Good heavens, look what just came in over the transom in the comment page to a previous email. Somebody fill me in. LeeThe Honorable John McCain
United States Senate
241 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-0303
June 29, 2008
DeDear Senator Mc Cain:
I (a Democrat) asked my husband (a Republican) tonight after hearing on TV about your search for a vice presidential candidate, what he thought of the situation. We have been married for 52 years of marital political disharmony.
His response: “Go ahead. Nobody can stop you.”
Since I hear that Mr. Crist, our governor. is high on your list of choices, I want to let you know that there is an important impediment to his candidacy that affects a lot of people. These are anybody with children, grandchildren (ten for this granny), teachers, students, and the horde of administrators and other Superintendent-Elia hangers-on who batten in Hillsborough County's School-board's employ, having made themselves comfortable via the bloated salaries and cushy perquisites bestowed on them by Superintendent Ms. Elia.
The superintendent herself makes $300,000 a year, with the board's being eager to download more on her; she makes the most I can find for a superintendent any place on the Internet. Ms. Elia has no doctorate; indeed, the board reduced the academic credential to a mere master's in a job that requires a doctorate earn its implicit status. The board--Edgecombe, Olson, Kurdell, Lamb, Falliero, and Valdes also faked a “nation-wide search" ad and billed the taxpayers $35,000 for it to cover its tracks. April Griffin was not on the board for the vote then, but I wager she would have joined the majority. My intuition says board members hired hired La Elia because they wanted an in-house buddy at the top who would not mess with their incumbency.
Ms. Elia hires unqualified cronies and hangers on and gives them lavish salaries and a guarntee of iron-clad employment no matter how badly they perform.
The transportation department melted down with a former bus driver as head, and Ms. Elia had to hire a pricey consultant to come in and sort things out. I read the report. Anybody could see that all it did for $350,000 out of the tax kitty was advise getting scheduling software and to park the buses in a more convenient place. A third-grader could have delivered up that thin wisdom. After this bus-meltdown's eclat, Ms. Elia hired an outside person who was not a crony (quelle miracle!) at a board member's urging but kept on the two mess-ups at the top that she had replaced and did not lower their salaries. What they do now remains a mystery. But we know that even the Tribune couldn't hold back from rebuking Ms. Elia for this piece of nutcake arrogance.
Ms. Elia, who lusts for good press above all things next to bonuses, has recently demonstrated the way not to get newspaper approval is by having a public quarrel with the editorial scribes at the Tribune, the only big paper in town. Ms. Elia has been too busy hiring home-ec teachers and their spouses for $130,000 sinecures to consider that anybody who courts a fight with editorial writers is jousting with people who buy ink by the barrel.
And the inattentive board members may consider that the Tribune editors sooner or later will turn a jaundiced opining eye on the board's lack of involvement in seeing that they keep promises they made to voters to have a care about how they let the superintendent run the schools into the ground.
The board never says a word about such gauche hiring practices' being athwart the equal-opportunity laws and the binders on all the schools' federal funds demanding fair hiring even though the board pastes on every available surface, “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” Nor did it object to the administration's hiring a home-ec teacher, one Ms. Linda Kipley, to the important job of head of Professional Standards, although you are probably as surprised as most people to discover that any college or university in the United States still graduates home-ec majors since most think that superannuated degree became extinct in the Diluvian Geological Era.
Kipley, as the head of Professional Standards, which should have a criminal justice or psychology degree, must have been the last graduate home-ec major from Saskatchawan Agricultural College. Just recently La Superintendent Elia hired Ms. Kipley's husband, who has no college degree much less the accounting degree the job description required. Other of the nineteen applicants did. But they weren't married to an Elia home-ec-degreed chum. The board didn't say a word to this torpedoing of the equal-opportunity board promise.
In addition to greed and crony hiring, Ms. Elia has trouble with punctuating and is vicious to the teachers. She springs things on them that affect their jobs and doesn't forewarn them. She cooks up cases against them if they utter a peep and sends them to Ms. Kipley's cell block of Professional Standards for the fun of seeing them humiliated and terrified that they will lose their job in a major economic downturn.
The board looked the other way while Ms. Elia downloaded an extra class on teachers without any warning or discussion. The board itself did not know this information except a couple of Elia's favorites. She as well forced teachers to accept a grade-inflation scheme in a surprise move that devalues students' grades and mars their chances of getting into a good university; this arrogance enraged teachers who felt that grade inflation diminished their professional dignity as well as disenfranchised their students. This scheme allegedly gave the superintendent more bonus money. The board looked on complacently.
Ms. Elia's latest stab at the teachers was her buying for millions of dollars--without consulting anything but her greed for the bonus signing-- an edu-machine gimcrack program called the Spring that hasn't worked other places and apparently replaces the expensive supplies of books on hand to be tossed. She told teachers nothing as usual, although it is they who must use this Spring device in the classroom.
The board apparently knew nothing of throwing millions of dollars at gimcrack edu-machinery, for Ms. Elia didn't let them in on this drain on the kitty but did send an email to teachers warning of a four percent budget shortfall. Ms. Elia seems inordinately delighted to send out to the nervous teachers news of yet another budget contretemps. When the board members finally learned of Ms. Elia's whopping outlay for the machine-learning purchase, one member popped up and said the administration should have a workshop on the device for the teachers, a suggestion that gives some flavor of the board's mental acuity: this board member, nor did any is my guess, realize that such a suggestion was closing the barn door after the livestock had exited since the contract already sat on the books thanks to Ms. Elia's alacrity for the bonus attending the Dr. Who device.
Mr. Crist has paid no attention to my request that he come down or send an emissary to examine the way the board and Ms. Elia mismanage the Hillsborough County school system. So I suggest you examine him more closely for his suitability before you pick him as your vice presidential partner.
If, God forbid, sir, something happens to you once you win in the landslide predicted by my husband, we will have a president a man who does not care a whit about malfeasance in the running of the schools in this or any county. We already have fallen behind even the performance of the students in Borneo and Lower Sri Lanka; lord knows what our national performance figures for schools will clock in as were Ms. Elia and the present board keep their jobs much longer.
Perhaps a hint from you would persuade Mr. Crist to stop dreaming of the vice presidency and start taking care of business here in Florida by coming to Tampa and insuring that a greedy superintendent and a feckless school board improve their louche running of the Tampa Bay Area's schools.
Yours respectfully,
Lee Drury De Cesare
15216 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
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