Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate

Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate

My husband and I watched Alafia parents streaming into the school board room at the December 9^th meeting.

They looked splendid in cobalt-blue tee-shirts with “Alafia” blazoned on the front. I hopped up to shake a few hands. I cheer brave people who challenge officials’ wrongdoing. We need them since officials who run things are often officials who are corrupt. Illinois governor Blogevich is not the only thug in public office.

My impression is that the people who run things at the school board do not run things honestly or well. Alafia’s parents revolt depends on that state of affairs.

These parents grappled with a principal, Ms. Smith, who did not have the goods to lead the school. Parents reported her to be dictatorial, negligent, and impervious to suggestions for improvement.

One parent emailed my blog to say that she was just like Ms. Elia. If so, say no more. My considered opinion is that Ms. Elia is a dictator who has negligible leadership ability. Her agenda is to ram through all the pay raises that she can for herself so as to retire with a sky-high pension from the tax kitty; meanwhile, she also sponsors projects that deprive teachers of dignity. She imposed with a quiescent board an extra class on teachers at the last minute with no extra pay. She forced teachers against their professional judgment to inflate grades to make her look better. She bought a $30-million-dollar Spring program to replace math and English books. Teachers had no part in selecting the program to replace books but would have to implement it.

Spring had failed in other venues and is failing in the county. More and more teachers don’t use it. Yet I hear that administrators now run around urging this or that teacher to teach a Spring lesson as show and tell for them because some big wig bureaucrat is coming around, and the administration wants to show him or her what a whiz bang program the Spring is and how teachers and students love it.

I would like to know what has happened to all those expensive math and science books.

Ms. Elia did not consider the cost to the district of replacing expensive text books with a gimcrack $30-million-dollar Spring program that does not work elsewhere. When She makes up her mind, it’s set in stone. The board is too gutless to oppose or, better, fire her.

Teachers can’t teach math and English with tinker toys thought up by people who want to gouge taxpayers by getting uninformed, headstrong superintendents who don’t check in with the board and consult with teachers before they sign on the dotted line to buy such stuff. Professional educators will rebel. They have in the county system I hear.

I have several times had people tell me or write me on my Casting-Room-Couch blog that Ms. Elia habitually curses underlings out in her office and makes lavish use of the “f” word. The volume of these tips has made me credit the information so that I have written Ms. Elia to confirm or deny the accusations. If I do not hear by next board meeting from the superintendent, I shall ask this question in the board public forum.

Citizens shouldn’t shrink from asking the administration and board such questions. Democracy demands that we keep track of people whom we elect. Too many become drunk with power the minute they achieve a perch in political office. So the public has the right and a duty to keep tabs on them. It pays their salaries and elects bodies like the school board. Democracy demands vigilance, or elected power thugs will take it away from citizens.

I had a little scuffle with the getting a question in to Ms. Falliero when she was chair about the adultery she conducted on school property with a Mr. Marc Hart, the previous head of Public Affairs.

Ms. Falliero gaveled me down and spat out “libel.” She succeeded at the next meeting in kicking me out of the board room with an ad hoc rule she cooked up with her lower-quartile bona fides. She ruled that I had violated board decorum by speaking a person’s name in my public comment.

Gonzalez sat on the podium and contemplated his cuticles as usual.

Pole Girl Faliero and the campus-police Jolly Green Giant cooked up a vignette beforehand, so when Pole Girl ruled me out of order and asked the Jolly one to escort me out of the board room, the big rascal did. The Green Giant glowered down at me in the lobby and threatened me with incarceration if I didn’t vacate the public property we stood on. I should have notified the Elder Abuse Council for Officer Jolly Green’s menacing an innocuous and helpless granny of advanced age.

Was I afraid during these exercises? No. Was I annoyed? Yes.

I subsequently had the ACLU come to instruct the board on free speech, and Ms. Falliero said that she “misspoke.” Mr. Gonzalez stopped contemplating his manicure and gave her a Romper Room version of the First Amendment and turned her loose again.

Ms. Valdez even had the grace to apologize for my experience. I got into the record subsequently Ms. Faliero’s shameless adultery that she had initiated by hanging out in Mr. Hart’s Public Affairs office with malice aforethought. She thus caused a dopey married man to divorce his wife and inflict pain and financial hardship for his two young children.

The gentleman came to my home and showed me the deposition of his divorce that nailed the Pole Girl solid. A school-board gavel has no power against the truth.

My belief is you don’t give in to the bullies. You come back for another round and continue the fight. And you don’t have to be big and strong to fight. You can make do with a big and strong mouth and a blog. Words have changed the world more than battles.

The Alafia parents are in a similar situation to mine described above with their current principal problem. I hear that Ms. Elia and her husband are friends with Ms. Smith and her husband, also a principal. My bet is that Ms. Elia took the patronage privilege that the feckless board ceded her while its members intone with their fingers crossed behind their backs, “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer, “ I envision that Elia hired Smith over lunch one day.

I infer the superintendent’s trip out to Alafia to confront the parents came from her buddyhood with Ms. Smith. I intuit that Elia didn’t care what outrages Smith had committed and that Elia felt nothing but antipathy to the Alafia protesting parents for their discommoding her and her buddy. Most of all she hated the press’s cataloguing the set-to.

Ms. Elia lusts for good press above all things except money. For Ms. Elia appearance is reality—or at least the reality that she wants to spoon-feed the public. She fears that if the public finds out what goes on behind the closed doors of ROSSAC that the board may have to fire her if its members want to keep their jobs. The administrators whom she has appointed without advertising the pricey jobs will go too, so they are in Elia’s camp big time.

La Elia can’t stand opposition to her whims. I think Alafia parents stunned her by standing their ground. For that I say hurrah. Ms. Elia is a bully who is used to rolling over people. The Alafia parents declined to be rolled over. I hear that the parents reduced Ms. Elia to sputtering silence a couple of times. Whoopee. And the best part is that since it was a public venue, our superintendent could not cuss out the parents and besprinkle them with the “F” word.

I was sorry the parents who appeared in the board room—I counted 12, terrific turnout since everybody is terrified to address the board—declined to go to the dais and speak their piece. I thought spokesperson Dunn’s comments were affable to the point of bordering on groveling. They lacked any grit at all. He lavishly praised Ms. Elia—for what he did not say-- and fell all over himself to say how eager everyone was to work with her. Le Dunn’s remarks had the airof les citoyens' telling Marie Antoinette, “Thank you for telling us to eat cake because we have no bread.”

If you paid attention to Ms. Elia’s lead-in comments about the situation before Mr. Dunn spoke, she lavished praise on Ms. Smith, insisting that the decision had been Smith's alone. Now that was a lie. The power of the parents' wrath along with Elia’s subsequent nudges and two board members' covert pressure was why Smith caved.

The parents, Ms. Elia implied, in clumsily oblique but biased commentary, had “caused a major distraction.” She claimed that there had been “misinformation, anger, and ugliness” on the blogs (one inferred this referred chiefly to the Alafia blog since I didn’t see any comments about it on the other blogs). If there is anything that Elia hates and also the board, it’s the hated blogs that just blab out the truth as they see it.

The blogs evade Ms. Elia’s spin dump to the public in order to pretty up the skullduggery that she presides over in the ROSSAC bunker. Mr. Hegarty, now head of Public Affairs after the board fired Mr. Hart to preserve Pole Girl Falliero’s reputation, is a man constitutionally slender, but after becoming Ms. Elia’s and the board’s spin machine working in overdrive, he has become the 98-pound-weakling of the Public Affairs Office.

Several times, Ms. Elia affirmed that had Ms. Smith not magnanimously resigned, she, Ms. Elia, was ready to “go through the process completely.” This process refers to the cotton-wadding-for-administrators process including the hourly $340--or was it $440?-- onsite “mentor,” a former Alafia principal, plus $4500 tuition for both Smith and her vice principal for a session at Eckerd to iron out the kinks in their personalities so that they can get along with the school population and parents. These two matriculants in Eckerd’s charm school attend seminars in things like not having the portables cleaned before ordering the children transferred into to them. They will master how to say “please” and “thank you” in the $9000 curriculum. They will wrestle with other esoteric stuff needed by a principal on how not to offend a large number of the parents of the children she is supposed to watch over by being rude to them and ignoring their complaints. This is esoteric stuff which only exceptional people know and a real bargain at $9000 especially in a county in which thousands of poor children can’t pay for supplies to join in class projects and will get coal in their stockings this Christmas.

The Tribune said Mr. Hegerty allowed that these were not the only efforts that Ms. Elia and the administration would make to salvage Ms. Smith’s job. He spoke expansively of committees and the like—whether funded or unfunded he did not mention. My guess is the former for there is nothing the board and administration like better than to throw tax money to the winds to fulfill the vagaries of the board and administration members or to satisfy their most fugitive and harebrained wishes.

I later heard that Ms. Griffin was observed talking with the parents at the board meeting. One of Griffin’s fans had written to blast me for not worshiping Ms. Griffin as she did and to reveal in triumph that Ms. Griffin and Pole-girl Falliero had conducted a deep-throat diplomatic mission to Ms. Smith and used the masterly psychology at which both are adepts to get La Smith to quit the Alafia principalship and go gently into that dark night of employment uncertainty, a feeling that now overwhelms over seven percent of America’s working people.

Ms. Griffin wants to be regarded as board savior but keep the five Elia proponents on the board propitiated. However, when Griffin teams up with one of Elia’s most fervent supporters and notorious Pole Girls to get Ms. Elia off the hook and protect the board franchise against the wrath of voters and especially Alafia parents, she attempts what even Disraeli would count as impossible. Griffin is caught between two worlds: one half dead, the other yet powerless to be born. She had better pick a side and work for it. She can’t straddle the public good and the board-administration advantage in this set-to.

The public needs to hear how the superintendent and the board handle the situation of a disastrous principal’s riling up a schools’ children’s parents. The public needs to hear of the lavish board-and administration-attempts to keep the principal in place despite the complaints. It also needs to be aware of the amount of tax money the board and administration are willing to fling away on the project for administration protection. The public needs information about the rituals of redemption conducted by Ms. Elia and her teams of review to save the job of what sounds like to me to be a lousy principal who not only needs to leave Alafia but to leave the system.

The public needs to compare this inanely solicitous treatment of an incompetent principal with instances of which I and most of the schools are aware of in which Ms. Elia and Professional-Standards sneak Linda Kipley team up to slam teachers and fire them for trifles.

Ms. Elia is a fluent liar. I saw that skill when I first met her at Tiger Bay after she and Cell Block Kipley teamed up to trap and fire media worker Bart Birdsall. The money piles strewn about by the administration that accompanies redemption rituals when an administrator is under the gun are nowhere to be seen in teachers’ cases.

The administrative thugs are right now trying to fire a teacher named Steve Kemp whom the leadership of the special-ed section threw into a classroom of severely retarded children with Kemp’s getting no training whatsoever for this challenge. The leaders who should have trained him instead filed a charge six days after they observed his trumped-up child abuse in the classroom, although they had left teacher Kemp in that role for six days despite the chiid-abuse charge. That logic would support leaving Jack the Ripper in a dark street clogged with ladies of the evening to continue his regimen.

My read on Steve’s crucifixion is that the special-ed supervisors found out that Steve has a blog that sometimes makes astringent remarks about the board and administration. Exercising his free-speech rights constitutes Steve’s crime that the special-ed incompetents didn't know for six days. They then got orders from Ms. Elia to discover a charge to file against Steve to fire him. I am sure Steve had been on Kipley and Elia's list for ages because of his blog. The three special-ed squealers all expect to get promotions and salary boosts from this villainy.

If Griffin can’t help the rotten status of the schools by discussing it on the podium for the sake of the open government that a democracy requires, she should not engage in stealth diplomacy teamed up with Pole Girl Falliero and should have no part in cajoling the Alafia parents not to speak at the board meeting so that the public can learn about the outrages that go on behind the scenes under the current leadership.

I want to attend the Alafia meeting on the 17^th to see if Elia can tame these Alafia parents or whether they will stand their ground. They should not tolerate Elia’s picking another unqualified pet for the Alafia principal post. She can busy herself finding a higher-paid position for Smith or inventing one—fulfilling the well-known schools’ adage that “When you mess up, you move up.”

If the Alafia parents let Ms. Elia snocker them when they stand on the border of a victory that will help the whole school system, I will feel regret every time I wear my Alafia tee-shirt that those brave parents were kind enough to give me when they showed up in full tee-shirt regalia on the 9^th in the Hillsborough County School board room. Lee

______________________________________________________________

Ms. Cobbe: I would like to know as public information the total spent thus far on the Alafia principal case. I would like to know the amounts spent on the similar cases of principal trouble mentioned in the Tribune article on the Alafia affair. I would like to know where the personnel or whatever department came up with the $440 figure for the previous Alafia’s principal’s “mentoring” of Ms. Smith. This principal makes more than a forensic criminal psychiatrist per hour. I would like to know how much money was spent by the administration in the Bart Birdsall case of two years ago. Thank you. ldd

___________________________

From: lee de cesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 1:31 PM
To: 'Grace.Ippolito@sdhc.k12.fl.us'
Cc: 'april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'susanvaldes@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jennifer.falliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Maryellen.elia@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Angie Manteiga'; 'Dan'; 'Lewis.Brinson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Gretchen.Saunders@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Wynne.Tye@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Cathy.Valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Connie.Milito@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'David.Steele@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Gwen.Luney@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Stephen.Hegarty@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Emily.mcbryar@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'renee.briggs@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'cmitseas@verizon.net'; 'letitiastein@sptimes.com'; 'danruth@sptime.com'; 'marilynbrown@tampatrib.com'; 'angiemanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com'
Subject: Ebenezer Scrooge fees

Ms. Ippolito:

According to the Tribune, you have been doing Ms. Smith’s coaching after the Alafia parent complaints for a whopping $340 or is it $440 an hour. What, pray tell me, entitles you to an hourly pay that exceeds that of the most erudite psychiatrist trained in the forensics of pathological relationships? Who came up with this amount?

Is that the figure you cited for your services, or did the administration come up with it?

How do you feel about there being thousands of poor children in the county who can’t participate in class because they can’t afford the supplies and who will now have a dreary Christmas because their parents can’t afford enough food much less presents?

Merry Christmas,

Lee Drury De Cesare

To Subject Sent Size Categories
'april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'susanvaldes@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jennifer.falliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Maryellen.elia@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; RE: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate. 8:35 PM 40 KB

From: lee de cesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 8:35 PM

To: 'april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'susanvaldes@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jennifer.falliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Maryellen.elia@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Dan'; 'Lewis.Brinson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Gretchen.Saunders@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Wynne.Tye@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Cathy.Valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Connie.Milito@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'David.Steele@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Gwen.Luney@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Stephen.Hegarty@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Emily.mcbryar@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'renee.briggs@sdhc.k12.fl.us'
Cc: 'letitiastein@sptimes.com'; 'marillynbrown@tribune.com'; 'Angie Manteiga'
Subject: RE: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate":

Lee-

It makes me ill that Mrs. Smith will now be awarded a posh position downtown with her ROSSAC pals doing who knows what. Why, why, why is it tolerable to harass and worse mere teachers when they either exhibit a flaw, run afoul of the wrong administrator,or rub someone with clout the wrong way by simply telling the truth in publics forums while a principal who very obviously is a shining example of "The Peter Principle" and almost destroys a school is rewarded for the willing incompetence and refusal to just do her job?????
pollyanna

I have a hunch Kemp will make it as Bart Birdsall did when Elia and Kipley cooked up a case on Bart’s for using the emails for political purposes, which he had not done. I think Elia did not want the schools to have the reputation of being hospitable to gays, so that is at the bottom of why she and Kipley lied up a case against Bart. This was right after Elia entered the office, so I infer she also wanted to show her County buddy Pat Bean an example of her power since this involved Bart’s sending messages to the county library head, a gay like Bart, about his helping to implement Ronda Storms’s ordinance that made the library off limits to gays.

These are not nice people we are dealing with.

Steve Kemp is smart, so the school system is lucky to have him as are the students. The special ed-supervisors who charged him with child abuse should have a Professional Standards case lodged against them since they threw him in a class of severely retarded youngsters and gave him no instruction. His field is learning disabled. Here is his explanation of his specialty. Lee

One thing I want to be clear about is my certification. My certification is in special education; however, there are specialties within special education. My specialty is teaching students with learning disabilities. These students are normal except they have problems reading, writing, and communicating in general.

Think of special education as a continuum with the least disabled students on one end and the most disabled students on the other end. My specialty is with students on the least disabled end of the continuum. However, the class that caused the problem was for severely mentally handicapped students. These students are on the most disabled end of the continuum. They require that teachers receive special training.

Another way to think of it can be demonstrated by thinking of physicians. All doctors are physicians just as all educators are teachers. There are specialties within medicine such as brain surgery. A brain surgeon is a physician with special training. If a family physician were to help in brain surgery having received no training, he or she would make a mistake eventually. Likewise, a learning disabilities teacher that goes into a class of severely mentally handicapped students with no training will make a mistake eventually.

I want you to have accurate information in my case so I wanted to clarify this. From your writing, I got the impression that you thought I was not a special education teacher and that is not true. I am a special education teacher but I teach students on the least disabled end of the continuum. My training is with students that have difficulty with language. I do not have experience or training with students that are severely mentally handicapped.

The administrators should not have placed me in a severely mentally handicapped class without providing me training in that area. They needed to replace an experienced aid that was burned out and refused to return to the class. Rather than finding someone experienced, Sosa grabbed me and threw me in the class. They were in a difficult situation by not having someone else available and I paid the price.

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 6:49 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate.

BTW-- Whats the status on Steve Kemp? He seems to be quite a guy and probably a pretty good teacher, too.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 9:07 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate":

How can Ippolito take the kind of money she was offered and be an ethical person? How can she accept $340 or whatever per hour to mentor a principal? That is a joke. Yet another unethical person working in the schools.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 6:06

PM

I am thinking rotten potatoes. They smell awful. lee

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 10:04 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate":

Too bad we can't throw tomatoes and radishes at the school board! I bet in places like Italy you can.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 7:04 PM