Wednesday, March 07, 2007




From: lee decesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 7:24 AM
To: 'joe.gates@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'anabel.machin-fajardo@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'steve.fortier@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'cynthia.wells-casey@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'gary.marx@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'eddie.jones@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'gerald.smith@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'karen.waechterl@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Leigh.Dallas@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'marta.lopez-harrison@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'sylvia.santana@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'ernie.lisi@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'wendy.conley@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'dorothy.bevel@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'patricia.henderson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'mirella.brummage@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'lucy.stewart@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'elaine.williams@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'eileen.schutz@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'barbara.blasband@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'annmarie.cupoli@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'judith.thom@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'stephen.durance@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jennifer.spooner@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'rufus.floyd@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'maria.broome-levinus@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'ginny.millett@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'judy.klispie@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'vera.davenport@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Daphne.Reddick@sdhc.k12.fl.us'
Subject: FW: Is the Education Foundation Underwriting Job Discrimination at the Hillsborough County School Board?



From: lee decesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 5:02 PM
To: 'mhkeen@educationfoundation.com'
Cc: 'justice.charlie.web@flsenate.gov'; 'dicks.john.web@flsenate.com'; 'dodsen.billweb@fl.senate.com'; 'victor.crist.web@flsenate.com'; 'michael.sciontiweb@house.gov'; 'culp.faye@flsenate.gov'; April Griffin (april.griffin@sdk12.fl.us); Dabonich@aol.com; edgecomb (doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us); Edith A Tobul (edt@ncweb.com); faliero (jennifer.faliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us); Frank Sanchez (pacojs1@aol.com); Jack Lamb (Jack.Lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us); montolino (montolino@aol.com); Tiger Bay Club of Tampa (tigerbay@tampabay.rr.com); valdes (susan.valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us); Warren Rachels (WRACHELS@tampabay.rr.com); 'justice.charlie.web@flsenate.gov'; 'rlong@hcc.cc.fl.us'; 'candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'carolynAdams-Wallace@hcc.cc.fl.us'; 'waltellis@hcc.cc.fl.us'; 'ericjoost@hcc.cc.fl.us'; 'Tami Simms-Powel'; 'paultash@sptimes.com'; 'johnhill@sptimes.com'; 'letitiastein@sptimes.com'; 'mdjean@msn.com'; Susan Valdez (susanvaldez@tampabay.rr.com); 'Patrick Manteiga'; 'genenj1@yahoo.com'; 'joyner.arthenia.web@flsenate.gov'; 'JudithChambers@hcc.cc.fl.us'; 'JimMajor@educationfoundation.com'; 'gregoryComnes@hcc.cc.fl.us'
Subject:

Mr. Keen, Education Foundation, pray deliver a copy of this email to all members listed on your Web site of the Education Foundation. Thank you. lee drury de cesare tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com


Late news: I have learned that the secret donor of Ms. Elia’s “We Deliver” prize is non-existent. A plot is afoot to make the Education Foundation or some other sucker corporation money bags for the $10,000 prize.

I will write to the CEOs of any of the local affiliates in the Education Foundation roster to complain about the misuse of corporate money to underwrite administration and School- Board abuse of the Foundation for Ms. Elia’s prize scam to cover over the suppurating sore of the rotten practices of the administration in hiring and in other ROSAC skullduggeries.


The business community must not underwrite malpractice in education that corrupt hiring practices represent. These award top $100,000-plus jobs to buddies and sycophants with no advertising for superior candidates. This jobs scam deprives the citizens of good value for their tax money and deprives the students of top-quality administration talent that tax money should buy for the school system. Local corporate representatives underwriting a debased administration hiring policy would be bad for the students and bad for the integrity of the honorable role of education in a society.


lee drury de cesare

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

This is what the Education Foundation says it does: The Hillsborough Education Foundation is an independent not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to help the School District of Hillsborough County teachers and students excel in programs that are not funded by public tax revenues. Led by a volunteer Board of Directors made up of business, education and community leaders, the Foundation has raised $52 million since its inception in 1988.




This Education Foundation, listed on the School Board Web page, appears to be a corporate-school-bureaucracy flimflam.

If the Education Foundation cared about education, its members’ would have examined how the Hillsborough County School Board deals with the entrenched administration’s members’ using their positions in a jobs racket and the School Board’s toleration of the situation.


For years the choice of superintendent has been a Board-administration jobs-program manipulated by a cadre of in-house power appropriators that maneuver to name an on-site superintendent to continue hegemony over the school system’s lucrative control. This cadre ignores better-qualified outside candidates who apply for a nationally advertised job the faux advertising of which costs $35,000 to tax payers for the superintendent. The superintendent appoints other top jobs to buddies and sycophants while the School Board looks the other way.




Greedy, power-hungry, grammar-punctuation-challenged insiders have already insinuated Ms. Elia into the supervisor’s job. Her supervisory experience was in the Hillsborough County building department, where she overlooked real-estate misdoing while she overbuilt classrooms. Her academic background is mediocre, and she can’t handle grammar and punctuation in her writing. The Board colluded with the administration powerbrokers to appoint Ms. Elia, even lowering the degree requirement.

Administrators in this jobs scam want the top administrative slots not for love of education but for love of the power of dispensing the taxpayer budget and its perquisites.

Two $120,000 administrators are presently home-ec- and kindergarten- trained.




Ms. Elia makes $262,000 a year plus perquisites. The below writing sample’s announcing her gimcrack prize to divert attention from her incompetence and the level of her literacy skills is revealing. The superintendent of Boston makes less than Ms. Elia. He is literate and leads one of the most prestigious school systems in the Number-One state in education in the country. Massachusetts has a state law that requires all administrative candidates including superintendents to take the same language tests as teachers take. That law in Florida would have weeded out at least half of the upper administration $100,000-plus jobs at ROSAC.




If only one of these flossy Education-Foundation businesses pressed the Hillsborough County legislative delegation to pass a law similar to that of Massachusetts, the members would hop to it, and Florida would have fewer marginally literate administrators the bloated salaries of which eat up tax dollars that should go to students’ education.




Such incompetence at the top explains the source of why corporations complain about getting job applicants who can’t write. If the superintendent makes $262,000—more than the Boston superintendent—with such feeble literacy as she demonstrates below, why should she care about students’ graduating with such language deficiencies as I saw entering my college freshman English classes? At their entry, county students were unable to write and punctuate a literate sentence much less an essay.




The corporate world should not complain about illiterate job applicants if it colludes with the corruption of the local school administration and the Board’s supporting it. Corporations should not preen as good community citizens if their representatives sit on a school foundation that underwrites such corrosive practices that undermine the high purpose of education.




lee drury de cesare

POLICY of School Administration Rubberstamped by the Board is routinely flouted. The superintendent passes around administrative jobs with bloated salaries to sycophants and buddies with no advertising. Board plays deaf and dumb. No wonder Florida is low in national standing. Voters don’t get top personnel for these bloated salaries; they get 2nd- and 3rd-rate people in jobs that they don’t have the credentials or the brains to deal with.

Excellence comes from the top. The Number One state in national ratings is Massachusetts. A Massachusetts state law requires that all administrative candidates must take a language test just as the teachers do to get their jobs. That

901 East Kennedy Boulevard, Tampa, Florida 33602 USA

Top of Form

I am nominating:

First Name: Maryellen

Last Name: Elia

Work Location: ROSAC Hot-Air Palace

Job/Position: Ultimate Decider and Bad Punctuator

My Information:

My Name: Lee Drury De Cesare
My Phone:
727-398-4142

Email:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Web Page:http://www.leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

I am a:
Student
Parent
Community Member and

Hapless citizen

Nomination for We-Deliver Award

La Elia Delivers Piffle




Whopping superintendent hubris makes the We-Deliver prize a slam dunk for La Elia.

Ms. Elia fantasizes that people are too dumb to notice that this bread-and-circuses gimcrack aims to divert attention from her sorry record.




Ms. Elia exploits teachers by treating them as coolies, not professionals.




Not only did Ms. Elia pass off as a bona fide raise at the beginning of the school year the accumulation of neglected past raises for teachers, but she now orders teachers to take on extra classes without pay to balance her budget while she gets $262,000 and perquisites for shoddy performance. Her effrontery comes from her conviction that teachers are too scared of her Professional Standards SS terror machine to stand up and say, “Enough!”




Elia’s administrative performance includes ignoring real-estate fraud in the building department. She also overbuilt classrooms while there and later scrambled school boundaries as superintendent to cover up this incompetence while uprooted and

sobbing tots clung to their mothers’ skirts.




Superintendent Elia flouts vaunted “We-are-an-equal-opportunity-employer” Web slogan and has turned the hiring process into a jobs racket by hiring unqualified sycophants and buddies without advertising for jobs for which they lack credentials.




Linda Kipley, who sports a Paleolithic home-ec degree, reigns Professional Standards Cell Block Lucco Brazzi, getting $120,000 for sadistic treatment of the unfortunates with better credentials than hers who come within her power. That Kipley sinecure got no advertising.




Most recently La Elia rammed through for Dr. Jim Hamilton a $132,000 boutique perch. He got the job before its description posted. The old huffer and puffer prances ROSAC Rasputin to tell La Elia what to do while being unable, the record shows, to distinguish between "your" and "you're."




To top off the reasons for La Elia’s meriting the We-Deliver certificate is that, despite being the least-qualified candidate, she filched the superintendent job through labyrinthine ROSAC politics even though every other finalist was better qualified than she.




Finally, Elia merits We-Deliver champ status because, at the top of a school system dedicated to instilling literacy in the young, she can’t punctuate and handle grammar at the level students need to achieve to graduate. See her award text below for confirmation.




Ms. Elia requires the $10,000 We-Deliver prize to add to her bloated salary for walking-around money to treat Rasputin Jimbo and other layabout administrator-C-students to chocolate-covered truffles while teachers labor gratis and bus drivers get third-world wages and broken-down buses in which to transport students.




The district must fork over the “We Deliver” award to La Maryellen Elia for sustained performance in ripping off faculty, hiring as bloated-salary administrators academic weakling buddies and sycophants, mauling grammar and punctuation, promulgating hanky-panky, employing smoke and mirrors, and churning out spin, spin, spin ‘till Daddy Takes Her T-Bird Away.

******

Prentice-Hall is the hefty, expensive-for-taxpayers text for English classes. Ms. Elia’s We-Deliver text shows that she not only writes without felicity but that she also messes-up on basic grammar and punctuation that students must know to graduate.

******

Maximum-leader Pronunciamento:

Grammar-Punctuation Errors Flagged—Excellence in Education Indeed

At the annual back-to-school news conference, I announced an employee Hyphen: hyphenate two-or- more words before a noun acting as a single adjective--Prentice Hall 747. recognition initiative to celebrate the fact Inexact diction: "miracles happen every day" is not a fact. that miracles happen every day in Hillsborough County Public Schools. We will give a cash award to the district employee who best exemplifies the spirit of “we deliver” miracles Close quotation marks after “miracles” every day.

We have formed a broad-based committee Easiest comma-rule error: Prentice Hall 694 and now we are soliciting nominations. With my input, the committee will select a field of finalists whose contributions we will celebrate.

The winner will get a check for $10,000.




It will be hard to pick five finalists. It will be harder to pick just one winner. This is a symbolic recognition – and a significant reward.




The point, of course, is to highlight some of those employees who are committed to do all they can. I know that our employees deliver miracles every day. Not everyone seeks recognition for what they Pronoun-antecedent agreement problem: Prentice Hall 600 do for our students and the district, so

if you know someone like that, please fill out the nomination form.

Anyone and everyone in the district is Prentice Hall 592 eligible to win. Either the compound subject represents a subject-verb agreement error, or if “anyone” and “everyone” parse as one person under a little-used, abstruse rule, then the author subsequently falls into pronoun-antecedent error. This dilemma in grammar parlance amounts to being caught between Scylla and Charybdis as they say in Plant City or as struggling between a rock and a hard place as Cambridge dons put the problem. Prentice Hall 592 All they need to do is make a difference, give it their all, and deliver miracles every day for the children, Redundant Comma: Prentice Hall 694 for the taxpayers and for the community.




Nominate a co-worker, supervisor, or even yourself. You can include your name on the nomination form, or you can remain anonymous. Keep in mind that the winner will be decided on the merits of the nomination, not the number of nominations he or she receives, although we will make note of that.

Parents, students, business partners and others in the community are also welcome to submit nominations. If a teacher, secretary, custodian, principal, aide Comma: Prentice Hall 696 or other staff member has gone above and beyond their Pronoun-antecedent disagreement--Prentice Hall 600 job description, that’s the person we’re looking for.

School Board members, district and school staff Comma: Prentice Hall 696 and I will surprise the winner at their Pronoun-antecedent disagreement--Prentice Hall 6 00 work site on Friday, May 11. The winner will be presented with a $10,000 check in their Pronoun-antecedent disagreement--Prentice Hall 600 name that they Pronoun-antecedent disagreement-Prentice Hall 600 can use however they Pronoun-antecedent disagreement--Prentice Hall 600 wish. Click here to access the online form. All nominations must be received by Monday,

April 2, 2007.

MaryEllen Elia,

Superintendent of Schools

********

Extracting public information from government people supposed to render it up to a citizen according to the Sunshine law requires a sturdy refusal on the part of the citizen to be turned aside. A citizen keeps asking the official sitting on the information to yield it up in accordance with the Sunshine Law until the bureaucrat buckles.


There is always a reason for an official’s keeping secret public information—in this case the source of the We-Deliver prize money. I have some surmises about why in this case the source of the prize funds is secret. If it redounded to the credit of the secret-keeper, Ms. Elia, the information would appear instantly. If it doesn’t, there is a tug of war between the citizen and the reluctant tax-paid functionary. The latter reason has this citizen's vote. The information that the Foundation or some other corporate sucker was supposed to deliver the money in time to award the $10,000 prize flummoxed me. Apparently, Ms. Elia violates the maxim that says you don’t count your corporate-sucker chickens before they hatch the golden egg.


A citizen is bound to win who hangs on; he or she will in the end get the data. The law and ethics are on the citizen's side.


lee drury de cesare

*****

Second request

Ms. Cobbe: What is the source of money for the We Deliver award? Who generated the idea? I would like to have that information and any material accompanying its generation as public documents. Thank you.

lee drury de cesare

2/22/07

There are no documents related to this, other than the text of the superintendent's back to school news conference speech. It was her idea. The money is from private sources.

2/22/07

Who are the private sources?

lee drury de cesare

Ms. Cobbe: What are the names on the "broad-based" committee to pick the winner? Thank you. Lee Drury De Cesare


From: lee decesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2007 3:11 PM
To: 'Linda Cobbe'
Cc: 'Tom Gonzalez'; 'letititiastein@sptimes.com'; 'jhill@sptimes.com'; 'patrickmanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com'
Subject: RE: public information Gene, call this to Patrick's attention.


From: Linda Cobbe [mailto:lcobbe@sdhc.us]
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2007 1:47 PM
To: lee decesare
Subject: Re: public information

I don't know the source or sources.

Linda Cobbe
External Communications
Manager

Ms. Elia does. Ask her. And if the superintendent declines to give the name of whoever donated the prize money for the We-Deliver prize, then ask the school attorney for an opinion on the secrecy of this source as it relates to public information since it has to do with public business--a prize involving the whole school system and even the community.


The source of the prize money should not be secret. If it is self-promotion of her superintendence by Ms. Elia, we in the public should know that information.


lee drury de cesare

***

ROSAC functionaries are reluctant to ask Ms. Elia a question. There is the inchoate fear that they will lose their jobs for their effrontery at asking for facts. Thus, the citizen should step up and ask Elia herself to protect the bureaucrat from administration habit of retaliation. Elia doesn’t answer emails. I believe that is due to her knowing that that her writing skills are sub-par. Her suspicions are correct. But this superintendent manqué registers the question and passes it back to the public-affairs people. Sooner or later, you will get an answer if you pound away.

Ditto for emails to Board members. They go into hiding once elected, believing that they have been elevated to the purple, not to public service. The secret to eliciting responses from the Board is to repeat the query as many times as necessary to draw the members out of their caves for a response.

***

April Griffin (April.griffin@sdk12.fl.us); Edgecomb (Dorothy.Edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us); Jack Lamb (Jack.Lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us); Susan Valdez (Susan Valdez@tampabay.rr.com); 'candy.Olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'letititiastein@sptimes.com'; 'patrickmanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com'; 'genenj1@yahoo.com'; 'jhill@sptimes.com

Ms. Elia: Ms. Cobbe of the Public Information office does not know this information. Pray provide it as public information. 1. Who is the source of the We-Deliver prize listed on the schools Web Home Page? 2. What are the names of the people on the award committee? Thank you.

lee drury de cesare

Mon 3/5/2007 8:50 PM

(maryellen.elia@sdhc.k12.fl.)

April Griffin (april.griffin@sdk12.fl.us); edgecomb (doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us); faliero (jennifer.faliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us); Jack Lamb (Jack.Lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us); Tiger Bay Club of Tampa (tigerbay@tampabay.rr.com); Susan Valdez (susanvaldez@tampabay.rr.com); 'candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'letitiastein@sptimes.com'; 'Patrick Manteiga'; 'genenj1@yahoo.com'; 'Tom Gonzalez'




Ms. Elia: This is the second public-information request that I have sent you for the source of the money for the "We Deliver" auction. You announce the contest on the School Board Web page and use the school imprimatur to authenticate its legitimacy, so it is school business.




The school system is not your private plaything, ma'am. The Web page announces school, not private, business. You must respond to a citizen's request for public information about your activities related to the school system. If you are not sure about the status of your we-deliver prize's source, ask the school attorney for an opinion.

Pray send me the public information requested.


lee drury de cesare


Ms. Elia: Second request: What are the names of the people on the “We Deliver” prize committee?


lee drury de cesare

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com


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