No answer from Ms. Reddick. She was on the board during the Erwin saga. Odd that these board members--Reddick, Olson, Lamb, and Kurdell all knew about the brouhaha involving Ervin's claims of criminal behavior and the purloining of tax money and never did a thing about the situation. Only after the press began to nibble at the story was the faux "investigation" launched. lee
April 22, 2008
Ms. Reddick:
When you were on the board, you worked for Black children. Ms. Edgecomb, the only Black on the board now does nothing but follow the leader and does not bring up the needs of Black children.
I would like to meet with you and discuss ways this situation can be rectified.
I live on the beach and used to live in Beach Park while our four children went to public school. I would be glad to drive in to talk with you if you will give me a time and a place.
Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
727-398-41`42
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Below is the URL for the Gonzalez's report to Dr. Lennard after the media's questions set off the "investigation" that the administration and board had avoided for four years during which Mr. Erwin had begged Davis, Hamilton, and Lennard to pay attention to his reports of theft, bid-fixing, employee-attendance scams, and shoddy quality in the building of new schools.
You will note that Gonzalez closes the investigator Gietzen's job down. Gonzalez had hired Geitzen to do the investigation. This explains why Gietzen says there is not time to do all the investigation that he was supposed to do. Erwin says Gietzen didn't continue after Gonzalez saw that what he turned up confirmed Erwin's own observations.
You will note in Gonzalez's recommendations that he does not mention the main problem: the unwillingness of Erwin's bosses Lennard, Davis, and Hamilton to act on reports of theft, crooked bids, and shoddy building at the taxpayers' expense. It is as if he can see no evil of the real culprits in the cause of the problem: the trilogy at the top. lee
As a frequent reader of your writings, I feel obliged to correct a minor error regarding my credentials. If I were in fact as bright as you hinted, albeit tongue-in-cheek, I could have avoided a career in the educational bureaucracy. For the record, my modest credentials include being a registered architect, and a 1974 graduate of Washington State University.
Mr. Blackwell, I expect that any intelligent person in administration or on the board would read my blog. Tom Gonzalez does but claims he doesn’t. People need to know what the enemy is cooking up. And I am the enemy of the administration and the board. They have cooperated in making the schools inhospitable to teachers, students, and thus education. You belong to a contingent of barbarians, sir.
If the board and administration think that they can make people like me go away by simply ignoring us, they are dumber than I thought. It’s people such as I who bore the small holes in the edifice of ignorance, prejudice, and amour propre that lets in the light. For some reason, I delight in this job. I think it’s because I am from a Southern clan with pretensions to aristocracy that this is so. As far back as I can recall, some member of my family was fighting evil in a state that knows how to produce some the unloveliest specimens of that phenomenon.
Although still learning, I should by now have some grasp of construction. What sometimes seems simple, e.g., wall cracks, can be incredibly complicated. And like many things technical, the explanation doesn't make for very interesting reading to most people. Unless it is oversimplified. And there's the problem. I intuited that your explanations had a degree of validity in the Erwin files. I will send this email and your comment in the Erwin files to my NASA engineer son in Cape Canaveral for his assessment. He was the boy who, while at Plant, tutored his ignorant friends in physics. I planned to give you equal time by printing your entire comment in my blog and that of Tom Gonzalez to represent what Erwin was up against. That’s coming up for the eager fans of this section of my blog. People have heard hints about the Erwin files but they have never seen them. I supply that lack. I have a large audience for it.
The evil in this case was that of throwing this man—whom everybody on the teacher side of the equation says was decent and disinterested—into the snake pit of the grounds-theft mess and other bad situations and then not paying any attention to the evils he reported both to Hamilton and to Davis. I infer these two canny survivors figured out ways to ignore Erwin’s warnings because they were too gutless to go in to Lennard—one of the most mediocre men in HC who waggled his way into the superintendent slot by geriatric sex appeal augmented by bean-sprout consumption every morning in the wilds of Plant City or Riverview, where his mansion with a vase of plastic flowers in the foyer stands in its splendid vulgarity. People of Lennard’s caliber getting a dumbass board to appoint him superintendent summarizes what is wrong with the leadership of the school system.
The Symmes Elementary project is a case in point. The builder, Skanska, was one the largest in the world. So that wasn't the problem. The architect was a small local firm with a respected track record including a subsequent re-use of the same design for Heritage Elementary School. So that wasn't the problem. The critical errors concerned the geo-technical data. Clayey soil was indicated, but what was encountered was worse than expected. In hind sight, the remediation efforts fell short. Requiring more insurance is a Monday-morning-quarterback solution. "Risk" is an integral part of construction. Managing the costs of everything that goes into construction, including risk containment, is a very tough assignment. And then there are the lawyers, but we don't have time.
The recent case of the school in which a couple of sections collapsed replicates what I infer was template for the same problems that afflicted the building process then when poor Erwin was running up and down flailing air. Tom Gonzalez told the board to eat the losses on the two-section collapse since the contractor was not big enough to carry the catastrophic-insurance burden that would indemnify the board. I think that scenario represents false economy. The board should not contract with any company not of the scale to have catastrophic insurance. And the board should always pay for the catastrophic policy. If the board can sign off on pissing away tax money in so many other ways, it can get adequate insurance for buildings, especially when Ms. Valdes has a mere early-childhood crony degree and is not intellectually or educationally equipped to make these decisions. Why don’t you offer yourself for that job? It’s where all the bad building decisions originate. In your job, slot you deal with those that occur after the horse has left the barn.
There's a similarly long, dismal explanation behind every "flooding-auditorium, leaking-roof, peeling-paint", sound byte. Such is life. Oh, sure. Such is life if you pay for this blasé assessment with tax money, not your own. And one does not need to hear the Jesuitical explanations of how physics and the ebb and flow of eternity affect this situation. What taxpayers need is some people who can foresee and warn against these catastrophes and hire contractors that don’t have a record of these flaws in their buildings. I think somebody’s brother-in-law is getting contracts.
Did you ever pitch in and provide to Erwin the explanation for these phenomena that agitated him; or did you, like the others, leave the poor guy twisting in the wind? Did you ever pick up the phone and say, “Doug, let’s talk about your concerns about the building deficiencies”?
A couple of other things; Jack Davis is very quick witted and actually a member of Mensa, I am told. Clever, funny, and dangerously ambitious. The gentleman’s quick-wittedness does not show up in his Erwin-case depositions. In fact, he sounds like a fellow who claims not to remember anything that would nail him as remiss; he sounds desperate to save his job. He did: with a big demotion albeit. Don’t let a MENSA appellation fool you. I joined MENSA when I was too young to know any better in the ‘60’s in NYC. I dragged my old man (also named Tom) to a couple of meetings. The people stood around preening because they belonged to MENSA. I didn’t hear any erudition—just sotto voice self-congratulation. I quit. That outfit is an intellectual fraud for people who didn’t have the grit to go to college for a legitimate degree and get elected to PBK. The tests to get in are suspect. In short, it’s a racket for insecure people.
Jim Hamilton is incredibly bright. Complicated, principled and thoughtful. Once told me I was "enigmatic". After double checking the definition, I took it as a compliment.
I saw no evidence that supports your claim that Hamilton was “incredibly bright.” I am an expert in spotting brainy people since my career was in the academic world. Connie Mileto, kindergarten scholar, snockered him into putting her on the fast track to a job for which she is in no way qualified for. That does not demonstrate bright behavior or behavior that had the good of the school system in mind. I observed Mileto jumping up, squealing, and hugging a legislator at Tiger Bay. This is not the dignified image the school system needs from its representative in Tallahassee. Mileto is not only deficient in education—the job should have someone with a political science or psychology or history degree—she lacks polish and sophistication that a job in the legislature requires to reflect credit on the schools. Not all members of the legislature are piney-woods boobs.
With Hamilton, I would substitute “boorish” for your “bright.” I intend when I have a free day to challenge the governor and the Board of Regents to explain how Le Hamilton extracted a Ph.D. from a state university, given that he can’t write his way out of a paper bag—not being able to distinguish the difference between “your” and “you’re” as just one example. I believe he bought his dissertation. He snowed you, sir, as he appeared to snow so many others. I consider him a leech on the system of public education for his entire professional life. There are many more like him in public-education, alas. But Hamilton seemed to be able to snooker people more with his pretensions. I think his talent was seduction, not intellect. I believe he hated me, I am pleased to say.
Doug Erwin was well intentioned, but in way over his head, and too proud to accept council. A more thoughtful man could have had a more positive impact. The folk hero clothes don't fit.
This is the condescending the-poor-guy-is-out-of-his-depth-and-crazy-to-boot party line, but I don’t accept it. Why did nobody stop the years-long theft in by MClelland et al until Erwin showed up? And when he tried to get Davis and Hamilton to do something, they evaded him? If these two were such brains, why didn’t they know 3 tractors and a baler were missing in addition to numerous other board property? That failure of vision does not say much for their administrative talent for oversight. Erwin’s trying to stop theft in the grounds department is not being in “in way over his head.” It is being honest and reliable about seeing to the public good in a corrupt school system run by corrupt, self-serving people like administrative thugs Davis and Hamilton—and doubtless with your collusion, despite your patina of Olympian cool.
Seeing a man who is as intelligent as you appear to be subsumed in the corrupt defense of the indefensible discourages me. It demonstrates how corruption-creep takes over in the mind-set of the people in a closed environment like the ROSSAC bunker. It’s hard to be objective as a member of the herd, which I infer that you are.
Finally, "OMR" stands for Office Machine Repair. These obvious things are always mysteries to me.
If possible, please keep my comments in confidence. Or at least avoid explicit attribution if possible. Now here’s where the rubber meets the road. I have a firm conviction that we stand behind what we say. We sign off on it with our names and to hell with the narrow-minded world. That’s my credo.
I won’t pass this email around because I think you would become the new Doug Erwin if I do. You’d see Davis and his ilk turn on you in a heartbeat. You don’t read the creeps you work with correctly, Tom. I infer you are about my son’s age, and that’s old enough to have figured out the world a little better. We women are better at scoping out character than are men. Women have for centuries had to be adept at this skill to survive in a hostile patriarharl population.
The ROSSAC myrmidons would attack you like piranhas if they knew you wrote me this piece. You’ll soon need a bullet-proof vest.
Pax vobiscum, lee.
PS. Period and comma always go inside quotation marks. The comma in the first paragraph splits a compound predicate nominative. But you are a good writer: a rare skill. I think your intellect deserved better than the job you settled for. There is a psychological story behind that circumstance. I need to know what your childhood was like to reconstruct it. lee
Thanks.
Tom Blackwell
Leo, take a minute to cast your engineer’s eye on this guy’s excuses for school buildings’ flaws that a fellow they fired named Erwin for pointing them out got crucified by the school board fifteen years ago. The file that Mr. Blackwell writes excusing the flaws Erwin pointed out will follow when I load it onto my blog. Mom
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- Relative direction, where down is the opposite of up
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- Down (football), in American/Canadian football, a period of time where one play takes place
- County Down, a county within Northern Ireland
- Down (game theory), a standard position in mathematical game theory
- Down (film), an English remake of the film De Lift, about an express elevator that develops a mind of its own
- Down (comics), a comic book published by Top Cow Productions
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