One of my four charges against Tom Gonzalez with the Bar Committee is his veiled threat of a lawsuit because I dared to ask that the ROSSAC robber barons to carry out the equal-employment-opportunity laws in hiring for bloated-pay administrative jobs that now go to Elia's buddies in a crony system of passing out the plums of employment to buddies and sycophants.


I said I would ask for a compliance review if they didn't.

There is no advertising to get the best person for the job if it is one of those bloated-pay administrative jobs. The superintendent simply slips them to buddies, and they sail by on the Consent Calender with a rubber-stamp from the board. None of the board members think it's worth their while to protect taxpayers by calling for the removal of these crony jobs for inspection to see if there was equal-employment opportunity practiced in the hiring.


And when theElia cronies with education-lite degrees--usually in early childhood--mess up, the taxpayers have to foot the bill for consultants to fly in and teach the incompetents their jobs.

Hence, taxpayers get screwed twice: once when the superintendent hires her incompetent buddies; once when they pay for pricey consultants to come in and rescue Elia's bad choices for the jobs.

The board except for Griffin and Valdez supports the crony hiring and doesn't want anybody to mention it because, as Ms. Edgecomb terms the practice: "It is part of 'institutional memory.'"

Indeed it is, and that's the problem. Tom Gonzalez hinted that the board could sue me for saying that I would get the federal funding agencies to conduct compliance reviews of the hiring practices of the schools as regards equal opportunity if the administration and board did not obey the federal funds' requirement for equal opportunity. The federal funds have equal-opportunity riders on all of them.

Turns out Le Gonzalez was blowing smoke: Florida adopted a SLAPP law last year to protect citizens who use their free-speech rights to complain about government incompetence. So the news is that Florida has a SLAPP law for just this kind of blackmail against people's exercising their free-speech rights. See "Sued into Silence: anti-SLAPP Laws to the Rescue" http://www.rcfp.org/news/mag/25-2/lib-antislap.html.

So when Tom Gonzalez hints that my complaints would earn me a law suit, he either knew about this law and made the threat anyway, or he didn't know it because he doesn't bother to keep up with relevant laws on his sleepy 37-year-school-board sinecure.

There is villainy afloat, folks, and nous devons prêter l'attention.


lee
lee