Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Erwin Fi...":

Tom Gonzalez is the school board attorney. His job is to protect the school board, so why did HIS firm hire the auditor to check on Erwin's complaints? Isn't that a conflict of interest? I'm not sure who should have hired the company that looked into the allegations, but it doesn't seem right that the school board attorney should do this, since he is trying to protect the board and could have hypothetically told the company what to find.



Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 7:15 PM

Your question is a good one. The only answer I have is that the school board and administration have scoffed at the law and decent behavior so long that they think they are immune to the logic of such questions as this.

Thus, in coming to the end of the Erwin files, I find profound satisfaction in seeing the logical, cogent, irrefutable commentary of Erwin's attorney, Ms. Priscella. I got her address from the file and intend to write her a fan letter as soon as I load all this other selected Erwin commentary onto this blog.

I also got an email from one of the building administrators who gave a strong refutation to Erwin's testimony in the Erwin just as all the others did--Davis, Hamilton, et al. They all sing from the same choir book. They have an ugly, sinister, unspoken understanding when they pick out a guy to crucify that they will all resort to the same vile choreograph that ends with calling him crazy.

I wasn't going to publish this administrator's email because I thought he was still working and would lose his job just as Erwin did. But when I checked in yesterday to work on the files in the public-affairs office, I asked the check-in security guard where this guy's office was. She said he had retired a couple of years ago.

So he won't lose his job or his pension if I put his email on my blog--although maybe he should for ganging up on Erwin.

Nobody ever loses a job in the ROSSAC redoubt if the toady is faithful to the superintendent. Davis is still around as head of technology. Elia created a boutique job for Hamilton so he would have the leisure to fret over whether to retire or not at the taxpayer's expense. Not one of the board members that adorn the board semi-circle have the nerve to rein in Elia in arrogance of that sort. We have yet to get one on the podium.

This morning someone asked me about their filing a charge with the Florida Bar for Gonzalez's cooperation with the chicanery of the Professional Standards head, La Kipley, and Ms. Elia's railroading him.

I said, "Absolutely, you should file. Maybe if enough people file the bar will start to catch on to how unethical Gonzalez is." Anybody who has a whiff of any lack of ethics should file against Gonzalez with the bar. It's a liberating experience. I recommend it.

The bar rejected my claim, but a lot of good came out of it. First, it put Gonzalez on the accusation end of the equation for a change. Second, he spent a lot of non-billable hours defending himself to the bar against my claims in his prolix essay. He had to do legal and linguistic contortion to to defend himself against not surrendering public documents (i.e. the Erwin files, which I got after I filed the charge); he had to describe in painful detail the ugly circumstances of how he got his good-ol-boy job without competition; he had to defend himself against cramping citizens' free-speech rights who come before the board; he had to stutter his way through his explanation of threatening citizens with a law suit to shut them up as he did me with his extortion hints. I was able to point out at a subsequent board meeting that the SLAPP law forbade this behavior and that he knew it and was just counting on the citizen's ignorance to make his hints of a law suit scare them into silence.

You don't have to win a hundred percent to win a valuable victory. Just somebody's filing this first bar ethics charge was a victory. It shows others that the maneuver can be pulled off.

I also got the fun of tearing up Gonzalez's grammar, punctuation, and writing style. That's my specialty and an especially apposite one with Gonzalez since he has an undergraduate literature degree and since lawyers are supposed to be able to write.

When Erwin got transferred to the job of finding ways to remedy the things that were wrong with the schools, it was involuntary and punitive. In trying to prove that Erwin's was not punitive, the comeback from Gonzalez was that there had been at least two involuntary transfers before. There had been more. In the grounds department Hamilton told Erwin to transfer bad employees around until they arrived at a perch in which nobody complained about them.

I read in the Erwin files that Kipley got the Professional Standards job by an involuntary transfer. That may be. I heard she was such a terrible principal at Hillsborough High that the teachers hated her and that some wouldn't go into a meeting with her without a tape recording device because she lied so routinely about what was said in the meeting. Those files contain all kinds of tidbits like that about the Evil Empire for us Forces of the Light.

My other theory is that the administration upper people intuited that Kipley had just the right talents of sadism and chicanery to suit that vile position.