Ms. Edgecomb: As I recall, when your incumbency began, Bart Birdsall and I gave you a book to read by a guy whom the school administration had trashed with the board's complicity. His story was not as bad as Doug Irwin's, but it gave another unlovely picture of how the administration savages anybody who disturbs the cushy system it has constructed for itself with tax dollars.

Please return it. I want to give it to one of the people who will oppose incumbents. Thank the Lord, I hear that both Dr. Lamb and Under-the-Radar Falliera will both have opponents.

I wondered when the Harvey daughter spoke last night for a school named for her father if you had done anything to assist the Black citizens who had come not so long ago to recommend a Black scholar to have a school named after him. Now I wonder if you will do anything to help the Harveys get a school named after their father. He contributed to his community and put seven children through college, a significant achievement for any father, black or white.

And you don't need to tell me as you did once before when I asked you about some Black children's needs in the school system what a paragon you are and what a star of the Black community. I am talking about deeds, not self-serving propaganda.

I don't see how it helps Blacks and minorities for a Black woman to sit on the school board unless, when she gets there, she does something to augment the status of the Black community. Having some schools named after outstanding Black citizens would be a way to achieve more status for them. You and Susan Valdes have a special duty in this area. You must go to bat from your board position for Blacks and Hispanics.

You also have a duty to the teachers and students of the district to see that they get a permanent slot on the board agenda. You would be the perfect person to balance your unkind reception of teachers when they came in numbers to protest Ms. Elia's surprising them and most board members with her "solution" to her class-size budget problem by dumping the extra day on the teachers without the courtesy of giving them a chance to know her plans ahead of time so as to comment and make suggestions. Nor, according to the newspapers, did the board members all know of her unpleasant surprise. She had let only two of her potted-plant board favorites in on the bombshell ahead of time.

What appalls me is that it seems that not one board member rebuked Ms. Elia for her precipitous, dictatorial behavior. I think the board should have fired her, not sat mute and cowed as if she were the board's boss, not the other way around-- unless the board had given her its blessing to carry out such policies without letting them and those affected--teachers and students--in on her bombshell.

Ms. Olson should join you. She told the teachers they were lazy, that their laziness was the reason they didn't want to teach an extra class without having had input into the decision. And Dr. Lamb commented that the teachers' applauding their colleagues when they went to the mike to protest Elia's secret decision that the teachers' applause may have violated decorum.

You three would be the ideal trilogy to tell Ms. Elia to put on the agenda the motion to award teachers and students the dignity of a permanent board spot. Don't ask her: tell her. You are her boss, not vice versa. Also keep in mind that open government requires that this motion get debate and a vote on the podium so that citizens can see how board members honor teachers and students. Star Chamber workshops don't cut it in decisions such as this. The public has a right to see its elected officials in action.

It appears to me as if the board and administration are envious of teachers' centrality to education. The board and administration seem to want to shut teachers out of any decisions that affect the schools and let them function only as the basis for the tax cash cow that gives the administration and board financial éclat to strut about as big Pooh-Bah patrons of education while teachers and students serve as mere ciphers. The board and administration are Big Daddy in the Big House on the plantation; teachers and students are the field hands.

The board and administration have this equation backwards. The teachers and students are the important ones--the heart of education. The administration and board are peripheral at best, parasites at worst.

My address for book return:

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com