The Plot Thickens

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 11:16 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on The Latest on the Rossac Attempted Crucifixion of ....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Latest on the Rossac Attempted Crucifixion of ...":

For the most part, our school district is twisted and has been for some time now. Numerous unstable individuals are promoted for the wrong reasons. Bullies run rampant. Communication between different departments is mediocre at best. (Some say it is at an all-time low and the worst they have ever experienced.) Still, I wonder about the few "good ones" that do exist. Are they recognizing what's happening? If so, are they comfortable while remaining silent? It could simply be they are afraid of the possible retaliation they too might face by the higher-ups at ROSSAC? After all, no one can be quite sure what a power-hungry, back-stabbing, toxic administration is truly capable of. If Goader does go down, then let it be the most public, transparent attack possible. I too suggest he starts a fund to support a lawsuit should they get away with it. I would definitely contribute. Ultimately, coercive fear-based power strategies are doomed to fail, as the dysfunction eventually takes over everything.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 8:16 PM

Casting-room Couch Reader:

The board does not know what is going on in the schools and does not care. It cares about the board podium as stage for its drama of See-How-Important-I-Am agitprop. It cares about settling new travel guidelines now that its profligate use of tax money to gad about has come to light. It cares about board snide exchanges between the chair, Polegirl Faliero, whom the board appointed despite knowing of her adultery on school property and on administration trips that broke up a home and will cause the two young children of her paramour life-long psychic pain. Board members care about their pose in the community of being patrons of education and such la-de-da posturing.

Patrons of education, my foot. I’d like to know what worthy book board members are presently reading. They would be like Palin if some intrepid reporter posed that question to them. But there are no intrepid reporters any more. The print press is now in suspended animation because its business is yielding to the onslaught of the Web. Blogs are rapidly replacing print press. Reporters are timid about even breathing much less asking a question for fear they will lose their fading jobs. Anybody with a lick of business sense could have intuited that the print press is a goner.

I believe that the last set-to between Griffin and Chair Pole Girl had to do with a conference Griffin lusted to attend despite its falling outside the new for-show abstemious guidelines. I am glad it did not get approval. Griffin has more urgent business to attend on her home turf. Griffin has not even a bachelor’s degree. Instead of gadding about on the taxpayer dime to conferences where education bureaucrats exchange stale information in sentences whose subjects and verbs don’t agree, she should sign up for night classes at USF and work toward her degree if she is so eager for education.

You can’t lead a school system with validity unless you know the history of the Western world, some of its literature, some of its philosophy, a passing acquaintance with its art and architecture, a modicum of information about the Greeks, and how to write a literate page of prose. I doubt that Griffin can illustrate these bona fides of the educated person ready to lead the schools of a county.

Pole Girl Board Chair Faliero had to get editing help for a page of vitriol she addressed to the Tribune. She alleges she has a USF degree. I shall write the president Genshaft and ask her how come USF graduates people who can’t write a letter-to-the-editor without editing assistance.

And as chair, the resident Pole Girl didn’t bother to master Roberts Rules, so she made a spectacle of herself stumbling around as chair and using the gavel instead of invoking the rules to guide the discussion. And God forbid it occur to Pole Girl to query layabout board attorney Gonzalez about which rule applied. He hasn’t argued a case before the Supreme Court, but he should at least know Robert’s Rules. His firm has had the board sinecure for 37 years on a good-ol-Bay-Area-boy handshake. The board lacks the guts and the smarts to fire Mr. Gonzalez and open up the job to other Bay Area attorneys who would not spend their board duty examining their cuticles

If there were ever a potent illustration of the board’s not caring about anything but its petty squabbles and posturing, let one call attention to the fact that a couple of days ago a board member had not heard about the Buchenwald Professional Standards Office’s charges against Stephen Kemp, a sociology teacher, soas to deprive him of his job. Here’s the précis of the situation written by Mr. Kemp alluding to his restraining a special-needs students after he was left to take care of a room of such students by himself:


There was no orientation for summer school and I received no training in dealing with students who are severely or profoundly mentally handicapped. My area of expertise is in teaching students with learning disabilities. This is a totally different area of special education compared to teaching students with severely or profoundly mental handicaps.


It is analogous to specialties in the medical field. A brain surgeon is a physician as is a family physician, but you would not expect a family physician to be familiar with brain surgery. Brain surgery is a specialty field for physicians.


Likewise, teaching severely or profoundly mentally handicapped students is a specialty field for special education teachers. I had no, nor did anyone offer, training in teaching severely or profoundly mentally handicapped students.


Therefore, unbeknownst to me at the time, the department head and principal had no business placing me in a severely or profoundly mentally handicapped class.

This is the kind of under-the-radar execution that the Professional Standards gulag carries out to keep teachers and staff in terror of losing their jobs. Ms. Elia doesn’t tolerate a whiff of criticism of the way she runs this outlier of Buchenwald. The superintendent lusts for good press. Anybody who criticizes her or the administration eventually goes to Professional Standards. Kemp has a blog under the name of Goader. He has criticized the way the schools run. Hence, he has for ages been on a “Trap Him for Firing” list. The Professional Standards thugs were bound to trap him sooner or later.

The supervisor who tossed teacher Kemp in this situation should be the one who should have his or her job in jeopardy, not Kemp. Yet the Auschwitz Professional Standards cell run by Home-ec Camp Warden Kipley rushed to file charges that will cost the teacher his job post-haste without any publicity of the situation if Ms. Elia has her way. The firing is planned to go on under the radar before anybody knows about it—or will admit to knowing about it. The ultimate board-ROSSAC device to escape responsibility for doing board members’ and administrators’ jobs is pretend lack of knowledge of the horrors unfolding in plain view. That method was the fall-back device during the several years that the crucifixion of Mr. Erwin was unfolding.

One of the board members who sat on the board and tolerated the Erwin crucifixion without intervening was Dr. Jack Lamb, whose board chair bottom is covered with lichen so long has he occupied it. Instead of asking for a full report on the teacher Kemp impending firing, Le Jack nominates a second board member for chair to compete with Susan Valdes, who is not one of the board Potted Plant team that automatically rubberstamps anything Ms. Elia puts before it. Valdes is due the chair job that Gonzalez after someone wrings the gavel from the hand of Pole Girl Faliero.

I must remember to ask Dr. Lamb for his thesis so that if it is illiterate or shows infalliable signs of being bought and paid for, I can wade into the USF administration enablers of illiteracy for handing out EDDs to academic dingdongs.

The police by accident left the name of the squealer who turned in Goader on its report that it sent to Kemp. He declines to release the name.

Doggone.

If you want to get a copy of the report, it is public information and housed at the Ybor City Police Department. Then you can tell me the name. Will I post it on this blog? Gentlepeople, is the Pope Catholic?

This missive has been sent to all board members and all administration members
lee