Ms. Olson:

As is your wont, you muttered criticism of my comments as I walked away from the mike on the 15^th.

I made out what you said. For a 75-year-old, my hearing is excellent. I believe the blessing is genetic. My maternal Aunt Jewel, who never left the small Georgia farming town in which she was born, had remarkable hearing until the end of her 94^th year. She died at that age and now lies at rest among our ancestors in the family cemetery in Hazlehurst, Georgia. We relatives and admirers of Aunt Jewel’s many virtues made her ability to pick up even a whisper from across a room the subject at family reunions.

Aunt Jewel was born with a hare lip. Grandpa took her to Waycross for a crude surgical procedure that was all available at that time. It helped a little. Aunt Jewel survived the surgery with a crippled face but a blithe spirit and lived out her life, first, taking care of Grandma until she died and then as companion to my Uncle Brown, who I now believe was gay, which must have caused a miserable and sex-deprived existence in that little bigoted town in which Uncle Brown lived out his life. He went to Waycross every weekend to play piano in a supper club. This fond niece hopes he met some gay honeys there. Otherwise, his life must have been quite bleak sexually.

As I retreated from the podium at the 15^th board meeting, I believe you said that I didn’t know how the board worked and that I should consider that we teach the difference between reality and fantasy in grammar-school playgrounds.

I know how the board works, ma’am. It’s a bunch of people whom the voters elected to look out for the wellbeing of the students and teachers in the school system but which obeys without question every impulse and whim of a greedy superintendent whom the board reduced the academic requirements to hire.

The corrupt ethics of the board allowed it to scam a “nationwide” ad for the job, bilking the taxpayers of $35,000 for the board’s subterfuge. In this corrupt flimflamming of the public, the board hired a corrupt superintendent.

This hiring fiasco signaled that the board had succumbed to the entrenched administrative cartel whose only interest is raping tax funds meant for the schools in any way possible with the board’s sitting supinely on the podium at board meetings approving the rape.

You rubberstamp the obscene salaries that Ms. Elia gives her buddies and sycophants when she promotes them to the highly compensated administrative slots in administration sinecures. You don’t say a word when these buddies and sycophants lack education or training for the jobs and need consultants costing hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to guide them through procedures they would know how to do had they the education to do them.

For example, Ms. Cathy Valdez, head of the facililities department, has an early-childhood degree, which explains why she named (Elia’s orders, one infers) a former administrator to a no-bid contract to do school business. He didn't have even a business phone with a live person answering it.

Valdez needed the contractor’s help because she didn’t know how to do the job as head of the facilities division. Were she trained for the crony administrative job she holds, she would not have required an expensive consultant to come in and do her work for her. The ignorance and lack of education of top administrators mean the taxpayers not only pay the obscene administrative salaries lavished on this ignorant ROSSAC crew but also pay the fees of the consultants hired to prop them up.

Then there is Ms. Linda Kipley. Ms. Kipley has a home-ec degree. I had no idea that those superannuated vo-tech citations were still around. I thought they had gone the way of the bustle. But stirring up white sauce was the training that Ms. Kipley brought to head of Professional Standards, which pays at least $135,000 a year and rising.

La Kipley got the job with no advertisement of it, moved from principalship of my alma mater, HHS, where she bungled the job so badly that the faculty was in rebellion. Instead of firing her, the superintendent transferred this incompetent to head Professional Standards. It is supposed to investigate charges of misconduct against teachers. It does not investigate the adultery that board member Faliero conducted after she stalked and seduced the head of Public Affairs, Marc Hart.But

La Kipley appears to spend most of her time helping Ms. Elia cook up cases against faculty and staff under surveillance for not doing Elia’s bidding or rebelling by muttering some criticism of the imperial superintendentship.

I could list other underqualified administrators, but these two citations suffice to show the quality of the superintendent’s administrative appointments, all of whom owe manic loyalty to her because they know they should not have gotten these bloated-salary, unadvertised jobs in the first place; they know their ignorance and inability to perform the jobs should make them ineligible for them.

These incompetents know in their bones that they lack the education to do the jobs Elia gifts them with for being her sycophants. They know too that their getting these jobs without necessary credentials rips off the taxpayer.

And so do you know all this, board member Olson, if you do not blindfold yourself to avoid the knowledge.

You lack not only loyalty to the taxpayers, the students, and the teachers but also courage, ma'am. Had you any courage you would not have joined Kurdell in the cowardly attack on April Griffin when Griffin asked that a no-bid contract that Ms. Elia had ordered Ms. Valdez to present to the board be pulled from the consent agenda for discussion.

The unspeakably stupid Ms. Kurdell, who has hunkered on the board for fifteen miserable years kissing the superintendent’s ass, said Griffin was “disloyal” to the infallible staff for wanting to examine a no-bid contract of $148,000 to an Elia former administrator buddy. In other words, any board member that asks a question is not, in the words of Dr. Lamb, “a team player.”

I fear that Ms. Griffin, made timid by the attack of you and Kurdell, will now subside into a team player; I fear that Ms. Valdes, who defended Griffin in the attack, will do the same. Then there will be unanimous team Elia ass-kissing on the board team.

I believe that the kinds of swaps of favors that the board presides over have great opportunities for graft. I believe envelopes of cash pass between the administration and the people getting the favors both in employment and in contracts. Taxpayers underwrite this criminal trade in money for favors. I believe that graft has gone on for a long time as at ROSSAC lucrative sideline for the administrative cartel and that such board members as you enable this graft with your obtuse acquiescence to everything Ms. Elia dictates.

That the Tribune has finally woken up and editorialized about Ms. Elia’s obscene compensation rip-off of the taxpayers with the board’s complicity is good news. The Tribune says the board is the culprit in this situation. I agree.

I do not believe Elia buddy Tribune's editorial editor Goudreau, Elia buddy, wrote that recent editorial criticizing Elia's greed. She does not write that well. For some reason, the Tribune local biggies had somebody else editorialize against Elia's greed. I hope I helped this circumstance by complaining about Goudreau's lack of skill with the English language and with logic to the newspaper's owners. Ms. Goudreau's lack of skill with punctuation and rhetoric is almost as bad as that of Ms. Elia. That's probably why they are soulmates.

If the board members had the voters’, students’, and teachers’ wellbeing in mind and if they were interested in education instead of remaining incumbent toadies of Ms. Elia's sufferance, they would not have let Ms. Elia’s greed run rampant and would have reined it in.

But the board is so disrespectful of its putative job of protecting the education system and instead has succumbed to what my USF distinguished-professor friend in the email below calls a “robber baron” system of administration that it has lost its bearings as board members and moved into the criminal precincts of the superintendent and her followers.

This man is a distinguished professor at USF and a bright light in his field of anthropology. He indeed knows fact from fiction.

I hope more voters become aware of the situation—that they discern fact from spin, that they turn their eyes to the depredations on education that the elected school-board members slough off to support a greedy superintendent whose inability to even punctuate correctly the board overlooks to give her one of the highest compensation packages in the country. You board members, Ms. Candy, betray not only voters, teachers, and students by so doing; you betray the high purpose of education.

A person who can’t punctuate or write a felicitous paragraph should not get $300,000 a year in tax money while literate teachers who inspire and teach our children get $34,000.

You yourself have engaged in the corrupt pas de deux of board and superintendent for your dozen years on the board, Ms. Olson—even signing off on the legal crucifixion of Doug Erwin when he tried to alert former superintendent Lennard to the hundreds of thousands of dollars of waste in the building department.

Instead of thanking Erwin, Lennard and the board sued him. This is a sorry history from which to address the back of a retreating taxpayer--me--at a board meeting to tell her she doesn’t have a grammar-school awareness of appearance and reality.

I hope the Tribune editorial on Ms. Elia’s greed and the board’s collusion signal the paper’s monitoring more closely the obscene panoply of board-superintendent despoliation of the education system in Hillsborough County without the girlfriend bias of Ms. Goudreau. I hope it signals management’s untying the reporters’ hands on the education beat so that they can report the truth more clearly than has been the case heretofore.

The survival of education in Hillsborough County is at stake.

lee drury de cesare

Lee: I believe that you have analyzed the problem very well. These people seem not to be public servants, but privateers of the old school.