Cable Guy has the Yuletide spirit. lee
From: cable guy [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 9:13 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.
cable guy has left a new comment on your post "Alafia Parents Step Up to the Plate":
Let's get multicultural: throw shoes!
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Posted by cable guy to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 6:13 PM
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com] Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 12:04 AM 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":
Ms. De Cesare, I have found numerous inaccuracies in your criticisms of the school district:
1) You often criticize Ms. Elia for "purchasing" the SpringBoard program for $30 million. SpringBoard, part of the CollegeBoard's EXCELerator program, was paid for via federal grant money. Elia didn't dish out a single cent for the program. And since Elia "purchasing" the SpringBoard program without board intervention is one of your biggest criticisms of her, you'll have to think up another lie to get your readers riled up.
Prized Reader: Since when is “federal grant money” not tax money? Are you writing me from the lower quartile of the IQ breathalyzer? All citizens pay for that federal-grant money. And it is going to be scarcer since Bush called off the regulators and left the greedy guts on Wall Street to cook up derivative instruments to steal us blind. And since when does a superintendent have the right to fritter away $30 million of tax money without having a public discussion of the purchase beforehand and the board’s approval, not to mention consulting with teachers who have to implement this Romper Room gimcrack program that is supposed to replace math and English books?
My teacher deep throats tell me that principals are running around the schools now begging teachers to put on a show-and-tell class with the Spring gewgaw because some bigwig (maybe the feds who funded it with tax money) is touring the schools to check out how the students and teachers like the Spring, which has failed in other venues and is now failing in Hillsborough County. I hear that more and more teachers are declining to use the program in their classes. The Spring fiasco of Ms. Elia is just another example of the Hillsborough County superintendent’s frittering away federal money while the board sleeps. Now go back to your flash cards.
2) Why do you claim that Grace Ippolito is getting paid $340-440 an hour/$2,600 a day for her temporary position at Alafia? The Tribune article clearly states that she is getting $340 a day, not an hour. Getting paid $2,600 an hour would be ridiculous. This means your claim that she is getting paid more than a psychiatrist is false.
Darling Reader, is Mentor Magnate Grace getting only $340 hour, not $440? Poor Grace. That means she has gotten only $2720 a day instead of $2820. What penury Grace has to endure because those mean old taxpayers won’t let Ms. Elia deliver money to her in bushel baskets.
I have asked Grace to donate this ill-gotten tax loot to the purchase of supplies for the thousands of poor children in the county who can’t afford supplies to participate in class projects. I am not holding my breath. Grace’s physiognomy on the Alafia Web-site mug shot does not look too gracious.
I don’t know any psychiatrist who charges more than $250 an hour—even those who went to Harvard stop at $250, or their patients say, “You crazy, doc? That’s a week’s work for me. If you can’t treat me for a few bucks and this basket of potatoes that I grew in my back yard, I’ll just stay crazy and become a thief who robs houses at night. What’s your address?”
3) In past blogs you claimed that Dr. Hamilton is being paid $65,000 a year for a lobbying job; now you claim he's being paid $165,000. Which is it?
Adorable Reader, it’s probably up to $265,000 by now even though Dr. Hamilton still doesn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re.”
Whatever Le Hamilton's job is or how much he is paid has not come off the board know-no-evil consent-agenda conveyor belt. The board didn’t discuss the necessity of “Your”- “You’re” Hamilton’s job, and when I have three times brought this subject up in board citizen comment, board members have played deaf and still have not done due diligence in requiring Ms. Elia to deliver her needs study for that job and what she pays Le Hamilton for it and whether spooning with his protege Ms. Mileto is one of its chief duties.
Ms. Elia has so far invented two jobs for Dr. Doesn’t-Know-the-Difference-Between-“Your”-and “You’re” Hamilton. She could lay him off from the second one as lobbyist up in Tallahassee and save some dough for hard times at the School Board, knowing that Ms. Mileto will probably cry her eyes out. But I doubt one member of the board has the guts or cares enough for tax payers’ money to insist that she do that.
Ms. Elia steals the “bonus” money from the teachers of the Hillsborough County schools for the work they do to raise student achievement. This is morally offensive, and the board allows it. The board can wade knee deep in immoral actions by the administration and pretend not to notice. That was board mode when the administration led by Earl the Pearl Lennard crucified Mr. Erwin for trying to alert the board to the theft that occurred unchallenged on school grounds. The board does nothing to rein in Ms. Elia’s exorbitant salary demands. Even though Elia does nothing but make blunder after blunder in managing the schools, her salary keeps going up.
That situation reminds me of the publicly traded companies whose boards give CEOs higher and higher salaries as the stock goes down. Carley Fiona of Hewlett Packard got a $42 million-dollar golden parachute on her exit from a company that had to fire her after 18,000 Hewlett Packard workers lost their jobs because of Carley’s inept running of the company.
This board is similar to Hewlett Packard’s. It does nothing while Elia shovels out more and more losing fiats that injure the schools, its teachers, and its students. The board members participate in Ms. Elia’s theft for teacher work in the bogus “bonus” scam that I believe Lennard initiated when he was not busy torturing Mr. Erwin. Whatever one labels this money stolen from teachers that lands into Elia's hands, it’s still part of the payout salary Elia siphons from the taxpayers and that a feeble board dishes out to her without a murmur. I propose that the "bonus" money get the more accurate label of "Money Ripped Off from Hillsborough County Teachers for Raising Student Scores."
Beginning teachers make 12 percent of what Elia makes. That’s a scandal. She's not 88 percent more valuable than they are.
Even the board has paid itself over ten thousand dollars more than beginning teachers make. The board is a part-time job that requires little effort--just sitting on the podium and pushing the "yes" button for anything Elia proposes while teachers often have to take second jobs to make ends meet.
This is a morally offensive situation that if the citizens fully understood they would rebel against in the voting booth and kick out these feckless board members. Ethridge and Lamb also have the nerve to be double dippers out of tax money of the state. They join Ms. Elia’s supreme greed. The board is indifferent to her greed and piously maunders in public about how teachers are the heart of the schools, but the board members' actions show that they don’t care about the welfare of the teachers and students. They care only about the comfort of the gang that runs the racket that has converted the board and administration into a mob that rips off taxpayers and exploits the tax base that students and teachers draw into school-system finances run by these cutthroats.
You are out of your league in this discussion, Sugarbritches. Best you decline the next time La Elia lays the job of combating me in verbal jousting. Let her come out from behind her perquisites and fight her own battles.
You will lose every time you board me. With words, I am Wonder Woman.
Publish this comment. Reject this comment. Moderate comments for this blog. Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room
Couch at 9:03 PM
2 comments:
Get over the your/you're thing, for Christ's sake The poster clearly suggested that the fee was $340 PER DAY, PER DAY, PER DAY. DOES BLOCK CAPITALS HELP YOU? PER DAY!
Your comments amuse me. Instead of admitting your inaccuracies, you continue your badgering of the school district. You do this to cover up your shortcomings.
I understand that federal grant money is tax money, but I’m trying to make the point that you always imply Elia is draining funds directly from the school district budget. A grant was offered to the school district, Elia took it, and now she’s the bad guy?
“Darling Reader, is Mentor Magnate Grace getting only $340 hour, not $440? Poor Grace. That means she has gotten only $2720 a day instead of $2820.”
Why do you keep saying Ippolito is getting this large sum of money PER HOUR? The whole point of my comment was to make you realize that the Tribune article states that she is getting $340 a DAY. You misread both a newspaper article and a reader’s comment. Are you senile? I can only assume such a thing from somebody who is always emphasizing proper literary communication.
And where do you get these calculations? Even if she did make $440 an hour, she would make $3,520 a day, not $2,280 (assuming an eight-hour workday). All you did was increase the day’s pay by $100 because that’s the difference of $440 and $340. You may be a master of language, but a 3rd grader could do math better than you. And you if you think these are minor calculation mishaps then you are a hypocrite. You say “who’s counting?” when it comes to tax payer money and imply that every cent counts. Well I believe that too and that’s why I’m so tedious with these calculations. Every cent DOES count, so you shouldn’t just shrug off these errors.
Also, you claim Elia is theoretically 88% more important than the teachers because teachers make 12% of her salary (God knows what you mean by that, on account of you don’t the difference between a salary and an annual income). Since you have no mathematical reasoning whatsoever, let me explain something to you: percentages don’t work that way. Just because teachers make 12% of what Elia makes, that doesn’t mean she’s theoretically 88% more important. To properly get your point across, you have to divide her salary by a starting teacher’s salary and then multiple by 100. For instance, let’s assume values and say Elia makes $300,000 (including the bonus) and a starting teacher makes $35,000. If you divide $35,000 by $300,000 you get about 0.12 which is 12%. Now, for the part you messed up on. To figure out how much more Elia is hypothetically worth you would have divide $300,000 by $35,000, which is approximately 8.57. Multiple that by 100 and you get 857. This means that Elia is 857% more valuable than the teachers, not just that measly 88% that you came up with. And since this value will be much more useful to you than the one you erroneously calculated, you can badger Elia even more. See, I’m just trying to help.
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