Bart Birdsall Gets Letter of Apology with no Help from CTA

From: Montolino@aol.com [mailto:Montolino@aol.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2007 11:10 PM
To: Yvonne.Lyons@floridaea.org
Cc: Jean.Clements@floridaea.org; Chuck.Kiker@floridaea.org; tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: Letter

Yvonne, Jean, and Chuck,

Tom Gonzalez tells me I will get the letter I continue to ask for......this is the letter Linda Kipley promised me in my meeting with her back in July 2005. Back then she said I would receive a letter that the meeting with her was satisfactory. However, I never received such a letter. Instead, I received what I feel was a threatening letter in a nasty tone with absolutely no wording stating that the meeting was satisfactory or the outcome was good. Around the same time I had a co-worker spread lies that I am about to be fired back when all this happened. He assumed this after a downtown person, who used to be a friend, told him the whole story.

I asked Tom Gonzalez to make sure the letter is the type that I can show anyone the letter as proof that I am not going to be fired to counteract rumors.

I wish CTA had made sure this letter was written to me back in August 2005. I think Kipley owed me this letter, and since she said I would receive it in the presence of a CTA rep, I should have received it.

But I am getting the letter through my own insistence. It is taking me almost 2 years to get the letter that Kipley owes me. Tom says I will get it. If I do, I will finally be able to put everything to rest and move on with my life. If I do not get it, I will probably attend every single school board meeting and talk about Linda Kipley owing me an apology for lying to my face during an investigation and for bringing up issues (a newspaper article and the Joe Stines emails) that she had no right to bring up during the investigation (and she even admitted I was not called into Professional Standards for those issues but she made a point of trying to scare me that MaryEllen Elia gave her those items).

I believe in being nice, but when I feel I have been wronged I will defend myself to the nth degree. I believe powerful people must be held accountable for their nonsense.

Below is a column about Molly Ivins. I believe CTA should work toward her goal: holding powerful people accountable......I feel that the culture at CTA is a "don't rock the boat, just work on FEA type issues that effect education, but don't make anyone important mad...." type of culture. It's a "let's help the teachers as long as it doesn't cause a rift in our relationship with the bigwigs" culture. I feel there are times you have to rock the boat and should, especially when it holds powerful people accountable and keeps them from abusing their power and harming others.

I am hoping the article below will inspire you all to be braver in helping teachers, when they have a problem or issue. I continue to be a CTA member, I continue to encourage new teachers to join, and, in return, I feel you owe teachers more when they are upset or in trouble.

Bart

Missing Molly Ivins
By PAUL KRUGMAN

CTA:

Pray allow me to lodge an official rebuke from a former FUSA president at HCC that you of Hillsborough County CTA let down a member whom you charge $500 a year despite your pusillanimous bowing and scraping to the administration when it mistreats teachers.

By dint of his persistence, Bart has petitioned Dr. Lamb to have the Board attorney survey the situation and has finally prevailed to a degree. The Board attorney will soon issue a pamphlet outlining teachers' rights who go to Professional Standards--on trumped-up charges in Bart's case and in others.

The administration uses Professional Standards as a sneaky punishment device not for infractions but for getting back at teachers for doing something the administration doesn't approve. In Bart's case, it was his participation in the gay protest to the library-shutdown privileges for gays.

This administration has a long and unlovely history of tolerating the savaging of gay children in the school system for years. Bart and a mother with a gay son at HHS lobbied against it for years while the administration and Dr. Lennard fled the problem because they thought that their protecting gay children in school would annoy the homophobic bigots.

CTA did not one thing about this vile Professional Standards situation and knew about it for years. It knew and looked the other way when Linda Kipley acted like the administration's Lucco Brazzi. It discouraged Bart from appealing his treatment. CTA let teachers enter Kipley's den of sanctioned sadism without even a paper in their hands outlining their rights and resisted requests--I know I sent several--to see that such information as the appeals process should be in a teacher's hands when he or she got the call from Kipley to come to her Abu Gharib Cell Block.

In short, CTA colluded with the administration in mistreatment of teachers. That's vile. Moreover, it's uncivilized.

As a result of Bart's unyielding persistence, he has also got the promise of a letter of apology to him from La Kipley. Again, CTA had nothing at all to do with generating this promised letter. It cooperated with the administration in its mistreatment of Bart even when a CTA Pooh-Bah accompanied Bart to the punishment interview with Kipley; it did not succor Bart: quite the contrary--its members with the administration honchos at a Tiger Bay luncheon.

Bart was new to the club and scared, but he got up and protested his treatment to speaker Elia despite being frightened and despite being ignored by the CTA sycophants present.

Bottom line: CTA is in bed with the administration, which uses CTA ciphers to keep teachers scared and quiet. The CTA's relationship with the administration comes first in CTA's lexicon of skewed priorities; teachers, who fork over $500 a year out of meager salaries, come second to the administration, with whom CTA is in thrall, too scared to annoy any administrator, no matter how egregious his or her behavior toward teachers.

Shame on CTA. It dishonors organized labor. If you and your ilk had been around at the beginning of the labor movement in America, you would have seen not a thing wrong with child labor, sweat-shop hours, and inhumane working conditions. Instead, you would have chimed in to support the opponents of these practices to call Samuel Gompers crazy.

Pray accept my abiding contempt.

lee drury de cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

---

From: Montolino@aol.com [mailto:Montolino@aol.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2007 11:10 PM
To: Yvonne.Lyons@floridaea.org
Cc: Jean.Clements@floridaea.org; Chuck.Kiker@floridaea.org; tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: Letter

Yvonne, Jean, and Chuck,

Tom Gonzalez tells me I will get the letter I continue to ask for......this is the letter Linda Kipley promised me in my meeting with her back in July 2005. Back then she said I would receive a letter that the meeting with her was satisfactory. However, I never received such a letter. Instead, I received what I feel was a threatening letter in a nasty tone with absolutely no wording stating that the meeting was satisfactory or the outcome was good. Around the same time I had a co-worker spread lies that I am about to be fired back when all this happened. He assumed this after a downtown person, who used to be a friend, told him the whole story.

I asked Tom Gonzalez to make sure the letter is the type that I can show anyone the letter as proof that I am not going to be fired to counteract rumors.

I wish CTA had made sure this letter was written to me back in August 2005. I think Kipley owed me this letter, and since she said I would receive it in the presence of a CTA rep, I should have received it.

But I am getting the letter through my own insistence. It is taking me almost 2 years to get the letter that Kipley owes me. Tom says I will get it. If I do, I will finally be able to put everything to rest and move on with my life. If I do not get it, I will probably attend every single school board meeting and talk about Linda Kipley owing me an apology for lying to my face during an investigation and for bringing up issues (a newspaper article and the Joe Stines emails) that she had no right to bring up during the investigation (and she even admitted I was not called into Professional Standards for those issues but she made a point of trying to scare me that MaryEllen Elia gave her those items).

I believe in being nice, but when I feel I have been wronged I will defend myself to the nth degree. I believe powerful people must be held accountable for their nonsense.

Below is a column about Molly Ivins. I believe CTA should work toward her goal: holding powerful people accountable......I feel that the culture at CTA is a "don't rock the boat, just work on FEA type issues that effect education, but don't make anyone important mad...." type of culture. It's a "let's help the teachers as long as it doesn't cause a rift in our relationship with the bigwigs" culture. I feel there are times you have to rock the boat and should, especially when it holds powerful people accountable and keeps them from abusing their power and harming others.

I am hoping the article below will inspire you all to be braver in helping teachers, when they have a problem or issue. I continue to be a CTA member, I continue to encourage new teachers to join, and, in return, I feel you owe teachers more when they are upset or in trouble.

Bart

Missing Molly Ivins
By PAUL KRUGMAN


Published: February 2, 2007
Molly Ivins, the Texas columnist, died of breast cancer on Wednesday.
I first met her more than three years ago, when our book tours
crossed. She was, as she wrote, "a card-carrying member of The Great
Liberal Backlash of 2003, one of the half-dozen or so writers now
schlepping around the country promoting books that do not speak
kindly of Our Leader´s record."

I can´t claim to have known her well. But I spent enough time with
her, and paid enough attention to her work, to know that obituaries
that mostly stressed her satirical gifts missed the main point. Yes,
she liked to poke fun at the powerful, and was very good at it. But
her satire was only the means to an end: holding the powerful
accountable.



She explained her philosophy in a stinging 1995 article in Mother
Jones magazine about Rush Limbaugh. "Satire ... has historically been
the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful," she wrote.
"When you use satire against powerless people ... it is like kicking
a cripple."
Molly never lost sight of two eternal truths: rulers lie, and the
times when people are most afraid to challenge authority are also the
times when it´s most important to do just that. And the fact that she
remembered these truths explains something I haven´t seen pointed out
in any of the tributes: her extraordinary prescience on the central
political issue of our time.
I´ve been going through Molly´s columns from 2002 and 2003, the
period when most of the wise men of the press cheered as Our Leader
took us to war on false pretenses, then dismissed as "Bush haters"
anyone who complained about the absence of W.M.D. or warned that the
victory celebrations were premature. Here are a few selections:
Nov. 19, 2002: "The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably
not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? ... There is a
batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now."
Jan. 16, 2003: "I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to
our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what
happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent
Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, `Horrible three-way civil
war?´ "
July 14, 2003: "I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would
lead to the peace from hell, but I´d rather not see my prediction
come true and I don´t think we have much time left to avert it. That
the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald
Rumsfeld. ... We don´t need people with credentials as right-wing
ideologues and corporate privatizers - we need people who know how to
fix water and power plants."
Oct. 7, 2003: "Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure
looks like a quagmire. ...
"I´ve got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be
killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed
by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I´ve
had a bet out that I hoped I´d lose."
So Molly Ivins - who didn´t mingle with the great and famous, didn´t
have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special
expertise on national security or the Middle East - got almost
everything right. Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those
credentials do?
With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong. They bought the
obviously cooked case for war - or found their own reasons to endorse
the invasion. They didn´t see the folly of the venture, which was
almost as obvious in prospect as it is with the benefit of hindsight.
And they took years to realize that everything we were being told
about progress in Iraq was a lie.
Was Molly smarter than all the experts? No, she was just braver. The
administration´s exploitation of 9/11 created an environment in which
it took a lot of courage to see and say the obvious.
Molly had that courage; not enough others can say the same.
And it´s not over. Many of those who failed the big test in 2002 and
2003 are now making excuses for the "surge." Meanwhile, the same
techniques of allegation and innuendo that were used to promote war
with Iraq are being used to ratchet up tensions with Iran.
Now, more than ever, we need people who will stand up against the
follies and lies of the powerful. And Molly Ivins, who devoted her
life to questioning authority, will be sorely missed.

Bart Birdsall
2309 W. Bristol Ave.
Tampa, FL 33609
home (813) 258-8817
cell (813) 362-7937
Montolino@aol.com