Board members can have a chance to show they are concerned with well-run schools, not with sitting on the Board as ceremonial potted plants.


But Westchase parents are still smarting.

They should do more than smart. They should raise sustained hell with the Board. Give it no peace is the winning strategy. The only way to win in politics is to make the office holder pay a price for betrayal of voters: being kicked out of office.

"You get the sense her mind's made up. It's done. This is the decision," said Linda Archer, a market researcher whose fourth-grade daughter was moved from Westchase to Lowry. "I just don't think that's the way to build community involvement."

This mother’s talking about Elia. She doesn't want community involvement. Elia wants community obeisance. The superintendent had made up her mind long before she conducted the faux community-input meetings with the parents. Parents and even students provide the background of Elia's apotheosis. Only as ego backdrop do they matter to her. She’s in the Jimmy Cagney, “Look-at-me, - ma!-I’m-on-top-of-the-world! mode.

La Elia lusts for what the French call la gloire. She is as interested in the schools as she would be in pencils if she were running a pencil factory. It's all background for her exaltation.

Two School Board members - Faliero and Susan Valdes - voted against the sweeping set of school boundary changes. "We need to listen to the community a little better," said Valdes, who represents the affected communities in northwest Hillsborough. "We can't be hard-nosed all the time."

I wish Susan had risen to the occasion, stood her ground, spoken from the podium, and defended the innocents in her district. There are times for a public official to be modest and retiring. This was not one of those for Susan. It was a time to be bold and outspoken for her voters and their children. If Ms. Valdez were ever going to rise to the occasion, this was it, and she missed her chance. Woe betide.

People run for the Board, promise to do great things when they get there, and then wilt into submission once on the job. The adminstration runs the show. The Board is an echo chamber of potted plants for the incompetent, power-hungry administration.

In the coming year, Elia wants school leaders to look at changing boundaries across the county. To address the tensions that flared in the northwest, a task force of stakeholders will oversee the effort.

Expect the “stakeholders” to be pawns ignored as the holiday committee and Westchase parents were. Elia does not possess sympathy or antenna for public accommodation. She possesses the instinct to bull her way through. Let’s see how the Board reacts. Supine acquiescence is my prediction.

"I would have communicated better to all the different groups," Elia said, "but I'm not sure in any true controversy you can get everyone to agree."

What in the hell is a "true controversy" as opposed to an untrue one? This is babble speak. Expect another show consultation with the community with Elia’s ignoring its members.


Elia had a pressing reason to demand full use of classroom space. In her first year, the district faced a $420-million shortfall in money needed for construction over the next five years.

She had to find it somewhere.School officials wanted the county to raise the $196 impact fee assessed on new homes for school construction. It was set in 1989.

Several county commissioners listened skeptically to the case for higher fees. Commissioner Mark Sharpe spent hours in Elia's office going over the numbers.


Sharpe does not strike me as the sharpest crayon in the box. He probably needed six months to learn the alphabet.

"I was really impressed by how she got her hands dirty, so to speak, in getting involved with the data in trying to solve a problem," said Sharpe, who says her effort helped sway his vote to raise impact fees.

Roundheels. The boy is a roundheels.

Last month, county commissioners voted 4-2 to boost the fee to $4,000. The hike won't be formalized until a public hearing in July.The debate highlighted ongoing divisions. Commissioner Blair blasted school officials for how they spend money. He remains openly critical of Elia's leadership.

This punch-drunk wrestler who lies that he is taller than he is has his good days.

"I haven't seen her demonstrate that she's putting a tough emphasis on efficiency and accountability within the school system," he said. "She's a very nice lady, but I still question whether she's fit for the quarter-of-a-million-dollar job she's in."

Although Le Blair may express gladiator sexism here from his chest-beating persona, I don’t disagree with our local elected Samson on Elia's not being up to the job. But I would say the same thing if she were a guy.

Elia says she can't change everyone's mind, but the people who hired her knew her style when they gave her the job. "Slowing down doesn't always get things done in the time frame that's best for students," she said. "I will take on things that might be difficult."Students are last on Elia’s priority list.

Her ego is number one. Commas are only moderately difficult. Let’s challenge her to take them on.

Letitia Stein can be reached at 813 226-3400 or © Copyright, St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.

Sunday, July 02, 2006


-----Original Message-----From: Montolino@aol.com [mailto:Montolino@aol.com] Sent: Monday, July 03, 2006 9:59 AMTo: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.comSubject: Re: (no subject)


Mrs. Olson,



I read the following passage below from an article in the St. Pete Times with interest. I was in New Orleans at the American Library Association conference, so I read this late.

It appears that you blame Elia for changing your vote on the calendar issue. I believe you should take responsibility for your own decision and your vote and not put the blame on Elia. This appears to be an attempt to get off the hook for your vote by throwing a colleague or friend or whomever to the wolves.

I experienced that same personality trait of yours when you yelled loudly at me at the gym (public place) that I violated school district policy for posting a library censorship message to librarians on a library message board, something that the American Library Association encourages. I know you yelled at me simply because you lacked an answer/response/action for Linda Kipley's lying to me. You wanted to take ZERO action in helping me against a totally corrupt Professional Standards investigation.

It boggles the mind that you can sit by and allow an unprofessional person who abuses teachers to sit as head of Professional Standards. It is actually scary that you don't care about this. You don't want to harm acquaintances or friends or whomever, but teachers are expendable. And back when you yelled at me in a public place, I was expendable in your mind b/c I was not a "friend."

However, you have known me for a long time, and you know I do not lie and that I have worked to help students for years on an unpopular topic, namely GLBT teens. How many teachers do such a thing so loudly? I am a rarity....something to be treasured since I speak for an unpopular yet necessary topic. I hear that you hissed that I could have been fired at Tiger Bay. I guess you believe someone who is a librarian who posts a library censorship issue on a library message board for other librarians to read deserves firing. Fire away! I will probably get an entire article in Library Journal for that.

Think about this. If the shoe were on the other foot, and you were a teacher and you had been pulled into Professional Standards on trumped-up charges I would look into the matter regardless if I liked or did not like you. I would have answered your email. I would not have yelled at you at the gym. The fact that this case has wider implications for all the teachers in the county who could be at the mercy of Professional Standards really makes the whole thing scandalous.

You lack courage in everything you do, and that is the reason I am trying to be a wake-up call to you. Believe it or not, I am a shy and quiet person, but I have never lacked courage in my life. I will never let any acquaintance or any job deter me from doing what I feel is the right thing to do. I wake up every morning liking the person I see in the mirror, and I don't think you can do the same. My view of myself is because I have ethics and stand by them.

The Westchase community is furious with you. Every single teacher I have ever known has disliked you from your attitude and personality on the school board telecasts. I have never met a teacher who says positive things about you, and I have rarely met an administrator who has anything good to say about you. When I bring up your name, teachers immediately roll their eyes. I am not making this up. It has been my experience time and time again.

This is a wake-up call. Start listening to your gut and acting on your gut and start doing the RIGHT thing. Stop being "friends" with people (for example, Elia) and covering up for them and then throwing those same friends to the wolves when it suits your needs (an unbelievable thing!). Stop being selfish. Have a vision! Do your job! Constituents in your district (like myself) deserve much more. If you took stands and stood by them and did what you felt was right instead of attempting to straddle the fence, you would not need to blame Elia for your vote. People can criticize Superintendent Elia about a lot of things but not for YOUR vote. You control that.

I believe true leaders do what needs to be done and do not waver and change votes and then blame someone else for their vote.
Bart

Within a week, Elia backed down. She asked the School Board to reverse itself, saying the fuss was distracting from the education of children.

Board member Candy Olson was among those who changed her vote. But she's not sure Elia made the best decision, saying it kept elected officials from an open debate.

"Sometimes she's a little too quick to respond," she said. "But that's an awfully good problem to have in a large, bureaucratic district."

Bart Birdsall2309 W. Bristol Ave.Tampa, FL 33609(813) 258-8817 (home)(813) 362-7937 (cell)Montolino@aol.com




Yearly dinner-on-the-grounds at the little church at the Drury family cemetery at Burnt, Fort Georgia


My family built the church on English land-grant land, and it was at first Episcopal. Then the randy Baptists of the family outbred the phlegmatic Episcopalians, who now go to church in St. Mary's.

The itinerant preacher who preaches the sermon on Homecoming Day is of the more demonstrative sort. His performance always puts my Catholic husband into a state of shock. I love the Baptist hymns and know all the words by heart. You just can't sing Episcopal songs. They are too esoteric for common folk.


Our Civil-war dead rest in the back of the cemetery. The most opulent tombstone belongs to my bachelor cousin who was the little town's school master for many years. His name was Buie. His mother was a Drury. He had nothing to do with his money but buy timberland. When he died, he made several of his newphews rich with timberland.


My family always honors its teachers, of which the family boasts quite a few from the original school master right down to the young people in the family. They go to prepare for their teaching careers to the University of Georgia--go Bulldogs! Beat them Gators!






Teachers' Rights

The URL below discusses a retaliation case that went through appeals to the Supreme Court, which gave its support to the worker in its ruling.

The case evokes the absence of a CTA working-conditions agreement that would rein in Linda Kipley’s sadistic treatment of teachers. Before teachers agree to anything when the new school year starts and the CTA presents them the new contract, they should review CTA’s loyalties by asking about a working-conditions agreement on appealing punishment and demanding that the teacher receive this information in writing before she or he meets Kipley for the first time. That doesn’t happen now. I know, from following Bart Birdsall’s case from beginning to end.

I found troubling the loyalties of the CTA as demonstrated by its conduct of sitting with administration at Tampa Tiger Bay instead of Bart Birdsall, a CTA member retaliated against by the administration. This seating arrangement provided a graphic demonstration of where CTA’s loyalties lie. All Birdsall got for his $500 yearly fee to CTA at Tiger Bay was a walk-by hasty greeting from a junior CTA official on his way out as he trailed like a camp follower after the administration contingent that had come en masse to hear Elia orate at Tiger Bay.

Go here for a Supreme Court decision on a retaliation charge in a worker’s EEOC filing: http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=40760&searchresults=1.

EEOC discrimination cases have doubled in the past year. So workers are showing more guts in protecting their rights on the job. Note the reference below to the bargaining agreement for appealing disciplinary actions. When Birdsall asked Elia about this issue when she spoke at Tiger Bay, she fudged the answer and didn't inform him of the time limit for appeals but later told him the clock had run out on his appeal time period when he filed an appeal. Neither administration nor Kipley had provided him with any appeals information. So how is a person charged with a professional-standards violation supposed to know that he or she can appeal and that there is a time limit for such appeals? The answer is that the person can’t, and that is how the administration wants it: deny information to people. That policy is the reigning policy of the administration to keep people—employees and citizens—in the dark so they can’t protest anything because they don’t know what is going on. The Board abets this policy.

La Elia showed herself a practitioner of slippery dirty pool with a teacher from the get-go in the Birdsall case. Elia was the one at the behest of county buddy Bean, shilling for library director Joe Stines, I infer, who told Kipley to have the Tech Department screen Birdsall’s emails on a massive fishing expedition to find any little tittle of possible misconduct by Birdsall so that the administration could manufacture a charge against him for violation of professional standards. This was a terror tactic. The tech department diverted its energies at Elia's behest from solving the teacher-pay problem with computers to chasing retaliation information against a teacher.

Meanwhile, Le Jim-You’re-Your Hamilton, sent illiterate, vulgar emails around the system, and Kipley didn’t respond to my professional-standards abuse-of-system-email charges filed with her against him. Neither the Board nor Elia answered my charge of double standard when I complained about Kipley’s not answering my charges against an administrator whilst eagerly prosecuting charges against a teacher.

As far as this citizen is concerned, my charges against Hamilton for professional-standards violations abuse are extant.

Continued comment on the retaliation case with the Supreme Court: White [person discriminated against in retaliation for her filing an EEOC charge] filed charges of sex discrimination and retaliation with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on October 10, 1997, and again on December 4, 1997. On December 11, 1997, White was involved in a dispute with a supervisor and was suspended without pay for insubordination. White made a timely request for an investigation within the fifteen-day period provided under the applicable collective-bargaining agreement for appealing disciplinary actions. Upon the conclusion of the investigation, BNSF reversed the suspension. On January 16, 1998, BNSF reinstated White with full back pay and expunged the suspension from her personnel record.

If the CTA didn’t spend most of its time sucking up to the administration, it might bestir itself to bargain that the administration provide a reasonable-working-condition appeals procedure in writing to present to a charged teacher to outline his or her appealing disciplinary actions against teachers such as those Linda Kipley perpetuates in the Abu Gharib Cell Block.

I have asked both the School Board and Ms. Elia’s office for the manual that outlines employee information on the professional-standards process with no answer. I have repeatedly asked Clements et al of the CTA for a copy of what provisions it has bargained for teachers to appeal disciplinary actions such as those Kipley enacts with nobody’s monitoring her sadistic impulses. I get no response from the CTA minions, which must mean that they have not done diddly about the obscene procedures Kipley engages in when she gets a teacher in her sadistic clutches. I know CTA doesn't follow up with the teacher and doesn't bother to monitor how Kipley treats him/ her during the punishment process. I have read accounts of how Kipley treated teachers in her clutches that were demeaning for a professional person. The CTA was AWOL.

Repeated complaints to the Board from two citizens—Birdsall and me-- finally got Dr. Lamb to charge the school attorney with investigating Kipley’s cruel behavior. I await the results: a cover-up, I fear. I heard that the attorney is an ok guy, but I want to see the Kipley decision to judge.

I have asked the CTA repeatedly for its salaries, which I hear are six figures, as extraordinary as that seems since it extracts $500 a year from teachers making the $31,000 pittance of beginning teachers. I wish a CTA member would demand the information and tell me what it is so that I can raise hell about the CTA extortion with the correct figures.

I hope the teachers don’t roll over in gratitude for the crumbs the Board and administration have finally dribbled out this year after over twenty years of miniscule raises. The best way to judge this raise is to divide it by the twenty years in which there have not been pitiful raises.

And another marker of the significance of the teacher raise after twenty years is to compare a beginning teacher’s salary to that of a couple of illiterate administrators. A beginning teacher’s new salary of $35,000 will compare to Elia’s quarter of a million salary and perquisites shakedown as 14 percent to Elia’s bloated take; a beginning teacher’s salary compared to Dr. Hamilton’s (who doesn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re”) $132,000 plus perquisites that probably put him at $150,000 is 23 percent.

I got this excerpt from the end-of-the-term Supreme Court decisions through my subscription to the NYTimes Select:

Employees' Rights

The court gave employees substantially enhanced protection against retaliation for complaining about discrimination on the job. Justice Breyer wrote the opinion in the case, Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Company v. White, No. 05-259, which interpreted the anti-retaliation provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. [This case is the one discussed above.]
The court defined retaliation broadly as any "materially adverse" employment action that "might have dissuaded a reasonable worker" from making the complaint. Eight justices joined the majority opinion, and Justice Alito filed a separate concurring opinion.


Addressing the free-speech rights of government workers, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Constitution does not protect public employees against retaliation for what they say in the course of performing their assigned duties.

Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in this case, Garcetti v. Ceballos, No. 04-473, drew a distinction between public employees' official speech, which he said supervisors were entitled to control, and their speech as citizens contributing to "civic discourse," for which they retained constitutional protection. The dissenters were Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg.
If the CTA were on the ball, had a scintilla of intellectual curiosity, and cared about protecting teachers’ rights, it would immediately request that the administration give it an opinion via its attorney on how the Board interpreted the “official speech” and “control” issues in the decision as it applied to teachers of the Hillsborough County school system.

I know the school lawyer told Kipley when she was trying to shut down Bart Birdsall’s free community speech on the gay issue--with the school’s trying to make a professional-standards violation against Birdsall to accommodate Elia’s buddy Bean and her protégé Stines at the county-- that Birdsall had a right to make complaints from his home email to Joe Stines as part of his free-speech rights as a citizen’s engaging in public discourse.

It’s important to nail down the administration via its lawyer’s definition of “control” and “official speech” to determine whether the administration can shut down all employee criticism of the administration itself and the Board on the job, which it now effectively does with covert and overt intimidation that keeps teachers mum from fear of losing their jobs or retaliation. The CTA should demand explication of what the administration and Board defines as “official speech” with concrete examples and what they consider violation of the official-speech curbs with concrete examples. CTA should demand explication and concrete examples of how the “official speech” restraints harmonize with academic freedom.

Please don’t think that I discuss such issues as the above as one who just fell off a watermelon truck. I was union president at HCC at one time and a twenty-eight-year member of FUSA. See http://www.fusahcc.org/ for what kind of union it is. Note especially the academic-freedom work.

I suggest it's time for the teachers of Hillborough County to consider changing to a union that represents its rights, not the wishes of the Board and administration.