My first granddaughter's graduation rug: it took me two and a half years to needlepoint it. At first I thought it would be her wedding rug; then she told me she wouldn't get married until she was in her thirties. So I switched it to a high-school-graduation rug. lee


Dear Area Director of School Boards Diane Coleman:


Hillsborough County’s school board needs guidance in some of its unfortunate behavior patterns on the podium during board meetings.

One infers that the Florida School Boards Association is just the source to provide it.

Here follows one of the worst problems’ affecting school-board members’ behaviors on the dais during meetings.

First is that they sit silent with other outrages transpire on the dais such as the chair’s insulting a citizen speaker who comes to address the board so that the speaker shrinks away vowing never to return for such cuffing around.

Yet these same somnolent board members, if one of the board members gets up enough nerve to ask for an item to be pulled from the consent agenda for scrutiny, come alive. Board members who have remained silent and visibly bored during outrages such as the chair’s insulting a citizen will leap into action to excoriate the board member who dared to ask for discussion of the item designated to be pulled from the agenda.

Such was the behavior of Board Members Candy Olson and Carol Kurdell recently when Board Member April Griffin asked for the customary no-bid procedure that gave a $148,000 no-bid contract to a former administrator in what looked like a buddy contract by Superintendent MaryEllen Elia.

Both members Olson and Kurdell gave Griffin a dais tongue lashing about her so-called “disloyalty to the staff” by questioning their infallible judgment. Olson and Kurdell added Board Member Susan Valdes to this tongue lashing because she had spoken up and supported Griffin's proposal.

Board Member, Jennifer Falliero, now board chair, had at a previous workshop told April Griffin to resign if she couldn’t go along with automatic support of the superintendent’s prerogatives such as appointing incompetent buddies to high-level administrative jobs. That's what I call the Zeig-heil Rule.

The superintendent of the schools' crony hiring means that incompetent, unprepared people who are superintendent buddies and hangers on get plum administrative appointments of $130,000 or more.

An early-childhood degreed person heads the building department; a home-ec teacher with bad grammar in her written decisions about professional behavior leads the Professional Standards Department, a kindergarten teacher heads the political affairs department because she was protegee of the second-in-command to Elia, male administrator Dr. James Hamilton.

When the transportation department melted down from bad management, a former bus driver was its head. Ms. Griffin had to force Ms. Elia to advertise this job. Then Ms. Elia took credit for this enlightened hiring decision, which was disingenuous of Ms. Elia.

Endemic to this crony hiring of incompetent buddies and sycophants is that the board then must hire pricey consultants to teach the people unequal to untrained and unprepared for these top jobs.

So the taxpayers pay twice for the incompetents' service: first the bloated salaries; second the whopping costs--$350,000 in the transportation meltdown--of consultants to come in and clean up the messes the incompetent, unprepared administrators of Ms. Elia's cronyism hiring make.

If you want a broader picture of the problems of the board’s inability to affect the negative practices of the administration, go to FloridaBarEthicsComplaint.blogspot.com.

The Hillsborough County School Board needs outside, objective mentoring from the State School Boards Association.

I hope that the Florida School Boards Association will provide it for the good of the ill-performing school-board members, the good of the whole school family, and the good of the citizens of Hillsborough County.

lee drury decesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708 tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

c: All members Hillsborough County School Board

c: All members of the Florida School Board Association: Claudia Brown-Curry, Vicki Drake, Kris Barnes, Ana Rivas Logan, Bill Mignon,
Andy Griffiths, Larry Nichols, Jo Ann Barber, Bill Mignon, Andy Griffiths, Patricia C. Carrol, Margaret Lofton, Lori Cunningham, Tina Pikoson, Wes Eubank, George Cox, Billy Gwin, Joie Caiger, Anne Geiger, Mary Tuis Brown, Nancy Bostock, J.M. Holtzclaw, Jerry Taylor, Brenda Carlton, Tim Alexander, Walter Miller, Barbara Harvey, Kathryn Starkeu, Allen Altman, Beverly Gallagher, Bill Graham, Paulette Berdick, Janice Kershaw, Mary Kneessey, Maggie Lewis-Butler, Judge B. Helms, Lorrie Shekailo, Kathy Hensley, Tom Greer, Larri Metz, Sandy Nicholson, Linda Powers, Carloyn Zucker, Barbara Rendell, Barry Gainer, Dede Shaffner, Jane Kukel, Steve Tuber, Judy Conte, Candace Lankford, Jane Galucci