An Elia Attempt to Cover Her Warts with Money Stolen from the Teachers

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Superintendent: 42K bonus to charity

Hillsborough Superintendent MaryEllen Elia is donating her $42,438 bonus to charity this year.

As school budget cuts loom, Elia sent out a simple memo Friday notifying School Board members that she has donated an amount equal to her full performance pay. She said she gave the money to the Hillsborough Education Foundation for teacher initiatives and to other local groups that support students and schools.

The bonus, part of Elia's contract, is based on more than a dozen student and school performance measures. She earned about 5,000 more this year than in the last, when she did not donate the money.

The performance pay comes on top of her annual salary of about 258,000.


-- Letitia Stein, Times Staff Writer

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Posted by Ziggy to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 2:10 PM


That Ms. Elia donated her “performance” pay to Hillsborough Education Foundation must come from her sense of guilt that the performance pay she has been getting is for the performance gimmick that Dr. Lennard thought up, the board adopted, and Ms. Elia seized after the board hired her over better candidates. The purloined “bonus” is attached to the degree to which of the teachers raise the students’ scores. The raising of students' performance comes from nothing that Ms. Elia has done; the teachers' work with students raises students' performance score. Ms. Elia and the board steal it from them.

This idea originated when Earl the Pearl Lennard held the job before Ms. Elia and who was almost as greedy as she. He, one must recall, is the superintendent who presided over the crucifixion of Mr. Erwin, who tried to inform the administration and board of ongoing theft in the schools but to no avail. But the board and administration did want to be informed of the theft: that to them was just the cost of doing business so that they could keep their overpaid jobs and power to dispense money that the state sent them for the teachers and student enrollment.

The board and Dr. Lennard and his crooked administration thugs crucified Mr. Erwin and tried to fire him without pay when he kept telling them about the theft and asking that they do something about it. When Mr. Erwin finally gave up hope of the board and the administration’s responding to his pleas after several years, he invited reporters up on the top of a newly built school and showed them the holes in the roof; he then filed a whistle blower charge against the board with a private attorney. Mr. Erwin, praise be to God, won the case and a settlement of $175,000. He fled to Georgia away from his tormenters into retirement.

I have had a letter from Mr. Erwin and his wife thanking those of us who hold the board and Ms. Elia’s feet to the fire. He did it as long as his health and nerves would allow. We must keep up Mr. Erwin’s work and labor to see that the Hillsborough County board has good people on it for a change and that they have the good of the schools as first on their agenda, not obeying Ms. Elia’s malignant orders that harm the schools.

Ms. Elia conducts business in the same unethical manner that Lennard did with the board’s supine complicity. Three of the board members who were on the board when Mr. Erwin was being abused and who refused to help him by pretending they did not understand what was going on are still on the board: Carol Kurdell, Jack Lamb, and Candy Olson. They continue to work hand in glove with Ms. Elia to deprive the students and teachers their proper place at the center of the schools’ concerns. They refused to respond to my request to give students and teachers a place on the board agenda to express their views.

New Members April Griffin and Susan Valdes have shown their demonstration of melding with the other board members by refusing to answer my email to them to give students and teachers a place on the board agenda so that they express their opinions on the running of the schools. All of this board is solidly behind the administration and does not challenge anything Ms. Elia does that is harmful to the students and the teachers.

This bonus money with which Ms. Elia is trying to buy herself some positive publicity since her public image has deteriorated recently as the public has slowly learned of the way she with board collusion runs the schools should properly go to the teachers. They, not Ms. Elia earned it.

Ms. Elia has disrespected the teachers and made their lives harder in the last couple of years by 1. Imposing an extra class on them without warning and without their consent but with the board’s silent collusion; 2. Forcing teachers to practice grade inflation to make her record look better but which harms students’ chances of getting into good schools and injures teachers’ sense of professionalism; 3. Buying a gimcrack program called Spring to replace math and English books with government funds without consulting with teachers or apparently with the board despite the teachers’ having to implement this program that has failed in other venues and is now not being adopted by many teachers in the county classrooms. This waste of tax money in times of economic hardship shows Ms. Elia’s and the board’s lax handling of public funds and their ineptitude in managing.

It is the duty of a vigilant press to report where Ms. Elia’s gift to the Education Foundation came from: it was extracted from the teachers of Hillsborough County who raised student scores but which the board handed over to Ms. Elia to bloat her already bloated salary.

Lee Drury De Cesare

C: Education Foundation