Where in the Hell Is the Crusading Press When You Need It?

When Jennifer Falliero first became chair, she called me "Ms. De Ville" from the podium after I had exposed her school-site adultery with Marc Hart. I was flattered by the comparison and am going to see if I can get me an outfit like the one that Glen Close wears in the picture. I also want the cat. lee

Anonymous said...

Lee,

Smiley is the Area 5 ESE Specialist - not the area director (unless your info is more current). Sosca doesn't appear in the directory. What is Morris's first name?

Wherever Smiley perches in the administrative hierarchy, he is a rat fink. I have found out from Goader that the complaint against him went to the Sheriff's Department, not the Ybor City Police Department. Maybe Sosca's not appearing in the directory is a good omen. I don't know Morris's first name but am working on it.

The Alafia parents are up in arms about the principal. They are rumbling about showing up at tomorrow's board meeting and raising Cain. I plan to raise a little Cain myself, but other people's Cain is more entertaining.

I am going early to get a good seat. lee

2:29 PM

An elf of the Minions of the Light has filled us in. lee

Database last updated: 11/30/2008.
Name	DOE #	District	Certification	Type	Validity Period
Sosa, Claudine Ann	748623	Hillsborough	Emotionally Handicapped, (grades K - 12)	Professional	7/1/2007 - 6/30/2012
Sosa, Claudine Ann	748623	Hillsborough	English To Speakers Of Other Languages (esol), Endorsement	Professional	7/1/2007 - 6/30/2012
Morris, Sharon G	543064	Hillsborough	Educational Leadership, (all Levels)	Professional	7/1/2004 - 6/30/2009
Morris, Sharon G	543064	Hillsborough	English To Speakers Of Other Languages (esol), Endorsement	Professional	7/1/2004 - 6/30/2009
Morris, Sharon G	543064	Hillsborough	Mentally Handicapped, (grades K - 12)	Professional	7/1/2004 - 6/30/2009
Morris, Sharon G	543064	Hillsborough	Specific Learning Disabilities, (grades K - 12)	Professional	7/1/2004 - 6/30/2009
Smiley, Ron Warren	799937	Hillsborough	Educational Leadership, (all Levels)	Professional	7/1/2006 - 6/30/2011
Smiley, Ron Warren	799937	Hillsborough	Elementary Education, (grades K - 6)	Professional	7/1/2006 - 6/30/2011
Smiley, Ron Warren	799937	Hillsborough	English To Speakers Of Other Languages (esol), Endorsement	Professional	7/1/2006 - 6/30/2011
Smiley, Ron Warren	799937	Hillsborough	Varying Exceptionalities, (grades K - 12)	Professional	7/1/2006 - 6/30/2011
Kemp, Mark S	901930	Hillsborough	Exceptional Student Education, (grades K - 12)	Professional	7/1/2006 - 6/30/2011
Kemp, Mark S	901930	Hillsborough	Social Science, (grades 6 - 12)	Professional	7/1/2006 - 6/30/2011
Kemp, Michael Steven	654997		Business Education, (grades 6 - 12)	Professional	7/1/2006 - 6/30/2011
Kemp, Michael Steven	654997		Educational Leadership, (all Levels)	Professional	7/1/2006 - 6/30/2011
Kemp, Michael Steven	654997		School Principal, (all Levels)	Professional	7/1/2006 - 6/30/2011

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2008 6:36 AM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Second Call for Public Information.

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 3:36 AM

Ms. Cobbe in the Public Affairs Office is pretty good about getting what you ask for. Sometimes you have to repeat the request, but that’s life.

Cobbe should have got the top job after Marc Hart when the administration kicked him out to save Falliero’s “reputation.”

As far as I can determine, Cobbe is the only one in the ROSSAC building who can punctuate. She also had the experience requirement for the job that Hegarty lacked.

But Ms. Elia was dumb enough to hire Hegarty, who can’t punctuate himself out of a paper bag and did not have the requisite experience. (I examined all the applications.)

Elia thought a former St. Pete Times reporter would get her better press. That’s a clumsy psychological read. The reporters left behind are likely to hate Steve’s guts because he deserted them and makes twice what they do. Steve makes $101,000 after two years on the job despite being unable to punctuate himself out of a paper bag. He also has trouble stringing a coherent paragraph together as his attempted ghost writing for Ms. Elia after he first got the job shows.

Elia appears to have found somebody more literate now to write her lugubrious, covertly threatening memos to the teachers of their impending job loss in her periodic broadsides to keep the field-hand pedagogues fearful and thus docile about how lucky they are to have her to fight for their raises (2 percent for teachers; 9 percent for administrators, with the base salaries of each making the teachers’ raises pitiful and the administrators’ opulent.)

Steve also sealed his capture of the top job in Public Affairs by being a press sycophant when he was covering the county schools; and after the Times moved him somewhere else, he kept up contact with several of the administrators.

This fellow may not be able to punctuate, but he is adept at brown-nosing.

Marc Hart is the only administrator--now defrocked--whom I know of who had a valid degree from a respectable college from which he graduated magna cum laude if I remember correctly. I have forgotten the college name for sure, but I believe Hart graduated from Loyola. Steve, I wager, graduated from Saskatchewan Agricultural College with a major in bee keeping. lee

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 3:36 AM

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Second Call for Public Information":

He [Valdez] won't give you what you need. The district officials blatantly BREAK THE LAW everytime someone asks for public information. They simply ignore all such requests. Then, if someone calls them on it they simply claim they never received it. Everyone down at the ROSSAC building are liars, cheats, and criminals!

Publish this comment.

Ah, be of good cheer, Anonymous Minion of the Light. Mr. Valdez does not want me to leaflet state officials’ mailboxes and emails with complaints about his ignoring the public-records law. He may be evil, but he’s not dumb. And he wants to make it to his pension paradise, which is the Riviera from the prospect of his opulent tax-supported pension. Lee

PS: I usually start the complaint lament with emails to the entire legislative delegation, then throw darts at a state-official map to select subsequent recipients.

Where in the Hell Is the Crusading Press When You Need it?

Mr. Tash, I see the Tribune Company owning the Chicago Tribune and LATimes is in danger of bankruptcy. Its revenues had a double-digit decline over the last year as more ads have transferred to the Internet.

Then my husband told me (he reads the SPT) that he got a bill giving him a 25 percent deduction for paying his yearly fee now. “Why such a generous break?” I asked. “My guess is that the paper may have a liquidity problem,” he said.

The which is what I have spoken about before. You should have a livelier paper that people want to continue to read and not switch to the blogs. And this brings me to my personal interest in your paper’s columns on the Hillsborough County School Board.

The Times does not cover the schools with any degree of seriousness and God forfend liveliness. It takes its copy from the ROSSAC Public Affairs spinners and prints it undiluted. And reporters sitting in the board meetings and take notes and print columns as dull as dust about the cover-up that passes as a board meeting.

Why in the world don’t you untie the hands of your reporter on that beat and let her report the struggles that exist in the school system? People like to read about strife. And the community should know about the robber-baron leadership of the schools. That would be well read and passed around town.

Ms. Elia’s main interest is bloating her salary (now $300,000) as high as possible to retire with a pension that will fill a Publix basket. She is vindictive toward anyone—especially teachers-- who criticizes her clumsy performance as superintendent and sets the Professional Standards office on them, first to tag the teacher for observation until he or she trips up on some minutiae that Professional Standards can use to haul him or her in for mind games to terrorize the poor wretch and fire the victim if possible.

These stories are replicas of the crucifixion done on Mr. Erwin twenty years ago. The administration gangs up on anybody who does not bow down to the superintendent’s wishes, not matter how whacky, and destroys the person if possible before firing him or her. The only coverage the papers gave the Irwn case was when he rebelled, hired an attorney, and won his case and a settlement under the Whistleblower law. They were mum during the several years that the administration was shooting barbs at him, hoping he would slowly bleed to death. Erwin kept reporting crime in the schools to his supervisors, and they kept giving him the runaround because, one infers, they considered such crime just the cost of doing business so that they could keep their bloated-pay featherbed jobs and the power of handing out the millions of dollars that the state sent the board.

The same ethos exists today. Carol Kurdell, whom the SPT endorsed against Steve Gorham, was a board member during the Erwin debacle, and, like all the potted-plant board members, pretended she didn’t know what was going on. She must have. Contractors that build shoddy schools that leaked like sieves must have been paying off the board. My question is this: Didn’t one of the editors interviewing her ask what she did during the Erwin saga of crime and collusion?

This fulsome introduction is preface to my asking you to let Letitia Stein, your reporter, investigate and report on the retaliation case on teacher Steve Kemp. Steve has a blog on which he criticizes the schools under the pseudonym of “Goader.” My hunch is that the administration has long been lying in wait to find something on which to nail him for something for which he must run the Professional Standards gauntlet. I attach an email to the personnel guy that gives a picture of the case.

Do I have to apologize to you again for calling you a chachectic ectomorph? Are you so small as to hold grudges against the wife of one of your faithful readers who paid his yearly bill when y’all asked him for it? Are you so sunk into an amour proper huff as not to cover crucifixions of Hillsborough County teachers because you are pouting about a whimsical metaphor? Go to! Mr. Tash, as some realist is always saying in Shakespeare when such situations arise.

Unshackle Letitia Stein, your education reporter, and let her cover the Steve Kemp situation. Blogs say Alafia parents are revving up to come this Tuesday night to the meeting to lace into the board about their principal. But I hope Letitia does not get mesmerized by that ruckus and forget about Kemp’s case. She will not if you tell her not to. And let her write in a livelier style than is her wont. I am sure the editors all tamp down any rhetorical flourishes the reporters put in their pieces. That’s why people are moving to the Internet for news. The blogs are full of vivid diction and agons of all sort described with flair. You newspaper biggies mistake dullness for dignity. People don’t want to read about life couched in moribund diction and oblique references to the problems. They want some blood and guts. Step back and let Stein provide some on the school system in Hillsborough County, the young woman’s beat.

I have given up on the Tribune. Everybody is so terrified there of losing their jobs that they won’t write doodly squat. The Times has enough revenue steam because of its unorthodox financial situation to let reporters loose so as to attract more readers and give the public the stories from behind the scenes that the Public Affairs rackets hide at political fastnesses such as the school board.

Lee Drury De Cesare


Mr. Valdez:


I have received no information on my public-information query about the charge of child abuse against Steve Kemp.


I am especially interested in the responsibility of Ms. Soca and Ms. Morris, his supervisors., and Mr. Smiley, the area director, who colluded in filing the charge with the Ybor City police against Kent.


These three supervisors placed Kemp in a Severely, Profoundly Mentally Handicapped classroom without offering or providing him any prior training. Such placement required that an aide working there needed prior training, and Supervisors Morris, Sosca, and Smiley knew that to be the case.


I repeat again my public-information request for the job descriptions of the three supervisors: Ms. Morris, Ms. Sosca, and Mr. Smiley. I ask again for the area’s procedures manual’s description of the need for the teacher working in an area of severely mentally handicapped children to receive instruction from responsible supervisors before being placed in the area.

I ask for a transcript of the deliberations that required six days for the charge to be filed by Ms. Sosca, Ms. Morris, and Mr. Smiley. I ask for the written explanation of why, if Mr. Kemp were such a threat to the children he cared for in the classroom, that Ms. Morris, Ms. Sosca, and Mr. Smiley left him in that classroom for the six days they mulled filing charges against him.
I ask for the rationale for restraining such children on the buses but not in the classroom. I ask who was supposed to remove the harnesses from the bus-restrained children in the classroom but did not in this case.

I ask for email and written records referring to this case, especially including those of Ms. MaryEllen Elia and Ms. Linda Kipley. They were the two who plotted a professional-standards case against my friend and school employee Bart Birdsall in order to terrify him into silence with the implicit threat of termination so that he would not again use his right to free speech in commenting on gay rights in the community.


Mr. Kemp, I am sure, waives his right to privacy for me to have this information; I will ask him to certify my right as a citizen to have these data I request if you require it.


C: All board members
All senior administration