Board Members:
The message I received below from 23-year Armwood history teacher and
I had hoped that the malignant policies of punishing anyone who criticizes Ms. Elia were limited to the ROSSAC bunker.
They are not.
Bruce's email below details one of what I hazard is a number of cases of such retaliation by Ms. Elia and her surrogates.
I have come to believe that Ms. Elia’s relentless harassing of and retaliation against teachers comes from her envy of teachers' secure place in their intellectual calling of passing civilization on to the young. She envies teachers’ legitimacy in the education world in which she does not have the the character, the academic credentials, or the spaciousness of intellect with which to participate without such trickery as she exercised on board members to lead them to hire her.
I judge that Lamb, Kurdell, Olson, and the board La Belle Dame sans Merci Faliero required no trickery to hire Elia instead of a Ph.D. from a good school with a history of publishing and wide experience. They hired Ms. Elia and knew that they awarded her the superintendent job without her deserving it on merit. These board members lowered the Ph.D. to a master's degree that Elia had and covered this pre-selection with a $35,000 bill to taxpayers for the scam of nationwide advertising.
The pivotal credential Ms. Elia possessed was that she would continue the ROSSAC culture of exploitation of taxpayers and their schools in a spoils system that generations of Hillsborough County superintendents and their dormant boards have advanced to the public's, the students', and the teachers' disadvantage. The complicit board members’ payoff is a safe incumbency so they can gad about town posing as patrons of education. I believe Valdes and Edgecomb were new and hence snockered into going along with Elia's boosters in the superintendent pick. Griffin was not then on the board.
Teachers are the real thing in the academic world; they walk into their classrooms with expert knowledge in their field after having taking a language-skills test to prove their fitness in literacy. Ms. Elia is ersatz and out of place, and she knows it. If
Proof of indifference to learning is Ms. Elia’s not bothering to learn correct grammar and punctuation while she schemed her way into the superintendent job, mastery of language’s being the sine qua non of scholarship for the leader of a school system dedicated to instilling literacy into students. Ms. Elia's bachelor's-degree college in New York state had grammar-and-punctuation errors on its home page when I checked it. This is not a good sign that Ms. Elia's alma mater is a hotbed of scholorship.
One school-board member, Dr. Lamb, told me that he did not consider literacy in the superintendent pivotal. This came from a man whose district's parents want their children to be literate graduates in a school system in which the taxpayers cough up $300,000 a year for a marginally literate but maximally greedy superintendent backed by a board with flaccid standards for the chief officer of the schools.
Ms. Elia’s vindictive acts toward teachers find expression in her downloading an extra class on them to solve her budget problems. It would never occur to her to reduce her bloated salary and those of her crony administrative staff to help with money problems. She did not give teachers the courtesy of forewarning them or asking for their input on her radical solution. Ms. Elia also imposed a grade-inflation scheme to make students’ performance look better so that she would look better; this dummying-down scheme prevents students' achieving standards adequate to gain entrance into good colleges and universities.
With the board's backing, Ms. Elia's refusing to sponsor a teacher-student slot on the board agenda for both groups to comment on the running of the schools shows she devalues and disrespects the two populations basic to education whom she is supposed to serve, not harrass and manipulate: teachers and their students. Administrator's jobs depend on teachers, not vice versa. Without teachers and their students, there would be no administration.
Absent psychiatric gloss, an observer has trouble assigning Elia’s vindictive acts against teachers a motive. Literary geniuses help us glimpse insight into this phenomenon. Coleridge’s analysis of Iago’s character describes it as one that demonstrates “motiveless malignity.” In another comment on this repulsive quality, Coleridge says that Iago is “haunted by the love of exerting power on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moral excellence.”
Bingo. That comment nails Elia’s attitude toward teachers to a T. Freud said that great writers had discovered the inner life of the emotions before he mapped it.
Ms. Elia has too much contempt for the board to have any malignity, motiveless or otherwise, toward its members. After all, she suckered these dupes into hiring her instead of a better candidate from the candidate pool among which my examination showed all had superior credentials to Elia’s.
Why would Ms. Elia fear people who did not understand the difference in potential for educational leadership between a Ph.D. from
Who that was not a psychologist could recognize a vector of corrupt impulses who entered seamlessly into a job locked into the long-standing system of robber-baron exploitation and patronage abuse of the Hillsborough County superintendent’s office?
Ms. Elia conquered the board before she even sat down to reign from her superintendent’s chair. Board members were all dupes or collaborators in her hiring. How can anyone respect or fear such round-heels specimens? The board‘s performance and Elia’s response to it show that “boss” Elia doesn’t.
I had hoped school principals were not part of Ms. Elia’s perfidious network. I misjudged Ms. Elia's obsession with total control of her empire. Not only principals but also department chairs are instruments in Ms. Elia's retaliation rituals.
Lord knows how widely the poison has spread. One hopes the primary grades are not infected. Even those twits, first- and second-year history teachers at Armwood, cooperated with Elia's punishment of Bruce by snapping up his honors classes of which the colluding principal and chair stripped him. These traitors-in-training need to re-read Machiavelli to see what kind of slime they have immersed themselves in early in their careers.
The email below from Bruce shows that evil reigns ubiquitous in the schools, thanks to Ms. Elia’s spread of venom. Even distant principal administrative class—including quasi teacher-administrative department chairs--must cooperate with vindictive treatment of a veteran teacher--and a Viet Nam veteran--to evade the superintendent’s wrath and keep their jobs by obeying her command to retaliate against a colleague merely for using his Constitutional rights.
I consider that situation evil. It contaminates with the poison of vindictiveness everything that it touches. The schools filled with young people and children should not feel the outwash of such administrative venom unchecked by a board too willfully blind or too cowardly to intervene.
The people suborned by Ms. Elia’s threat of firing lay bare the fact that a school employee must be either against the powers of darkness or with them. There is no in-between. One must make a choice. Maintaining one's standards of ethics always entails a modicum at risk. It implies at a minimum the response, “No, I won’t do that. It goes against my ethics."
The word “evil” comes from Old English and means “extreme moral wickedness.” I believe that Ms. Elia’s poisoning the entire school system with the spleen of her twisted lust for power and admiration and the board’s looking the other way and tolerating this pathology and its negative effect on the schools present appalling evidence of evil in the school system’s leadership. The situation ranks ethically barbarous when a board oversees with collaborative noninvolvement the punishment of teachers for wanting to let the board know their views on school issues such as Elia’s extra class imposed without consulting them and her grade-inflation fiat.
Evil people fascinate us. In evil’s most extreme forms, psychopaths baffle but rivet us. Why do these mysterious people (the serial killer) do that? Even bush-league evil such as Elia's commands attention and wonder. Elia gets grudging admiration from even teachers, whom she degrades, for her deviating toward the vicious side of humanity—even when her object is they. I recall a newspaper quote of master teacher James Aulusio, who has appeared often at the board to speak for teachers’ rights. He said something to the effect in a tone of grudging admiration laced with wonder that Elia just barreled ahead, the devil take the hindmost.
For the majority of people pathology-driven people take on some of the glamour of evil. Power-driven people like Elia for the majority of normal souls represent a compelling snapshot of the dark side of human nature and gain their power therefrom.
I saw this phenomenon before when I taught at HCC for 28 years. Professors who could quote pages of the Areopagitica didn't have the moxie to go before the board and denounce some administrative skullduggery that injured education.
Nobody knows the source of Claggart’s evil soul. Melville does not take us inside Claggart’s mind and show why he is as he is. Claggart is, in Coleridge’s famous formula, a creature of “motiveless malignity.” That’s the scariest of the faces of evil. We can even understand and identify with Lucifer’s getting kicked out of heaven from disobedience that comes from rebellion against authority. Claggart, however, is evil without motive. He has, as Coleridge says in another comment on the great exemplar of motiveless malignity possessed of a “keen sense of his intellectual superiority” and his “love of exerting power.”
A logical person finds it hard to believe, given the evidence, that even Ms. Elia believes in her intellectual superiority—although she is reputed to be unwilling to listen to anyone but instead insists on cataloguing all the reasons she is right. But there is no doubt that she loves exerting power that humiliates people. I hazard no one will dispute that fact.
I append below the email from the young teacher who catalyzed my comments. He gives me permission to use his name and communication: a rare example of courage in a school system, the workers in which from teachers to janitors Elia has cowed and made abandon their right to say what they think under the Constitution’s First Amendment. She punishes those who exercise their Constitution right of free speech, which is supposed to be an absolute right. Elia’s worst action is that she has stripped the school family's courage to demand their rights. Thank God this fellow holds out against this obscene coercion.
I met this young man at the protests by teachers to the board to criticize the extra class without warning and without consultation. This was the meeting at which Ms. Edgecomb criticized the teachers’ “rudeness”—for which she later had the grace to apologize after reviewing the tapes—and at which Dr. Lamb, then chair, speculated that the teachers’ applauding their colleagues’ comments at the mike was a violation of Roberts Rules. Nobody ever said you had to smash into the upper limits of the Stanford Binet to run for the school board.
That protest meeting featured teachers speaking to a board with the blank, pitiless faces of the priests who sentence Radames to death in Aida. Board members did not utter one word of support to the teachers; they did not give one indication of sympathy. The board is just as prostrate before Ms. Elia’s ukases as the teachers were. On the podium, it always seems to me that the board regresses to some age at which the designated adult, Elia, has the power. When the teachers came to tell the board how they despised this sneak attack of an extra class by Elia, board members regressed to the obedient fear of little children, forgetting that people elected them to be grown-ups who shaped the school system for the majority of the population, not for the team of parasitic cronies who run a dictatorship from ROSSAC.
What was clear to an observer from the board attitude toward teachers at this meeting was that its members joined Elia in not wanting teachers and students to have a say say in running the schools and God forbid their having recognized spot on the board agenda. The board is in accord with Ms. Elia’s stance that dictates that teachers’ job is to teach but then to shut up. Teachers have no right in deciding how their jobs are defined and do not to participate in decisions about how many classes they teach or the integrity of the grades they award students. The CTA union, in bed with Ms. Elia, is not a bit of help to teachers even though these pay CTA over $500 to bed down with their administrative ROSSAC cronies. If Ms. Elia wants grade inflation to make her look good to the governor and the state-administration world, she simply orders teachers to inflate grades to augment her carefully massaged reputation statewide. This massaged reputation will ensure her receiving more “awards” for her contribution to “excellence in education" and more “performance-bonus” pay to bloat her already stratospheric salary.
_________________________________________________
It was nice to see your e-mail, and to know that you are still fighting for our students. Teacher morale is lower than I can remember in my 23 years of teaching, and many great educators have quit the system rather than put up with the exploitation. It seems the only hope we have is to change the board, for our superintendent gets little resistance from the present group. Some well placed reporting on the issues raised in your note would help shake things up a bit. I will be more than happy to discuss the issues with any interested reporters. Keep in touch.
By the way, I was punished severely for speaking out. I lost my dual enrollment classes and was given regular level world history to teach. I taught honors level for 16 years, but those classes were given to first and second year teachers who were more cooperative with our administration. Many others were punished as well. It has been a rough year, but we will get through it with our dignity intact. Since the arrival of our present APC dual enrollment has shrunk to one class of Freshman English, whereas we used to have classes in science, social studies, math and English. We do have ten sections of AP Human Geography, though, for ninth graders. Remember, Ms. Elia’s bonus money in part comes from the numbers enrolled in AP, not how many actually pass the test.
___________________________________________________
My questions about the data of Bruce's retaliation punishment for the board are these:
1. Do you plan to pretend that you don’t know that such horrors of retaliation that Bruce describes go on even after this message provides you with the evidence?
2. Do you plan to ask Bruce for an interview to expand on the particulars of his punishment and tell you who carried it out?
3. Do you plan to omit lawyer Mr. Gonzalez from this interview since his mental processes seem to work against a whistle blower inside the system; his cooperation with and perhaps even catalyzing the legal crucifixion of Doug Erwin bespeak this tendency in my considered opinion.
4. Do you then plan to question Ms. Elia to see if she will acknowledge her dastardly treatment of this Bruce in retaliation for his mere use of his First Amendment right, which is an absolute right immune to Ms. Elia's disapproval, to protest her contemptuous mistreatment of the schools’ teachers?
5. Do you plan to explore with her a head count of how many of the protesting teachers besides Bruce she punished vindictively for merely exercising their Constitutional right to appeal to elected officials for redress of grievances?
6. Do you plan to hide, as is your wont, behind the shibboleth of your exercising a mere “policy” role in the running of the schools, hence your inability to exercise control of such exhibits of sadistic retaliation as Ms. Elia visited on Bruce? Have y'all passed a policy of supporting retaliation that we don't know about?
7. Are you aware that “policy” comes from Old French and means at its root “police”? The police have rules. They don’t contemplate them; they enact them. So should the board. If your "policies" are merely empty promises, what good do they do? Your slogans of "we are an equal-opportunity employer" are everywhere, yet Ms. Elia's administrators include crony hiring of a home-ec teacher, a kindergarten teacher, and an early-childhood teacher in top administrative jobs for which there was no advertising and no chance of equal-employment opportunity. Then the board has to approve expensive consultants to come in and teach these unqualified people how to do their jobs.
8. Is it your policy to tolerate retaliation by the superintendent against teachers or others of the school family for exercising their Constitutional rights? If not, explain why you show such patent unwelcome when teachers protested the extra-class policy.
9. Is it your policy not to confront the superintendent no matter how egregiously wicked her actions against members of the school family are?
10. Is it your policy to forget that you took an oath to obey the laws of the land and to protect and promote them—including teachers’ and others’ Constitutional rights to speak out when the superintendent oppresses them?
11. Is it your policy to overlook, foster, and even encourage Ms. Elia’s retaliatory conduct and using the Professional Standards office as a depot for snitches to report tremendous trifles on teachers she has targeted, a practice devastatingly detrimental to the teachers and other members of the school family because they must submit to Ms. Abu Ghraib Kipley's terror tactics? Ms. Kipley is not smart; but she has demonstrated she can be mendacious and gruesomely cruel.
12. Is it your policy never to fire Ms. Elia no matter her depredations against the schools' teachers and students?
13. Will the four board members up for re-election reveal to the voters what their response has been to this information about Ms. Elia’s retaliating against teachers in a democracy for these teachers’ exercising their First-Amendment rights to bring their grievances to the elected board members for redress of grievances?
14. What will you say to editorial boards that interview and ask what you did about this documented problem of retaliation by the superintendent against teachers for exercising their First Amendment rights, brought to your attention in this missive?
When you ran for office, you all promised to respond to taxpayer concerns. I send you a concern involving sadistic retaliation by the superintendent against a young
I will mount your responses or note their lack on my blog leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com, where they will get wide readership.
lee drury de cesare
4 comments:
The Principal at Armwood was identified as the one who called a faculty meeting on the day the teachers had planned their protest.
It has been alleged this meeting was unnecessary and called specifically to keep his faculty away from the front lines. The content of the meeting appears to support this allegation.
Mr. Hutek has been mentioned in many conversations as a vindictive, ineffective principal who is believed to have ROSSAC aspirations. From the tone of Bruce's email he would fit in very nicely.
Armwood is in chaos. It reflects the weak appointments glossed over by the Board.
If what Deepcover says is true, Hutek is perfect for the ROSSAC building. That place is full of people who are ineffectual, but they tell teachers how to do everything. I wonder how those people look themselves in the mirror. Who would want to be a part of that bunch? Is money that important to someone that they want to make a little more and go down there?
Bruce is not alone.
Teachers at my school are not allowed to sit at their desks during instructional time.
If you are observed sitting at your desk enough times, that alone is prima facie evidence that you are a poor teacher.
I swear by all that is holy that I am telling the truth. I am afraid to give my name for out of justifiable fear of retaliation.
We are treated like children.
I am ashamed that I dont have the courage yet to speak out openly. I figure by this spring, I will be ready to document this whole sordid mess. I am not confident anything will really change except that by then, I will be unemployed after over a decade of successful teaching.
Sad
Lee
I have been reading our blog for a year and I am certain you would give my Principal quite an earful. I doubt this person would understand most of it though.
So if I told you the name of this person, and you sent the blistering missive, where would that leave me? This person is vindictive and mean spirited.
I thank you for taking the time to read my original message and will continue to enjoy your blog. Knowing your scrutiny of grammar and punctuation, please be gentle with me. I would hate to be graded on that.
Thanks
Post a Comment