Cruelty in the ROSSAC Shadows

Ms. Elia: the reason I became interested in the school-board outrages was the failure I observed in the Bart Birdsall case to protect teachers and staff from the sicko retaliation against them by the administration.

You and Ms. Kipley, with the technology department's assistance, cooked up a case against Birdsall for supposed violation of the misuse of the school emails for private purposes. Meanwhile, Dr. Hamilton was using the emails to air his ego whilst misspelling "your' and "you're" to the disgrace of the school board. Those gaucheries should be a Professional-standards charge if anything should be. I even filed a Professional-standards charge against Hamilton, but Spin Factotem Hegarty laughed off the Hamilton unprofessional illiteracy by saying it was "just a joke." An assistant superintendent who can't differentiate between homophones is indeed a joke in addition to being a disgrace to education.

Because of your girlfriend relationship with Ms. Bean at the County, you agreed to take these Birdsall e-mails that Bart sent from his home computer from Beam for the purpose of accusing him of a made-up charge.You used these as basis for a school investigation, even though the emails were not eligible for the charge since they did not originate on school computers and because Stine was too gutless to answer Bart's emails sent to Stine as a private citizen objecting to Ronda Storms's homophobic shut down of gay privileges in the county library.

One concludes that the wussy Stines complained to boss Bean, who passed the emails on to you to use to scare Bart about retaining his job in an ugly retaliation against a private citizen who also happened to work for the school board. What's a buddy superintendent for if not to scare a teacher with losing his job because he asks the county government as a private citizen for fair treatment of gays?

That is retaliation, the kind that this article below writes about in the NYT today. Mr. Erwin's torture by Davis, Hamilton, and Lennard was also retaliation that the Supreme Court justices' opinion covers. Even that wretched Bush appointment Alito wrote a concurring opinion that retaliation is illegal under the the discrimination laws.

In the Hillsborough County School System, you, and Lennard before you and probably the superintendents before him retaliated against people for even criticizing the administration.

That is why there is such ubiquitous paranoia among teachers about speaking up against things that teachers and staff see as wrong. Thank goodness the parents would come in to mow you down if you had the nerve to pick on their kids.

But you don't pick on the kids because you know their parents would not stand for it. You pick on teachers and staff who you figure won't fight back because of the terror instilled in them by yours and Professional Standards' dispicable retaliation regime.

You and the Professional Standards chief ghoul, Kipley, have worked up a settled regimen to retaliate against people for the slightest complaint about your unfair treatment of them if you think you can get away with it. The payoff for you is that this example of cruelty triumphat will warn them away from complaining about any administration outrages.

Retaliation under your and Lennard's regimes saw you routinely use coercion as a policy to keep employees intimidated and scared lest they lose their jobs if they protest bad treatment. That malignant policy is what the Erwin case demonstrated in the court papers and demonstrates itself daily in the school system. It is a sicko practice of 3rd-rate administrators to hang on to power. You don't lead by example; you lead by intimidation.

The board complies with this vicious practice of the board but denies in cowardly fashion knowing of such a practice. The board's abdication in this matter and its pretending not to know about it are as cowardly and repulsive as this behavior was in the case of Mr. Erwin. The Erwin jury believed Erwin, not the administrative and board thugs. If the unfair-retaliation information to teachers and staff gets out to the public, like the Erwin jury, it will believe the teachers and the staff over the board and administration. Voters are not stupid. They are inattentive, not stupid.

A teacher now writes me about his principal's discrimination against him and what he infers will be the principal's retaliation against him for resisting her discrimination. It's the same old same old: ugly stuff.

The lower-quartile administrators can't seem to comprehend that their behavior will undo them if the person mistreated decides to take the case to the EEOC and not Professional Standards.

If this principal does follow your office's covertly approved retaliation against the teacher, I am going to find out how he or she can invoke the Supreme Court justices' ruling in this area and encourage him or her to file charges against the board that has allowed you and Lennard and the other villains who have sat in the superintendent's chair to mistreat workers by retaliating against them because nobody has challenged the retaliation yet except Mr. Erwin.

You and Ms. Kipley aim to grind teachers down until they are too frightened to fight back. Your donating a job to Mr. Linda Kipley for Ms. Kipley's years of vile action against teachers at your behest represents the payoff for her participating in the sadistic conduct she has engaged in against teachers and staff. This is despicable stuff.

Apparently, you have felt it was safe to ignore the Erwin jury's finding that the school board did retaliate against Erwin via Davis, Hamilton, and Lennard for you continue to retaliate against workers in the school system using the same covert, despicable policy that Lennard, Hamilton, and Davis used against Erwin. And you encourage unethical administrataors, including principals, to do the same. You continue to think you can get away with this unprofessional, vicious behavior and that the board lets you continue the vile practice because most of its members agree with you.

I don't know how many Mr. Erwins the board will need to repudiate and do away with this malignant policy. I don't know how many board members have to be replaced before the practice changes.

But I will help anyone whom you retaliate against to the best of my ability to fight it and expose your and the board's war against teachers and staff who are not part of your buddy-sycophancy-relative pool of those who are exempt from retaliation because of these connections to you and your major administrators.

I consider your regime to be a disgrace to education, Ms. Elia, as are your lack of education and experience a disgrace to your unearned position; and I consider this sneaky retaliation against employees of the schools not under your buddy-family-sycophancy protection umbrella as that of corrupt conduct that bespeaks your unspeakable abuse of power.

lee drury de cesare www.casting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Justices Say Law Bars Retaliation Over Bias Claims

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By LINDA GREENHOUSE

Published: May 28, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that employees are protected from retaliation when they complain about discrimination in the workplace, adopting a broad interpretation of workers’ rights under two federal civil rights laws.

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Text: Opinion (Gomez-Perez v. Potter)

Text: Opinion (CBOCSnt> West, Inc. v. Humphriesnt>)

By decisions of 7 to 2 in one case and 6 to 3 in the other, the court found that the two statutes afford protection from retaliation even though Congress did not explicitly say so.

The decisions are significant both as a practical matter and as evidence of a new tone and direction from the court this year, following a term in which there were sharp divisions and an abrupt conservative turn.

The new rulings were in distinct contrast to one of the signature decisions of the last term, a 5-to-4 decision that placed tight time limits on plaintiffs seeking to file pay-discrimination cases. Justice Samuel A. Alitont> Jr., who wrote the majority opinion almost exactly a year ago in that case, Ledbetternt> v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, wrote one of the two majority opinions on Tuesday. Justice Stephen G. Breyernt> wrote the other.

One of the cases began as a lawsuit by a clerk for the United States Postal Service in Puertont> Rico. The plaintiff, Myrna Gómez</font>-Pérezfont>, 45 at the time, complained that she had been denied a transfer to a different office because of age discrimination. Her lawsuit alleged that as a result of her complaint, she became the target of retaliatory actions by her supervisors.

The other case was brought by a former assistant manager of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, a black man named Hedrick> G. Humphries>. Mr. Humphries> had complained that a white assistant manager had been motivated by racial discrimination in dismissing a black employee. In his lawsuit, Mr. Humphries> claimed that he then lost his own job in retaliation for his complaint.

Retaliation complaints are a growing subset of workplace discrimination cases, because it is often easier for employees to demonstrate that they were retaliated against than that they were victims of discrimination in the first place. Retaliation complaints filed annually with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doubled in the last 15 years to 22,000 from 11,000.

Congress has provided explicit protection against retaliation in two major federal statutes. One is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex. The other is the provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act that applies in the private sector.

However, there is no such explicit protection in the portion of the age-discrimination law that applies to federal government workers. Nor is there explicit language in a post-Civil War-era statute that gives “all persons” the same right “as is enjoyed by white citizens” when it comes to making and enforcing contracts, such as contracts of employment. Those were the two statutes that the court interpreted on Tuesday.

In both decisions, the majority relied heavily on precedent, reasoning by analogy from recent cases that dealt with claims of retaliation under other statutes. The most recent such case was a ruling issued in 2005, before either Justice Alito or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court held then that a law known as Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges that receive federal money, also prohibits school officials from retaliating against those who bring sex-discrimination complaints. The statute itself does not mention retaliation.

In his opinion on Tuesday in the federal age-discrimination case, Justice Alito said that the provision in question, broadly prohibiting “discrimination based on age,” was “not materially different” from the anti-discrimination language the court had interpreted both in the Title IX case and in an earlier decision from 1969, interpreting a Reconstruction-era statute that bars racial discrimination in property ownership.

“The context in which the statutory language appears is the same in all three cases,” Justice Alito said. “That is, all three cases involve remedial provisions aimed at prohibiting discrimination.”

In the Postal Service case, Gómez-Pérez v. Potter, No. 06-1321, the federal appeals court in Boston, which has jurisdiction over federal cases from Puerto Rico, dismissed the suit on the ground that the age-discrimination provision that applies to federal workers does not cover retaliation claims.

In his opinion, which overturned the appeals court and reinstated the lawsuit, Justice Alito said that understood in the context of its enactment, the provision did cover retaliation. He noted that while the basic age-discrimination law was passed in 1967, it was not extended to federal workers until 1974.

In the interval, the Supreme Court had issued its decision deeming that the 19th-century property-rights law covered retaliation. Congress was “presumably familiar” with that case, Justice Alito said, and “had reason to expect” that the new age-discrimination provision would be interpreted with similar breadth.

Justices Say Law Bars Retaliation Over Bias Claims

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Published: May 28, 2008

(Page 2 of 2)

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Roberts said that, to the contrary, Congress was “well aware” that the Civil Service Commission had issued detailed regulations protecting federal employees against retaliation. The chief justice said that Congress should be understood to have made a judgment that retaliation problems in the federal work force should be dealt with administratively rather than judicially.

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Related

Text: Opinion (Gomez-Perez v. Potter)

Text: Opinion (CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries)

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined the dissenting opinion.

These two justices were the only dissenters in Mr. Humphries’s case, CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, No. 06-1431, which held that Congress intended to cover retaliation claims brought under the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that is usually referred to as Section 1981. The court upheld a ruling by the federal appeals court in Chicago, rejecting an appeal brought by the company that operates the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain.

The Supreme Court’s decision last September to hear the company’s appeal was a surprise, because all the federal appeals courts that had weighed in on the question interpreted Section 1981 as covering retaliation. Resolving disputes among the lower federal courts is the Supreme Court’s main reason for accepting a case. The decision to grant this case in the absence of such a dispute spread alarm throughout the civil rights community on the assumption that a majority was prepared to shut the door on retaliation claims.

There was ample reason for that assumption, since Chief Justice Roberts had earlier made clear his distaste for precedents in which the court has gone beyond a statute’s text to infer a basis for a lawsuit.

It was especially significant, therefore, that both he and Justice Alito signed on to Justice Breyer’s discussion of the importance of “stare decisis,” the court’s doctrine of adherence to precedent. Even if the court’s approach to statutory interpretation was changing, Justice Breyer wrote, “we could not agree that the existence of such a change would justify re-examination of well-established prior law.”

He added: “Principles of stare decisis, after all, demand respect for precedent whether judicial methods of interpretation change or stay the same. Were that not so, those principles would fail to achieve the legal stability that they seek and upon which the rule of law depends.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, accused the majority of hiding behind “the fig leaf of ersatz stare decisis,” relying on precedents that had been incorrectly decided in the first place.