Saturday, September 15, 2007
Ms. Olson:
The intelligence that the school board had countenanced the administration to shut down teacher access to blogs astonished me. Apparently, the board objects to the blogs’ criticism of its rubberstamping Ms. Elia’s ukases and the criticism of Ms. Under-the- Radar Faliera’s breaking the law by creeping out of her home district under cover of darkness and moving to the glamours of South Tampa’s sparkling precincts.
I understood school-board members to be Constitutional officers whose oath of office includes their swearing to uphold the Constitution. Lots of people don’t like free speech, but that dislike does not mean any citizen’s free speech should suffer. Those citizens include school employees. And a public official, no matter his/her objection to people’s hearing other views than his or her own must not collude in cutting off free speech rights to members of the school family.
Please tell me if you support this shutdown of free speech in the schools. And if you agreed with it, tell me how that agreement is coincident with your duty as a Constitutional officer to uphold the Constitution. If you agreed to shutting down access to blogs by teachers at school, that is the same the same disregard for the statutes that is not unlike the Under-the-radar Board Member Faliera’s knowingly breaking of the law when she sneaked out of her district to live in Davis Islands and hoped nobody would notice.
There are, I understand, three board races in contention next election. Citizens will want to hear about the individual board members' stand on this issue of abridging free speech by a public body.
Whatever your views on this issue, traditional or exotic, would you please ask the tax-paid board attorney to give the board members a legal opinion on this shutdown of access to blogs? Thank you.
I will put this email on my leedrurydecesars casting-roomcouch.blogspot. com blog. I understand it is one of the blogs that the board has blocked.
lee drury de cesare
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