Our old bulldog, Obie: gone but not forgotten He was the dumbest, bravest dog on the planet.

Chair Faliero:

Your performance at the school-board meeting January 7^th requires comment.

First, let’s deal with your usual rebuke to me during my podium time about “personal attacks” and avoiding names when I said the board should fire Tom Gonzalez because he got the job no bid without advertising or competition; that he had lied about getting a letter of closure from Linda Kipley for Bart Birdsall; and his telling me at least three times that he would author a pamphlet telling teachers how to defend themselves in the Professional Standards gauntlet.

You weren’t able to define “personal attacks” for me. If you forbid something, you should have a ready definition of it. I think you invoke much that you don’t understand in this job as chair, one that you are unfitted for on several fronts. Forbidding someone from using a name in his or her comments is irrational and unconstitutional. I don’t see how people can avoid using names. What are they supposed to do—refer to the targeted wrongdoer as “a certain humanoid,” a blob of protoplasm,” or “Hey, you!”?

Your discourteous, reception of Ms. Sue Saffira who followed me during the citizen’s forum is unforgivable. You were unpleasant to the point of hostility. One compares your treatment of Ms. Saffira with your saccharine reception of the man who headed the pedophile program. You chirped a big hello and smiling welcome to him but sneered at Ms. Saffira, a mother of children in the school system and an officer of the PTA in her children’s two schools. Where is your sense of propriety, Ms. Falliero?

Your fawning over the pedophile-stopper guy and sneering at the mother tells me that you are one of those women we feminists call a “man-directed woman,” one who does not think she is important enough to stand on her own but must have some man validate her for her to feel worthwhile. These poor creatures flatter just about every man who appears on their horizon.

Last board meeting you were flirting with poor old Tom Gonzalez, who wouldn’t respond to Helen of Troy unless she could give him a cash-producing case of spousal cruelty against Menelaus for preventing her from running off with Paris to frolic at Troy and bring that city down. Hussies either in ancient times or sitting as chairs of a school board are never up to anything wholesome for the human race.

Last meeting you made eyes at Tom Gonzalez; this week you zeroed in on the pedophile stopper guy. This behavior lends support to the belief that you lured Mark Hart into adultery; that you broke up his marriage; damaged his two children thereby; and that such is your modus operendi. It’s not enough that you have managed to become a school -board member; you continue to solicit men’s approval—not excepting soliciting attention from the podium of the school board in public view of your pitiful need for male approval. Yours is a sad commentary on women’s taking advantage of the opportunities that women’s rights advocates have eked out for women.

This flirtatious behavior in a public woman is embarrassing to women who aspire to be taken on their merits as men are. As long as some women act like floozies, misogynists will feel free to treat all women as sluts.

This behavior is gradually dissipating as more and more women object to it. You will note CNBC’s Mathews and Schuster’s being under the gun now from their bosses for converting all women into the hussy ilk. Matthews has made constant sexist digs at Hillary, and Shuster even said the Clintons were pimping their well-raised child, Chelsea, in the presidential race. Your being nice to the pedophile-stopper guy and discourteous to women at the podium does not help women erase the malignant whore-Madonna myth that cripples their advance in the world outside the Freudian bifurcation of kitchen or brothel. Stop this contemptible conduct in the name of decency and women’s progress, Ms. Falliero. including that of the girls in the school system over which you unfortunately preside.

Think what a difference the school-board chair’s being courteous or even charming to parents such as Ms. Sue Saffira, who come before the board, would make. What if you had not sat on your board-chair throne and glowered at Ms. Saffira? What if you had instead used some of the charm you lavished on the pedophile-stopper guy and said, “Welcome to the board-comment period, Ms. Saffira? I understand you are an officer in not one but both of your children’s schools’ PTAs. This board is grateful for your support. You must limit yourself to the three minutes we have allocated to citizen-comment time. We look foreword to your comments”?

Would being polite like that kill you, Madame Chair? Would not making honorable mothers like Ms. Saffira feel like a worm begin to supplant the board’s reputation for indifference to and even cruelty to the parents anxious for the board’s cooperation in seeing to their children’s wellbeing in the schools?

What ails the psyches of the board members that they don’t see their churlish behavior toward parents augments the board’s reputation for indifference and even contempt to the population it promised to put first—students, their teachers, and parents?

What if at the end of the three minutes instead of your busting in to bark, “Stop! Your time is up!” you possessed the intelligence and grace to say, “Thank you for these valuable comments, Ms. Saffira. I am sorry that we must observe the 3-minute limit that applies to all our visitors. Please come see us again to give us the benefit of your observations”?

And the board should have the PR sense to add an extra minute on to a comment time when the person asks for it. Would that shrink the board's amour propre to extend this grace to people whom board members suck up to during election time with the hope that they never see them again until re-election looms?

Would the ROSSAC bunker's mode of shutting out the world and sneering at the very people who undergird education in the county collapse if the board chair were polite to people outside of ROSSAC? I don’t think so. Such behavior from the board chair would do much to attenuate the way people perceive the school board and administration as hostile to the public--even to the parents and beyond. The board is also hostile to teachers and students, who are what schools are about. So great is the antipathy of the board to any but the denizens of ROSSAC that it has cut teachers and students off and dishonored them by refusing to assign them a slot on the board agenda and welcoming their comments. Instead, the board makes it impossible for teachers and students to believe that the board and administration value them as human beings and as the reason why there exist schools in the first place.

You demoralized this mother, Ms. Falliero, with your churlish treatment of her in contrast to your fawning on the pedophile-preventer man. We see from your fulsome greeting to him that you can be welcoming. You just don’t choose to welcome anybody but your fetish objects—men.

I doubt Ms. Saffira will want to return to address the board, and I wager her friends who she said told her not to come can say, “We told you so” when she returns to her community. Such is the perception of the school board in the community it putatively serves. Such are the board members’ board decorum after they who work hard at election time to snocker voters on the hustings to convince the electorate that they deserve to remain on the board.

You treated Ms. Saffira with so much contempt that my mother genes kicked in so that I intercepted her on her exit to tell her she did just fine. And she did. Any lummox of a chair would have recognized the worth of this young mother’s intelligent comments about the value of change and would have treated her with dignity. But not you, Ms. Falliero. You wouldn't know an intelligent comment from a mother from a hole in the ground. You have no business as the chair of a school board that cares a whit about its reputation of commitment to children and of serving the voters and not the superintendent’s regime.

An ethical board would not tolerate an adulteress chair who fawns over a male guest and treats so ill a mother of two children in the school system who serves as an officer in the two schools of her children’s PTAs

By temperament and by skills, you have no business being school board chair. You don’t have control of your agenda, getting mixed up in processing mere linear items; needing someone to tell you who is next on the speaker list; asking repeatedly so that the audience hears you ask again and again, “Who’s next? Who’s next?” This dithering does not add to your authority.

But most of all, you should not be board chair because you have no feel for the dignity of people and have, instead, an hypertrophied opinion of the importance of male figures who appear before the board, making a fool of yourself with your excessive bonhomie toward guys, but not women.

I asked my husband about your telling Board Member Griffin to hurry along and wind up her comment. My husband was mayor in our little beach town for a dozen years and chaired a board with our intelligent lawyer’s help. My old man says a presiding officer is ill advised to tell a board member to wrap it up. He says the rebuked board member should respond “point of order,” remind the chair that she speaks for her constituents and does not accept the curtailing of her right to do so. My husband says a presiding officer who tries to cut off an elected official on the board shows little judgment and scant talent for leading. He says any elected official is clothed in the validity of being the person the voters put in the position to speak for them. He said that validity trumps the chair’s wishes.

I hope that the next time you interrupt Ms. Griffin or any board member and tell him or her to hurry along that the rebuked party will follow my husband’s protocol or mine—mine being to tell the chair to go to hell.

I often disagree with my Republican husband, who has in this election thrown his hands up on the Republicans and now supports Hillary for president while I support Obama, to whose campaign I have sent all my dress-and-shoe money since he began his noble quest. But I was glad to get this fellow's comment whom I married fifty-one years ago on an issue involving Roberts Rules because he has lived them for fourteen years as a public official. These data may merit him chicken and dumplings from his domestic political adversary.

I note that you didn’t rebuke Board Member Olson for conjugating the universe ad infinitum as is her wont but that you, in contrast, rebuked the board member whom you had previously advised to resign if she couldn’t fall in with the Elia agenda and become a rubber stamp for Ms. Elia as you, Ethridge, Kurdell, Olson, and Lamb are. That fact makes your board-chair conduct look biased, Ms. Falliero, and just plain mean-spirited. And let me here repeat my belief that Ms. Elia’s firing Mr. Hart on a trumped-up charge of drunkenness was to cover your adultery up and to ensure for her a servile, dependable vote on the board. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to discover that you two had a strategy session in which Ms. Elia said, "OK, Falliero, vote my way a hundred percent of the time, and I will fire Hart to protect your board seat." And you said, "It's a deal."

The which brings up this question that Suzy Cream Cheese has posed to you on her teacher blog The Wall and which I second: Why don’t your engaging in on-the-job adultery with a married man, ending his marriage, and savaging his two young children while agreeing with Elia that firing him to protect your “reputation” provide basis for your resigning your job on the school board?

As an indignant American asked Joe McCarthy, “Have you no shame, ma’am?”

lee drury de cesare

c: Ms. Sue Saffira

Ms. Safira, the blogs that giver an alternate view of the Hillsborough County school board and administration are mine, Suzy Creamcheese’s The Wall, Sisyphus, the Rock that Keeps on Rolling, Eskay Express, and Goader. We are the blogs that speak truth to power on school issues.

I don't know who your board member is. Find out and have the member come to a meeting with interested parents in your district. If that board member can't climb down off the dais and go out and talk to parents, what good is he or she? Not showing up will signal that your community needs to form a committee to work for the election of a new board member to replace an indifferent one.

The potted plants of the board will never stop serving Ms. Elia and her minions instead of the students, teachers, and the public until voters decline to put them in office. When these board ROSSAC addicts catch on to the penalty of their indifferent and even contemptuous behavior when it comes to parents, students, teachers, and the rest of the school family, they will mend their ways or get kicked out by the voters. lee

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