The following has gone to all board members and Dalai Lama Tom with love and kisses. lee

Board members:

Listening to the discussion at the January 15th board meeting of the lawyer's settlement recommendation for the failed contract with the outfit that built a school which, after completion, had a part fall down, I have questions:

1. Did Ms. Valdez handle this deal? Did she bid it out? How many bids did she get? Who picked the successful bidder, the company that built the school part of which fell down? Did Ms. Valdez do research on the company's history before the she picked it? If not, why not? If she did, is that research available for review?

2. Did Board Attorney Gonzalez write the contract? Who did if he didn't? Did he review it even if he didn't write it? Did he provide the board with a written analysis of the contract? Did that written analysis include the caveat about the extra insurance needed to cover any catastrophic situation that developed such as the building's falling down? He cited the ever-present possibility of such catastrophes in his response to Ms. Faliero's objections. If he did not include that data in his written analysis , why not?

Why didn't one of the board members ask the attorney why he did not include that vital data if he didn't cite it in the analysis of the contract?

Are the board members too in awe of the attorney to rebuke him for not doing his job? Why? You employ him and authorize his salary. So you shouldn’t be deferential. You should be polite, but not deferential. You didn’t give him an exclusive contract years ago and shut out all the other attorneys in town in order to wrap him in cotton wadding. If Mr. Gonzalez flunks contract exegesis, then lace into him in public during the meeting to assure the voters that you are doing your job and won't put up with incompetence; don’t tippytoe around as if the board attorney were Dalai Lama.

If you have elevated Le Gonzalez to that status, you are going to have to buy him some of those chic, floaty saffron robes for board duty. And saffron robes would clash with the beauteous Mr. Gonzalez’s complexion type in my up-on-fashion opinion. So stay away from saffron robes in the name of board-room aesthetics. Don’t let Ms. Kurdell recommend in this area whatever you do. That purple outfit that she affected January 15th looked like Dolly Parton picked it out for her in Woolworth's boutique manque. Ms. Kurdell gets a D-minus in aesthetics.

There is a blank space after His Wonderfulness Dalai Lama Tom Gonzalez's likeness below. Just plow on past it to take up the discussion again after this six inches of blank space that I can't remove.

I believe that the elves that paint Dalai Lama Tom's toenails yellow have thwarted me because they do not like for Dalai Lama Tom to be ridiculed. The elves mistake me. I am face down in reverence before His Wonderfulness Dalai Lama Tom.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Gonzalez

I believe Ms. Valdez does not have the education and training to do the job of head of the facilities department. That job needs a person with a business degree and preferably previous experience. Ms. Valdez got the job without its being advertised in one of those mysterious choices of an insider with no apparent qualifications getting a bloated-salary administrative job for reasons beside qualifications. Ms. Valdez did what Dr. Lamb favors: she "worked herself up" to the job. The skills with which she "worked her way up" were toadying and sycophancy. Ms. Early Childhood Valdez's elevation past her credentials may benefit the incestuous ROSSAC administrative coven's sense of coziness, but it does not benefit the taxpayers, the teachers, the students, or the community that pays the bills.

Incompetent administrators are why the administration needs so many consultants. The administrators require somebody to give them flash-card seminars on how to do their jobs. Taxpayers underwrite without knowing it the ill-trained administrators’ consultant graduate school.

That was the situation in the bus meltdown. The head of that department was a former bus driver. If the head had been a person with a business degree, he or she would have kept up with the school-bus transportation field. Such areas have periodicals--lots of them.

The bus-transportation head would have spotted an article on using computer-routing software and have said, "Hmmm. That can fix our problem, and we won't have the bus meltdown that looms." He or she would have gone to Ms. Elia and said, "Ms. Elia, we need to buy some routing software and get a couple of technicians from the company to come and show us how to use it. That will take care of our burgeoning routing problems.”

One doesn't know if Ms. Elia would have had sense or security sufficient to have accepted the suggestion from a subordinate. If what I have heard about her management style is accurate, she would have ordered him or her to sit down to a lecture on how wrong the recommendation was and how she would instead get contractors in to review and solve the problem. (Ms. Edgecomb calls this repeating of errors "institutional memory." Ms. Edgecomb reveres "institutional memory.")

Ms. Elia's mindset is to have the taxpayers fork over several hundred thousand dollars to cure any problem that my seven-year-old grandson, Noah, could solve in a trice. (I seem to recall the bus contractors charged $350,000 for a contract featuring no organization, slovenly writing, and only two suggestions that they embroidered with many harrumphs and comma splices.)

I underwent the agony of plowing through that contract. It advised this: 1. Buy some routing software; 2. Park the buses in two convenient locations. 3. Send us $350,000 bucks pronto.

You know where these consultant geniuses got the ideas? They got them from the same place a savvy head of busing at the Hillsborough County school system could get them: from the professional journals. People have to keep up with their field. People with business degrees know this fact.

A savvy head of the busing department could have figured out solving the problems without a consultant. But he or she would need a business degree as training. A wiser superintendent would have approved the recommendation above by the imagined business-degreed head of busing. The routing software would have been a lot less than $350,000.

However much a bus driver's heading the transportation section may have tickled Dr. Lamb's fetish about people's working themselves up through the system, the former bus driver head, whom Ms. Elia finally replaced at the urging of a board member now in deep disregard by Ms. Elia, the other board members, and all the administration detritus at ROSSAC, didn't have the administrative know-how to do the job. This higly compensated ignorance cost the taxpayers $350,000.

Dr. Lamb once defended such deficient administrators as Valdez to me by saying that people should be able to "work their way up through the ranks. This was in response to my complaint of the naming Ms. Connie Mileto as $130,000-or-more lobbyist.

Dr. Lamb adores Ms. Mileto, and I know why. I witnessed Ms. Mileto modus operandi once at Tiger Bay. She hopped up on her little Munchkin legs high enough to hug a guy, squealing endearments the while. Very professional, to be sure. This scene strikes me as that which set to murmuring Dr. Lamb's cardio-vascular synapses. The Centers for Disease Control have run a study of the Tampa Bay area that shows with graphs and side-bars that a disproportionate number of old guys in this geographical outback have majorette fetishes. Dr. Lamb and Dr. Hamilton's names head the list of the severely afflicted.

When I complained about Connie Mileto, who got the Tallahassee lobbyist job with the background of kindergarten teacher and the warm sponsorship of Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Lamb invoked his beloved "working-one's-way up" theory. I demurred. If Ms. Muchkin Mileto wanted that lobbying job, she should have not majored in kindergarten lore; she should have majored in political science, public relations, or maybe psychology to plumb the psches of the panhandle savants who inhabit the legislative chambers in Tallahassee.

The logical extension of Dr. Lamb's working-way-up theory would be that grounds keepers at the Mayo Clinic work themselves up to chief thoracic surgeon. Or the kitchen crew at Harvard works its way up to professors in the Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Lamb occupies a seat on the board of a school system. It runs the county's schools. Schools provide education and training to equip people to get jobs. The graduates, one hopes, go on to college to get additional training to qualify for jobs such the administrative job of head of facilities that Ms. Valdez holds bereft necessary training or credentials. She has a degree in early childhood. I would trust her with "Eency Weency Spider" scholarship, not with running a division that requires business expertise. What does early-childhood training have to do with the intricacies of administrative control of the building facilities department? Nothing at all.

But the ROSSAC savants don't see this logic. And the board abets their nuttiness.

Ms. Valdez's case is typical of the administrative appointments that pack ROSSAC. Here's another of many: Linda Kipley.

Linda Kipley, head of professional standards, has a home ec degree. I thought that "degree" went the way of the dinosaurs. No, it still thrives in the ROSSAC building of the Hillsborough County schools. Suffice it to say that La Kipley's pay is way above $100,000 .Professional Standards needs a psychology, sociology, or maybe criminal-justice degree. The work has nothing to do with whipping up a bechamel sauce.

Kipley got the job without its being advertised, of course. Gossip says she got it to move her from the principal's job at Hillsborough High, where the faculty were in rebellion against her bizarre managment of the principal's job there. People secreted tape recorders for interviews with her because she would not stick with what she said but would claim that she said something else.

Hillsborough High is my alma mater. It makes me want to puke to think a person of Ms. Kipley's ilk was principal at my beloved Beat Plant! high school. The sainted Vivien Gaither was my principal. Ms. Dowdell was my dean of girls. They were godly people. The Olypian swells would have been lucky to have Gaither and Dowdell hang out with them. Ms. Kipley is not a god. Her status is terrestrial and probably even lower--where the CEO is Beelzebub.

Dr. Lamb's advocacy that such incompetents "work their way up" invalidates education. His view erases his right to sit on a board of education at all. He doesn't believe in education. He doesn't understand what it is, and he is hostile to excellence and the need for department heads to have solid transcipts that show completion of their areas of concentration in of higher learning. His attitude is as obtuse as it is anti-intellectual.

I read in a blog that the administration does not give full information to the board on which to make decisions. Why doesn't a board member bring up this issue on the podium in the name of transparent government and let the public hear it? Let Ms. Elia respond to the concern of the public. It's a serious issue of administrative thuggery.

It doesn't help open government for the board members to believe that they must retain an artificial prissy decorum on the podium that covers over such vital issues as the administration's putative withholding information from the board; the board needs all information extant so that its members can make good decisions. What this curtailing of data benefits is the administration's grasp of power. Information, in fact, is power. Who was in charge when only nobles and clergy got educations and hence information? The nobles and clergy, of course, were in the driver's seat.

The information, for instance, that the administration and superintendent are running a racket in ROSSAC that disgraces education should be public knowledge. That need explains why I write this blog and sit through school-board meetings, at which I am hated by the board-dais habitues.

La Belle Dame sans Merci and homewrecker Board Chair Faliero, for instance, sneered when it was my time to speak on the 15th, "You have three minutes, and I'm starting to count now," she snapped. I ignore aduterous smartasses. It will be a cold day in hell when such specimens as y-chromosome-administrator stalkers such as Faliero ruffle my feathers. I aim to educate the public to the vile ROSSAC situation. And board's collusion with the superintendent to disinfranchise the public shall bruit about on the World Wide Web as long as I can pull myself up to a CRT screen at the village pump.

If board members are so supine that they allow doctoring of information by Ms. Elia, the board does not serve voters; it serves administrative thuggery. Voters need to know about withholding or distorting of information by the administration to the board and the board's allowing it. The public will then have grounds to demand that the board fire a duplicitous superintendent and her hive of drones or quit the board-racket game.

If the administration withholds or distorts information that the board gets, it shows that the administration does not have enough respect for the board or fear of it to play straight with the members. If the board stands for this situation, it might as well bring its Play-doh to board meetings and stop pretending it is involved in the decision-making that leads the schools.

Better, it should quit and let people mount the board dais who will do the job taxpayers elected them to do.

Lee Drury De Cesare