Ms. Elia:

Board attorney Mr. Gonzalez refuses to send me public information. That violates the Florida public-information statute.

I have filed an ethics charge against the Thompson, Sizemore & Gonzalez firm with the Florida bar for this defiance of the law. The firm already has the burden of the negative image it earned for prosecuting and losing the Doug Erwin case of punishing a brave whistleblower of school waste: http://www.doug-erwincase.blogspot.com.

I now ponder asking the governor for his help as well in insuring that the Hillsborough County school district and board not be scofflaws of the public-information statute.

The Public Affairs office works overtime to polish your public image so that voters will remain ignorant of the state of affairs behind the school-board Wizard-of-Oz curtain that screens the reality of ROSSAC doings from the voting, taxpaying public.

Hence, we have such puff-pieces as that below that the image machine led by Mr. Hegarty, Public Affairs office, fed to Ms. Stein, of the St. Petersberg Times. She swallowed it whole, alas.

Everyone even minimally alert about administration machinations knows that you hired Mr. Hegarty over better-qualified candidates—he lacked supervisory experience, one of the job’s advertised requirements-- since he had been the school-board’s St. Pete Times education reporter, so you thought he could get you better press to assuage your image fetish.

Mr. Hegarty also fulfilled the school-board penchant for hiring from the inside, credentials bedamned.

Since you have striven in a p.r. gloss to convince people of your friendship with Governor Crist, I believe he may be a logical official to alert to the status of the Hillsborough County school system and your malignant influence on the board that results in negative situations for teachers and students, the heart of any school system.

I urge you to tell your acolytes that compraise the potted-plant board to order the school-board attorney to obey the law and provide me with the information that I have requested.

lee drury de cesare

April 17, 2007

Crist is listening

Gov. Charlie Crist is open to reviewing the FCAT standards in high school, where the state asks students to jump a much higher bar than in the lower grade levels. It's a pet issue for the Hillsborough Superintendent MaryEllen Elia, who brought it up during a nearly half-hour meeting Monday with Crist in Tallahassee.

The district has found that 10th graders just meeting the state's standards rank in the top 20 percent of students nationally. At lower grades, students making the FCAT bar perform far less well compared to their peers nationally. Third-graders, for example, place just above the bottom third.

"I am willing to listen to further talk," Crist said. "If there are always ways that we can make it, you know, better, why wouldn't we?"

Elia cheered his response. "I felt like our work on identifying (the issue) for him paid off," she said. "I pointed out to him that we've had this as a concern for a number of months." Elia doesn't expect anything to happen overnight. After all, as far as explosive issues go in Tallahassee, there's none bigger than changing the FCAT.

- Letitia Stein, Hillsborough County education reporter