The Beat Goes On

I bet Ziggy is really Kipley's husband or Cobbe....it is someone with a desire to tell you that you are wrong which is fine, except that she misses the whole point and ignores the issue of the ROSSAC officials acting like a bunch of crooks and the school board looking the other way.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 4:15 AM

I have to give Ziggy credit for being relentless. He is also smart. He sticks to his subject and never veers from it. Such types can rule the world if they stay on message. Ziggy is the student who sat in the back of the class and asked irrelevant questions to throw you off your stride when you were trying to teach a resistant class with their eyes glazed over about dangling modifiers. But I will never succumb to the harassment of a fellow who has no better sense than to adopt the nom de plume of Ziggy. Le Ziggy demonstrates no talent for lethal diction. lee

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 7:16 AM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on The Moon Is in Its Bring-Out-the-Dopey-Twits Phase....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Moon Is in Its Bring-Out-the-Dopey-Twits Phase...":

Dear Secretary of Education Smith:

I solicit your assistance in regard to what I believe to be gross negligence on the part of the Hillsborough County School board in a matter of hiring.

The board claims it subscribes to and fulfills its duty to maintain equal-opportunity practices. It blazons everywhere “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer.”

Yet the board allows Superintendent MaryEllen Elia to hire friends and sycophants to high-level administrative jobs without advertising these jobs as Title VII and federal funds require.

The board even tolerates Ms. Elia’s inventing jobs for buddies. For example, Dr. James Hamilton was recently due to retired but apparently was not ready to leave comfort and perquisites of employment in the school system. So Ms. Elia invented him a job with a fancy title and a salary of $140,000 a year. A clerk told me that Ms. Elia attached Dr. Hamilton’s name to the job before it was put on the books. She conducted no advertising for it.

When Dr. Hamilton recovered his nerves sufficient to face the terrors of retirement, the soothing way this transition occurred was that Ms. Elia invented him another job as lobbyist in Tallahassee for, I believe, $65,000 a year. With this perquisite, Dr. Hamilton joins the board’s two double dippers Dr. Lamb and Ms. Edgecombe in getting both pensions and salaries in the school system.

It is worth noting that Ms. Elia, according to my open-records inquiry to the Public Affairs Office, did away with the temporary $140,000 fancy-titled job when Dr. Hamilton left it.

The board’s lack of vigilance let both jobs slip by on the Consent Calendar without an open discussion for the benefit of citizens’ right to open government. Citizens deserved to see that Ms. Elia’s needs study for the Hamilton boutique jobs received board review and that the board gave its approval or denial of the Hamilton-specific jobs and satisfied itself that Ms. Elia had done the advertising of the job required from an equal-employment-opportunity employer.

I have three times brought up the impropriety if not illegality of Ms. Elia’s using tax money to create jobs for Dr. Hamilton during citizens’ comment time to the board.

Its members receive these inquiries with glassy-eyed incomprehension and ignore them.

Thus, Dr. Hamilton remains in his Tallahassee lobbying job.

This situation is interesting on the personal level as well. Dr. Hamilton guided Connie Mileto into the job of Information Officer for the schools past qualified candidates when La Mileto had only kindergarten credentials. So La Mileto now works in Tallahassee. The talk of the schools at the time of this feat of promotion of an unqualified candidate was Dr. Hamilton’s wife’s divorce of him. She had been a principal in the schools and a good one according to the reputation she left behind.

I would like the Office of the School Superintendent for Florida to examine this job-creation for Dr. Hamilton and the board’s toleration of it and inform me whether it is legal or illegal. And if it is, as I suspect, illegal, I request that your office take the necessary measures to correct it.

Meanwhile, I shall ask the Public Affairs Office for a summary of Dr. Hamilton’s work product as lobbyist. Dr. Hamilton will have to hire a secretary to do any writing for him because he has trouble with the English language although he got a Ph.D. from the University of Florida, where, I believe you received your terminal degree as well. Dr. Hamilton stumbles with markers of literacy: he is, for example, unable to differentiate between the homophones “your” and “your.”

Sooner or later I must write a citizen inquiry to the president of the University of Florida and ask him to determine if the thesis committee that passed Dr. Hamilton’s thesis goofed off when its members passed it. A person with an iota of caution would have suspected that the thesis came from a paid ghost.

Respectfully,

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

Leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

C: Hillsborough County Board Members

Governor Crist

All members of the Hillsborough County Legislative delegation

Ms. Cobbe:

Dr. Hamilton has been on the job for some months now up in Tallahassee lobbying.

Please send me copies of his work product during this tenure in the capital.

Thank you.

Lee Drury De Cesare