Posted on the Tampa Bay site of the Tribune:

The Elia compensation editorial is right.

Ms. Elia is greedy and bilks all the money she can from taxpayers, but the editors are correct that the board is responsible.

April Griffin and Susan Valdes gave her a low evaluation but still rubberstamped her lavish contract. So they did nothing to curb Elia’s greed.

The scheme in which Elia gets "performance" bonus began with Lennard's crafty manipulation of the board.

When Elia came along, the board probably with the complicit attorney Gonzalez's urging just rolled the bonus scheme over into Elia's contract. The teachers did the work that raises students’ scores; it is they who deserve any bonuses for the achievement.

I believe Gonzalez's willingness to go along with anything that the superintendent pushes is to keep on her good side to keep his job. He knows Elia, not the board, is in charge. His firm got the job fourteen years ago from Lennard without allowing any of the other firms in town to apply. Gonzalez knew this was wrong because he is a labor lawyer; but he grabbed the unfair deal anyway.

Presently, Elia has rammed a grade-inflation scam down teachers’ throats without consulting them. As a professor at HCC for 28 years, I predict that this scheme will up the already high number of students from county schools who enter college without being able to write a literate paragraph. Instead of teaching Yeats and Shakespeare, I had to teach these freshman students grammar and punctuation. The dumbing down that the grade-inflation scheme that Elia has forced on the teachers is bound to make this matter worse.

Elia has no sympathy for literacy. She struggles with punctuation herself and writes with the felicity of a 7th grader.

If there were one brave member of the school board who would lead instead of sitting on his or her hands and quaking at the thought of opposing the group tyranny of obeying Elia and giving her everything she wants, that would make all the difference. But there is not one such person on the board now. They are uniformly gutless.

The taxpayers are to blame for that situation of a weak, complicit board. But so are the newspapers that are remiss in not reporting it more clearly and often to the public.

If, as the public asserts, education is the most important concern of people, then the school board abetted by the mute newspapers are not doing their jobs.

lee drury de cesare
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com