I spent another several hours with the Erwin legal files. I think I am starting to grasp the morphology of the case.

I will supplement my assessment so far with some of the documents that led me to my provisional guess at what went on.

Erwin’s supervisor, Dr. Edwards, I think, quit right after the supervisor lured Erwin into taking the job that Erwin had refused on the first offer. So the bait was sweetened to give Erwin senior status to take the job.

I haven’t read far enough to know who had this job before Erwin. The administration may have sent him to Chattahoochee for R&R because this job is crazy making.

Good old stout-hearted Erwin goes in and finds chaos. A guy named McClelland is the head of the grass-cutting guys. He is stealing openly. He has a nephew who is in on the theft. They do such things as get in an order for the schools and unload a little of the order in the school warehouse but then go on to their own warehouse to unload most to the stuff.

Meanwhile, Erwin is cataloguing the situation. McClelland seems to have some kind of connection with Joe Newsome, board member that gives the grass cutter a Teflon shield. You will recall that Mr. Newsome is the land owner that the schools recently bought a bazillion-dollar parcel from for a school when many alleged there was cheaper land close by.

Erwin meanwhile is documenting that a lot of the schools are built on bad land, water being a particular problem. You will recall that this is the division that Cathy Valdes with an early-childhood degree now heads thanks to Elia. I don’t think early childhood bona fides is the best background for assessing soil suitability for school houses, but cronyism trumps competence at ROSSAC any day of the week.

The woman in charge of time also is signing in and out people at false times. Sometimes they work a few hours and then take off but get full-time pay and even overtime. McClelland, the super grass-cutting thief, just takes off to his spread in another county whenever the urge comes over him. He has stolen three tractors which the Keystone school cops have spotted on his land, but they weren’t equipped with a camera, so they didn’t get a picture. McClelland’s nephew or some such kin is also getting trees for landscaping courtesy of the taxpayers.

McClelland is not only a thief but also an arrogant one. He stomps into Erwin’s office and snarls that anybody who accuses him of theft is in big trouble. He says he is a rich man, that his father is a rich man, and that he defies the world to prove he is stealing school property. I can’t wait to see what this guy does on the stand when I get to that part. McClelland says he know people in high places. I infer he means board-member Newsome who will protect him.

Meanwhile, Board Member Sam Rampello is checking in to the grass-cutting area. He says he has to look after the Hispanic workers who depend upon him to protect them.

Sam was an administrator at HCC’s Gordon Keller. He was a crony appointment, of course. The reason I feel so at home with the ROSSAC shenanigans is that they are the same ones I saw when I taught at HCC when I was faculty union president there. I talked to Sam shortly before he died to find out about a guy whom ROSSAC had crucified, who had won his case, but then saw ROSSAC not restore him to his job but put him to teaching prisoners. Dr. Lennard did that. He was then in the vo-tech basement with about three people under his command.

That’s the kind of background that the Hillsborough County School Board counts as superintendent material, turning down Columbia PH.D.s with wide experience, considerable publishing, and fluent in three languages. Vo-tech nonentities beat out such superior specimens by a mile. The people who sit on the board don’t feel comfortable with people whose subjects and verbs agree and who come from the unknown regions beyond Plant City and Wauchula.

If you read the folder of the people who applied when Elia got the job, their sterling credentials compared to Elia’s third-rank bona fides leave you astonished to think that she got the job. The board covered its ass in a sham “nation-wide” search and billed the taxpayers $35,000 to cover their dishonest tracks. Entering ROSSAC just infects people. They enter healthy but get soul leprosy in two weeks.

Tearing his hair out, Mr. Erwin takes his diary of wrongdoing to Dr. Hamilton. Dr. Hamilton says, in effect, “Return to your post, observe what’s going on, write everything down, and all will be well.” Meanwhile, the tractors are still missing, a hay bailer, and God knows what else. And McClelland fences to a reputed drug dealer the stuff he can’t use. A weeping subordinate of McClelland stumbles into Erwin’s office, flings himself into a chair, and sobs to Erwin that he “can’t take it anymore.” The “it” being the constant theft going on around him on the job is one infers what he can’t take.

Erwin is meanwhile distraught with a sense of helplessness and disorientation. The administration promotes and gives more money to a man he wants fired for non-performance. The routine to deal with problem employees is to move them around until nobody complains about them any more. I think this is called the Peter Principle. If a firing is eminent, Joe Newsome sweeps in to counteract it. Newsome's ignorance and arrogance quell the other ROSSAC King Tuts.

Meanwhile, Erwin discovers the shoddy workmanship in all the recent buildings. Bloomingdale High School’s AC is terminal and has been in only a short time although it should last 30 years. So Erwin has to replace it for millions of dollars. The roofs are caving, of course, and even the painting jobs are subpar and have to be repeated. Every time Irwin turns around, something else is collapsing that was recently put in for a bazillion taxpayer dollars. I have suspected under-the-table payments to administrators who sign off on contracts. This file presents a primie facie case for the practice.

Erwin checks in with Dr. Hamilton again. He checks in with Dr. Hamilton frequently, but Dr. Hamilton’s generic advice is to rock on and let things play out.

You will recall that this is the same Dr. Hamilton that held a high-level position until the day he finally and mercifully retired. In fact Ms. Elia created and the board signed off on a boutique job for him the last few months of his employment so that he could dither in comfort until he decided to exit.

One of these days when I have time, I shall write to Gainesville, which gave Hamilton a PH.D. I will ask that his thesis committee be arrested for accepting what must have been a store-bought thesis when compared to Hamilton’s marginally literate writing (see back issues of Casting-room Couch, for proof. He mistook the difference between “your” and “you’re” to give you some idea of his level of linguistic sophistication.)

Every time Erwin appealed to Hamilton to do something about the theft and chaos in the department Erwin was overseeing, Hamilton put him off and temporized. Yet Hamilton is a specimen who held high-level jobs until he finally left and cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands in pay and perquisites for his shoddy, incompetent performance over his long and dreary administrator career.

Finally, Erwin in despair went to see Dr. Lennard. In the first meeting Lennard hemmed and hawed and told Erwin to check back in with him. When Erwin did, this is what Dr. Lennard told him: that his job was in jeopardy because he had said some negative things about people in high places. I can hear Erwin's occipital lobe breaking away now.

I can hardly wait for my records-review session this Wednesday to continue with this incredible saga of abuse, lies, theft, stalling, temporizing, sex, lies, and videotape.

Be patient; I will load on the supporting documents after I have cooked dinner. Like all liberated women, I cook. lee