The "Poor Communication" Racket

Read Marilyn Brown's piece on Elia's constant lament of "we have to improve" when another is failure-to-communicate catches up with her. It's on TBO.

Brown does her usual good job of detailing the time-after-time series of this strategic Elia excuse to mislead the easily fooled board members, who never call her up on this failure to inform people who need the information that she hoards. The board members are too lazy or too intimidated to make Elia catalog the number of times she has failed to inform people.

This deliberate misleading by Elia is strategic, not accidental. Knowledge is power. The people who know what is going on have the power. Those who don't are at a huge disadvantage. Elia knows this and uses the deliberate deprivation of information as part of her hoarding of power.

I got a whiff of Elia's excluding even the board members on the Spring deal when April Griffin suggested holding a workshop for the teachers when the teachers raised a belated ruckus about Elia's not informing them about the Spring since teachers were on the hook to implement Elia's secret buy. Elia must not have informed even the board of her $30 million purchase on its watch. Otherwise, why would Griffin make the dumb suggestion to have a teacher workshop on the Spring when Elia had already signed the contract, making the board liable for the tab for this excessively expensive program that allows Elia to "earn" more bonus points? Griffin, unfortunately, lacked the moxie to call Elia to account on this lapse of failing to keep the board up to date on her sucking the taxpayers into a $30 million commitment whose chief purpose was to expand Elia's bonus possibilities.

The problem in this failure to communicate goes back to the board. The board lets Elia get away with this scam of information-is-power-so-hoard-it. If the board raised this issue in a public school-board forum and made Elia defend herself and made clear that board members expect her to share information or get fired, she would share information. Elia wants to keep her job to run up the retirement tab that taxpayers will be stuck with when she finally, mercifully leaves.

But the board vote is now 4 to 2 against holding Elia accountable for her actions in this and in other mismanagement decisions. The two for sharing information are Griffin and Valdes. The other five--Kurdell, Falliera, Edgecomb, Lamb, and Olson--are in Elia's pocket and enemies of the taxpayers, the teachers, and the students. These five board members don't see any loyalty as important except their blind loyalty to Elia. Let's hope Steve Gorham beats Kurdell. That would give a 4-3 profile with only four being blindly obedient to Elia.

Make no mistake that Elia knows that knowledge is power. That is why she makes all these moves to hoard it with the shopworn excuse of, "Well, I could have done a better job and will do so in the future." She deliberately does not do a better job.

Elia has no intentions of sharing information until the board puts her job on the line for chronically withholding vital data. Elia is not smart in academics; but she is crafty in pulling the wool over the board's eyes, and the board is too lazy or too enamoured of a system that gives its participants the chance to preen and not do vital homework by reading all the data that applies to the board job. These reluctant scholars of the high purpose of board duty cost the taxpayers, the teachers, and the student and effective school system. lee

c: All School Board Members
Marilyn Brown, Letitia stein, Paul Tash, rosemary goudreau, and Patrick Manteiga