The picture to the right is a montage of a bunch of us women who put on our goofiest hats and picketed the St. Pete Times and the St. Petersburg ACLU for sexism. After picketing, we entered the banquet hall and plopped ourselves down at our reserved table, circulated amongst the sourpusses we had picketed, and handed them fliers rebuking their sexism. They were not amused. Boo hoo.

The St. Pete Times had hardly any women on its masthead, and most of the front-page bylines were male. The ACLU turned down the plea of St. Petersburg's Planned parenthood to intervene in the anti-abortion crazies' harassing women going into abortion clinics but took instead the case of a one-legged man's right to dance in public places (I'm not making this up). We reamed out the local Pinellas ACLU and sent a copy of the invective all over the state to embarrass its members with other ACLU chapters. I wrote the Columbia School of Journalism to rat out the Times's sexism. Fun was had by all. lee

Analysis comes from the mail:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " Ms. Olson: As is your wont, you muttered crit...":

The reason people like Candy Olson do nothing about corruption is that they want to be able to ask for favors from the ROSSAC administration. If a person is friends with Candy she can get Candy to do something about the problem she is having. If Candy were not backing up the downtown administration, their favors to her would stop. So she looks the other way and defends the administration and screws the taxpayers, so she can have a little bit of power to show off to friends.

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 4:44 PM

___________________________________________

Heavens, I didn't think Candy an adept at such labyrinthine politics.

The school situation fits loosely a piney-woods Guelphs and Ghibellines scenario. Dante was involved in that struggle on the Guelph side. During that period in history, the Italian Guelphs and Ghibellines traded sword wounds, insults, and interdictions.

I am a great admirer of Dante's poetry, not his politics, so we went to Ravenna to see his tomb. My husband took a picture of me in front of it. I can't find the picture, or I would mount it at the top of this page.

Dante's Guelph sympathies opposed the Ghibelline line-up of his hometown of Florence. So Florence banished him. He pined all his life to go home. He died in Ravenna at 56 unrepatriated but not before writing The Divine Comedy.

That great first poem in the Italian dialect, not Latin, made him Italy's premier poet. So, lo, then the Florence politicos wanted him disinterred in Ravena and brought back to Florence to be put in the fancy tomb the city fathers had waiting for him. Dante was now a tourist attraction.

But the city fathers in Ravenna said no and had the monks hide Dante's bones so Florence couldn't swipe them. Florence's city fathers finally turned to other matters and backed off from trying to make off with Dante's bones. So the monks took Dante's bones out of hiding and put them in his Ravenna tomb, where they still reside.

The tomb in Florence remains empty. You can hear tourists there say, "Now who were these guys the Guelphs and the Ghibellines?"

I like to think of those Ravenna monks' hiding Dante's bones and of the Florentine city boosters' fuming about the situation. It makes me smile every time I think of it. It sounds like a dust-up between the city and the county.

I now am rereading a new version of The Divine Comedy, in which a different poet translates every canto.

I can't decide to which circle of hell to assign the ROSSAC crowd. When I hit that circle in rereading the poem, I will say, "Bingo! Here's where those asses at ROSSAC belong."

lee

lee

Ms. Olson:

As is your wont, you muttered criticism of my comments as I walked away from the mike on the 15^th.

I made out what you said. For a 75-year-old, my hearing is excellent. I believe the blessing is genetic. My maternal Aunt Jewel, who never left the small Georgia farming town in which she was born, had remarkable hearing until the end of her 94^th year. She died at that age and now lies at rest among our ancestors in the family cemetery in Hazlehurst, Georgia. We relatives and admirers of Aunt Jewel’s many virtues made her ability to pick up even a whisper from across a room the subject at family reunions.

Aunt Jewel was born with a hare lip. Grandpa took her to Waycross for a crude surgical procedure that was all available at that time. It helped a little. Aunt Jewel survived the surgery with a crippled face but a blithe spirit and lived out her life, first, taking care of Grandma until she died and then as companion to my Uncle Brown, who I now believe was gay, which must have caused a miserable and sex-deprived existence in that little bigoted town in which Uncle Brown lived out his life. He went to Waycross every weekend to play piano in a supper club. This fond niece hopes he met some gay honeys there. Otherwise, his life must have been quite bleak sexually.

As I retreated from the podium at the 15^th board meeting, I believe you said that I didn’t know how the board worked and that I should consider that we teach the difference between reality and fantasy in grammar-school playgrounds.

I know how the board works, ma’am. It’s a bunch of people whom the voters elected to look out for the wellbeing of the students and teachers in the school system but which obeys without question every impulse and whim of a greedy superintendent whom the board reduced the academic requirements to hire.

The corrupt ethics of the board allowed it to scam a “nationwide” ad for the job, bilking the taxpayers of $35,000 for the board’s subterfuge. In this corrupt flimflamming of the public, the board hired a corrupt superintendent.

This hiring fiasco signaled that the board had succumbed to the entrenched administrative cartel whose only interest is raping tax funds meant for the schools in any way possible with the board’s sitting supinely on the podium at board meetings approving the rape.

You rubberstamp the obscene salaries that Ms. Elia gives her buddies and sycophants when she promotes them to the highly compensated administrative slots in administration sinecures. You don’t say a word when these buddies and sycophants lack education or training for the jobs and need consultants costing hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to guide them through procedures they would know how to do had they the education to do them.

For example, Ms. Cathy Valdez, head of the facililities department, has an early-childhood degree, which explains why she named (Elia’s orders, one infers) a former administrator to a no-bid contract to do school business. He didn't have even a business phone with a live person answering it.

Valdez needed the contractor’s help because she didn’t know how to do the job as head of the facilities division. Were she trained for the crony administrative job she holds, she would not have required an expensive consultant to come in and do her work for her. The ignorance and lack of education of top administrators mean the taxpayers not only pay the obscene administrative salaries lavished on this ignorant ROSSAC crew but also pay the fees of the consultants hired to prop them up.

Then there is Ms. Linda Kipley. Ms. Kipley has a home-ec degree. I had no idea that those superannuated vo-tech citations were still around. I thought they had gone the way of the bustle. But stirring up white sauce was the training that Ms. Kipley brought to head of Professional Standards, which pays at least $135,000 a year and rising.

La Kipley got the job with no advertisement of it, moved from principalship of my alma mater, HHS, where she bungled the job so badly that the faculty was in rebellion. Instead of firing her, the superintendent transferred this incompetent to head Professional Standards. It is supposed to investigate charges of misconduct against teachers. It does not investigate the adultery that board member Faliero conducted after she stalked and seduced the head of Public Affairs, Marc Hart.But

La Kipley appears to spend most of her time helping Ms. Elia cook up cases against faculty and staff under surveillance for not doing Elia’s bidding or rebelling by muttering some criticism of the imperial superintendentship.

I could list other underqualified administrators, but these two citations suffice to show the quality of the superintendent’s administrative appointments, all of whom owe manic loyalty to her because they know they should not have gotten these bloated-salary, unadvertised jobs in the first place; they know their ignorance and inability to perform the jobs should make them ineligible for them.

These incompetents know in their bones that they lack the education to do the jobs Elia gifts them with for being her sycophants. They know too that their getting these jobs without necessary credentials rips off the taxpayer.

And so do you know all this, board member Olson, if you do not blindfold yourself to avoid the knowledge.

You lack not only loyalty to the taxpayers, the students, and the teachers but also courage, ma'am. Had you any courage you would not have joined Kurdell in the cowardly attack on April Griffin when Griffin asked that a no-bid contract that Ms. Elia had ordered Ms. Valdez to present to the board be pulled from the consent agenda for discussion.

The unspeakably stupid Ms. Kurdell, who has hunkered on the board for fifteen miserable years kissing the superintendent’s ass, said Griffin was “disloyal” to the infallible staff for wanting to examine a no-bid contract of $148,000 to an Elia former administrator buddy. In other words, any board member that asks a question is not, in the words of Dr. Lamb, “a team player.”

I fear that Ms. Griffin, made timid by the attack of you and Kurdell, will now subside into a team player; I fear that Ms. Valdes, who defended Griffin in the attack, will do the same. Then there will be unanimous team Elia ass-kissing on the board team.

I believe that the kinds of swaps of favors that the board presides over have great opportunities for graft. I believe envelopes of cash pass between the administration and the people getting the favors both in employment and in contracts. Taxpayers underwrite this criminal trade in money for favors. I believe that graft has gone on for a long time as at ROSSAC lucrative sideline for the administrative cartel and that such board members as you enable this graft with your obtuse acquiescence to everything Ms. Elia dictates.

That the Tribune has finally woken up and editorialized about Ms. Elia’s obscene compensation rip-off of the taxpayers with the board’s complicity is good news. The Tribune says the board is the culprit in this situation. I agree.

I do not believe Elia buddy Tribune's editorial editor Goudreau, Elia buddy, wrote that recent editorial criticizing Elia's greed. She does not write that well. For some reason, the Tribune local biggies had somebody else editorialize against Elia's greed. I hope I helped this circumstance by complaining about Goudreau's lack of skill with the English language and with logic to the newspaper's owners. Ms. Goudreau's lack of skill with punctuation and rhetoric is almost as bad as that of Ms. Elia. That's probably why they are soulmates.

If the board members had the voters’, students’, and teachers’ wellbeing in mind and if they were interested in education instead of remaining incumbent toadies of Ms. Elia's sufferance, they would not have let Ms. Elia’s greed run rampant and would have reined it in.

But the board is so disrespectful of its putative job of protecting the education system and instead has succumbed to what my USF distinguished-professor friend in the email below calls a “robber baron” system of administration that it has lost its bearings as board members and moved into the criminal precincts of the superintendent and her followers.

This man is a distinguished professor at USF and a bright light in his field of anthropology. He indeed knows fact from fiction.

I hope more voters become aware of the situation—that they discern fact from spin, that they turn their eyes to the depredations on education that the elected school-board members slough off to support a greedy superintendent whose inability to even punctuate correctly the board overlooks to give her one of the highest compensation packages in the country. You board members, Ms. Candy, betray not only voters, teachers, and students by so doing; you betray the high purpose of education.

A person who can’t punctuate or write a felicitous paragraph should not get $300,000 a year in tax money while literate teachers who inspire and teach our children get $34,000.

You yourself have engaged in the corrupt pas de deux of board and superintendent for your dozen years on the board, Ms. Olson—even signing off on the legal crucifixion of Doug Erwin when he tried to alert former superintendent Lennard to the hundreds of thousands of dollars of waste in the building department.

Instead of thanking Erwin, Lennard and the board sued him. This is a sorry history from which to address the back of a retreating taxpayer--me--at a board meeting to tell her she doesn’t have a grammar-school awareness of appearance and reality.

I hope the Tribune editorial on Ms. Elia’s greed and the board’s collusion signal the paper’s monitoring more closely the obscene panoply of board-superintendent despoliation of the education system in Hillsborough County without the girlfriend bias of Ms. Goudreau. I hope it signals management’s untying the reporters’ hands on the education beat so that they can report the truth more clearly than has been the case heretofore.

The survival of education in Hillsborough County is at stake.

lee drury de cesare

Lee: I believe that you have analyzed the problem very well. These people seem not to be public servants, but privateers of the old school.

More Mail

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " I've Got Ma...":

You wrote: "That shut La Candy up. She only nips at my heels when I am retreating from the podium. I hear her nattering following me as I exit down the aisle."

This is so true! She reacts, she doesn't act. I think she longs very much to seem to others as a take charge and strong person, but deep down inside she is nothing but a follower and only takes what she thinks are chances when the danger is past. She would never take up for a minority unless everyone else is doing so already. Then, she would suddenly have courage, although that is not really courage.

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 6:22 PM

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " _gos='mons...":

The board should make a motion and vote to get rid of Elia's bonus pronto. That money should go to students and teachers, not her. She has done nothing but bring down morale.

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 6:11 PM

I fear not one has the guts to mention the contract; and they did sign it. But they could say that they regretted that they signed this contract and that they will never be that disloyal to the taxpayers, students, and teachers again. They could give voice to the right thing to do even if it's too late now.

I believe the board attorney helped Elia insert the bonus scam that Lennard cooked up before her. The attorney is no friend of the taxpayers, students, and teachers. He is a big supporter of the no-bid contracts that former administrators get. His own firm got the job fourteen years ago with no advertising.

But the board doesn't even have sense or courage enough to manage its own attorney. Olson, Kurdell, Lamb, and Edgecomb are total slaves to Ms. Elia. Griffin and Valdes want to do something, but they don't have the courage to risk the disapproval of the rest of the board and the wrath of Elia.

Alas, alack, and weladay. lee

Elia's Sweet Deal Is No Achievement

ADVERTISEMENT

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 18, 2008

It has been widely thought that Hillsborough County School Superintendent MaryEllen Elia's contract gives her a hefty bonus for student achievement. She earned a $37,620 bonus this year alone, but look close and you will see it is only partly grounded in student gains.

Elia earned $13,600 for each school that achieved Annual Yearly Progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. She got another $10,100 - at $100 a pop - for the 101 Hillsborough Schools that rated an "A" on the FCAT.

That's fair enough.

But she also was given nearly $8,000 for getting more students, particularly black students, to participate in advanced placement classes and to take AP exams - though the number of students who actually did well enough on the test to earn college credit did not improve.

Participation shouldn't be confused with achievement.

The Florida Department of Education also likes to pretend high schools are better than they are because more kids are signing up for advanced courses. One Texas study showed that students who merely participated in AP courses had a better chance of graduation from college than those who did not take AP classes. But the same study showed the best chance of college success was among students who actually passed AP tests.

In Hillsborough, just 45 percent of the more than 15,000 students who take AP courses score well enough on the exam to be given credit. And among minority students, the success rate was even lower.

On other significant measures, Elia received no bonus. There was no bonus for improvements in reading scores for black and Hispanic students in third, eighth and 10th grades. And although she did get a reward for higher math scores among minority students, at less than $1,800 it was just a smidgen of her overall bonus.

The two best measures of education success are nowhere to be found in Elia's contract: the high school graduation rate - not counting GEDs, which the state shamefully allows - and the number of Hillsborough high school graduates who need remediation when they attend a community college or university.

If the school board measured those things, it wouldn't be pretty.

More than 80 percent of those going into Hillsborough Community College need remediation in math, reading and writing because they are not prepared to do college-level work. At the state universities, 55 percent of new students needed remediation.

Elia can't be blamed for negotiating a good deal for herself. She is earning more than $290,518 this year.

It is the school board that is responsible for the largesse. The contract may say Elia is being judged on performance, but parents and the public should not be fooled.

If the Hillsborough School Board truly wanted to reward the superintendent for improving schools, members would change the measures to ones which show Hillsborough students are learning what they need to succeed in life.

Reader Comments

Posted by ( wazzamattaU ) on January 18, 2008 at 8:24 a.m. ( Suggest removal )

Does anyone still believe our schools are under-funded?

Report Abuse

Posted by ( ToeCutter ) on January 18, 2008 at 11:29 a.m. ( Suggest removal )

She needs a tax break.

Report Abuse

Posted by ( Major7th ) on January 18, 2008 at 2:39 p.m. ( Suggest removal )

and yet the budget for our music programs is 90% less than it was 30 years ago. Way to go bean counter, milk the morons that run this school system for all their worth. You obviously don't any teaching experience to make 10 times what our teachers make.

Report Abuse

Posted by ( twinkobie ) on January 18, 2008 at 8:23 p.m. ( Suggest removal )

The Elia compensation editorial is right.

Ms. Elia is greedy and bilks all the money she can from taxpayers, but the editors are correct that the board is responsible.

April Griffin and Susan Valdes gave her a low evaluation but still rubberstamped her lavish contract. So they did nothing to curb Elia’s greed.

The scheme in which Elia gets "performance" bonus began with Lennard's crafty manipulation of the board.

When Elia came along, the board probably with the complicit attorney Gonzalez's urging just rolled the bonus scheme over into Elia's contract. The teachers did the work that raises students’ scores; it is they who deserve any bonuses for the achievement.

I believe Gonzalez's willingness to go along with anything that the superintendent pushes is to keep on her good side to keep his job. He knows Elia, not the board, is in charge. His firm got the job fourteen years ago from Lennard without allowing any of the other firms in town to apply. Gonzalez knew this was wrong because he is a labor lawyer; but he grabbed the unfair deal anyway.

Presently, Elia has rammed a grade-inflation scam down teachers’ throats without consulting them. As a professor at HCC for 28 years, I predict that this scheme will up the already high number of students from county schools who enter college without being able to write a literate paragraph. Instead of teaching Yeats and Shakespeare, I had to teach these freshman students grammar and punctuation. The dumbing down that the grade-inflation scheme that Elia has forced on the teachers is bound to make this matter worse.

Elia has no sympathy for literacy. She struggles with punctuation herself and writes with the felicity of a 7th grader.

If there were one brave member of the school board who would lead instead of sitting on his or her hands and quaking at the thought of opposing the group tyranny of obeying Elia and giving her everything she wants, that would make all the difference. But there is not one such person on the board now. They are uniformly gutless.

The taxpayers are to blame for that situation of a weak, complicit board. But so are the newspapers that are remiss in not reporting it more clearly and often to the public.

If, as the public asserts, education is the most important concern of people, then the school board and the mute newspapers are not doing their jobs.

lee drury de cesare
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Report Abuse

Post a comment

(Requires free registration.)

Posted on the Tampa Bay site of the Tribune:

The Elia compensation editorial is right.

Ms. Elia is greedy and bilks all the money she can from taxpayers, but the editors are correct that the board is responsible.

April Griffin and Susan Valdes gave her a low evaluation but still rubberstamped her lavish contract. So they did nothing to curb Elia’s greed.

The scheme in which Elia gets "performance" bonus began with Lennard's crafty manipulation of the board.

When Elia came along, the board probably with the complicit attorney Gonzalez's urging just rolled the bonus scheme over into Elia's contract. The teachers did the work that raises students’ scores; it is they who deserve any bonuses for the achievement.

I believe Gonzalez's willingness to go along with anything that the superintendent pushes is to keep on her good side to keep his job. He knows Elia, not the board, is in charge. His firm got the job fourteen years ago from Lennard without allowing any of the other firms in town to apply. Gonzalez knew this was wrong because he is a labor lawyer; but he grabbed the unfair deal anyway.

Presently, Elia has rammed a grade-inflation scam down teachers’ throats without consulting them. As a professor at HCC for 28 years, I predict that this scheme will up the already high number of students from county schools who enter college without being able to write a literate paragraph. Instead of teaching Yeats and Shakespeare, I had to teach these freshman students grammar and punctuation. The dumbing down that the grade-inflation scheme that Elia has forced on the teachers is bound to make this matter worse.

Elia has no sympathy for literacy. She struggles with punctuation herself and writes with the felicity of a 7th grader.

If there were one brave member of the school board who would lead instead of sitting on his or her hands and quaking at the thought of opposing the group tyranny of obeying Elia and giving her everything she wants, that would make all the difference. But there is not one such person on the board now. They are uniformly gutless.

The taxpayers are to blame for that situation of a weak, complicit board. But so are the newspapers that are remiss in not reporting it more clearly and often to the public.

If, as the public asserts, education is the most important concern of people, then the school board abetted by the mute newspapers are not doing their jobs.

lee drury de cesare
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

I've Got Mail

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "My children and grandchildren gave me a party for ...":

I did not understand Candy Olson's comments after you called her on the carpet. Her only defense seemed to be, "You don't understand how school board meetings work." It made no sense at all. Basically, she does not want the public to be a part of the school board meeting, and when someone has the audacity to be a part of it, she chastises that person as being ignorant of school board meetings and protocol. This is another way of saying, "Shut up and let me sit here and allow Elia to get away with whatever she wants to! Quit bothering me to do anything about anything!"

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 2:45 PM

I don't know what it is about me, but I set Ms. Olson off. Maybe that has to do with our first encounter.

I was helping a gay friend of mine, Bart Birdsall, to try to get the board to recognize the bullying of gay kids in the schools and the need for seminars to teach teachers how to deal with this problem. They all resisted. They didn't want to lose the bigot vote and to hell with the bullied gay kids.

From some source I heard a teacher at a school had a copy of the Bible on his desk from which he lectured a gay boy in his class about how he was going to hell if he didn't repent and become straight.

Since Olson was board member from my old Beach Park district in Tampa, I wrote her to complain.

She wrote back and said, "The last time I checked, we have free speech in this country."

Ms. Olson's Achilles heel is that she wants to be a wit but has zilch talent to construct bon mots. She usually dredges up some chestnut that has been around since Noah's Ark popped up. She lacks the brains and the wit for ripostes. When the addlepated Carol Kurdell jumped on April Griffin for objecting to no-bid contracts, accusing her of being "disloyal" to the splendid staff, Candy said, "You go, girl!" and looked around for praise for her wit. That's how her mind works, poor thing.

I emailed her one of my stern rebukes, cited separation of church and state, reviewed how the Bible could find use in literature classes as the great piece of Western literature that it is, etc. but said a teacher can't keep a copy on his desk and terrorize a gay kid with it.

That shut La Candy up. She only nips at my heels when I am retreating from the podium. I hear her nattering following me as I exit down the aisle.

On the 15th, I think she said that I didn't know how the school board functioned (yes I do: the school board is the elected asskissers of the superintendent; they volunteered for that job instead of for standing up for the taxpayers, the students, and the teachers); I believe she also said that anybody should know the difference between fact and fiction that "we teach that in grammar school."

Her remarks are usually meant to diminish me. Fat chance.

Ms. Olson's been on the board too long. I am begging a young Beach Park woman who is a friend of one of my daughters and a teacher to run against Candy the next go round.

Ms. Olson will never be a good board member. She is a coward who follows whoever in charge. I am sure that some injury to her psyche in childhood catalyzed that coping reaction, but it is not pretty.

Candy is a follower; she can never be a leader. If a good person were superintendent, Candy would follow him or her; if a bad one such as Elia is in charge, ditto.

Since I sent copies of my emails to Candy about the Bible-thumping teacher to the school's principal, the principal, a wise woman, shut down the teacher's cruel Bible seminars in his classes.

lee

My children and grandchildren gave me a party for my 70th birthday at the home of my youngest daughter, Margie. She lives still in Beach Park close to our family's old home at 407 South Lois. Our children went to Grady, Coleman, and Plant. Dr. Sheldon was superintendent then. I fought him to get ROTC opened for girls and to provide bus transportation for the cheerleaders, who had to make their way to games sometimes through dicey neighborhoods on their own while the football players got bused: a case of parochial sexism, of course.

Dr. Sheldon thought a woman must be insane to question his Olympian wisdom. So he regarded me as a nutcase.

Cile Essrig, on the board for a billion years , earned a "pinko-red" slur from one of the Chamber of Commerce dandies who came up to NYC to lure my husband's company to establish a branch in Tampa. The source of this dandy slur was that Cile had revealed a liberal tendency or two in her board seat.

Cile would call you up and claim she wanted your advice. Then you discovered that this was just a political ploy. Cile had no intention of following advice.

She was loyal to women's rights, however, and attended all the Barefoot and Pregnant Awards ceremonies that we in Tampa NOW staged to cite sexists for behaving badly.

Cile adored Dr. Sheldon and would hear no criticism of him.

I've Got Mail!

Subject:	FW: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on onster.gostats.com';_goa=401613;_got=1;_goi=1;_goz....
Date:	Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:56:05 -0500

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 11:15 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on onster.gostats.com';_goa=401613;_got=1;_goi=1;_goz....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "onster.gostats.com';_goa=401613;_got=1;_goi=1;_goz...":

Why do we have a school board if all they want to do is say, "Yes, ma'am" to Superintendent Elia? Why bother having a board? Let's just let the Superintendent and the district do whatever they want. It's the same thing. The board has forgotten its duty to the public, because each board member probably wants favors for family members. It makes me sick.

Good observation. I think a board if it as gutless as this one is extraneous.

Ms. Edgecomb's daughter is in the administrative pipeline, I understand. That, I infer, explains why Board Member Edgecomb makes fulsome comments that make not a whit of sense. She's just running on empty. Edgecomb is afraid if she does something for taxpayers, teachers, and students, that will impede her daughter's progress on the administration stairway to heaven. My guess is her daughter has a degree in some aspect of early childhood: just the ticket to an administrative job managing some business aspect of the schools for which she has not a whit of credentials.

A guy got up to speak who had run against Ms. Edgecomb for the school board. So she's not invulnerable to challenge.
That cheers one up. If he runs again, I will send him some money if he is not a fascist--although a fascist might be an improvement over Ms. Chatty Cathy Edgecomb.

Chatty Cathy the name of one of the dolls my girls used to cry for. It talked when you pulled a string.

For some reason, the girls would undress the dolls the minute they got them. So when they grew up and left home, I went into the storage room of the garage on Lois one day and saw about 30 naked dolls lying in mute testimony to the end of my girls' childhood. I don't know why girls strip dolls the first thing after they get them, but they do. I burst out in tears, picking up one dirty naked doll, then another, trying to recall when we gave the doll, to which of our three girls, and on what Christmas.

When Ms. Edgecomb ran for the board, I was a La Gaceta columnist. Patrick Manteiga, my publisher, and his wife, Angie, invited Susan Valdes on her first run for the board to a Tiger Bay luncheon; my husband and I invited Ms. Edgecomb. Charlie Crist was the speaker. Because his Republican party's platform was homophobic, I asked him at question time if he were gay. Ms. Edgecomb almost fell off her chair and could be seen edging away from me in horror.

She has never sent my husband and me a thank-you note for the luncheon. I suppose that is to signal that she altogether disassociates herself from me because I take the First Amendment seriously. I think omitting sending a thank-you note for a lunch violates the board's rigamarole on civil conduct. It certainly violates my Southern mother's ideas on decorum. If a person didn't write a thank-you note for treating him or her to lunch, my mother would say that the person "was raised in a barn."

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 11:01 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on onster.gostats.com';_goa=401613;_got=1;_goi=1;_goz....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "onster.gostats.com';_goa=401613;_got=1;_goi=1;_goz...":

This is the best commentary about "hiring from within" that I have seen recently.

The mindset that goes along with promotion-without-background must also be what drives them to name schools after themselves and have a continuous parade of self-congratulatory pomp and circumstance.

Bringing in a professional from the outside would show them all up and upset their "close family" ties that hinder.

I think you are right about their being afraid of brains and talent. The denizens of ROSSAC have nailed down a little corner of the taxpayer money-and-power pie, and they are milking it for all it's worth.

This greed to hold onto their state money kitty and power explains their resistance to giving teachers and students a permanent place on the board agenda. They want people to forget that students and teachers are whom the board is supposed to serve, that the the board and administration are mere support for teachers and students. The administration and board want to give the impression that they are the school system and that teachers and students are mere props.

This hostility to teachers and students explains Elia's thrusting down teachers' throats the extra class without consulting them and now initiating the grade-inflation scheme without consulting teachers to make her performance look better. That she did not consult teachers on this grade scam confirms that she inferred correctly that teachers would probably resist the dummying down of grades.

The administration and board are in fact jealous of teachers and fear them because the board and administration know in their bones that teachers have legitimacy and that the board and administration don't. However much they try to diminish and disrespect teachers, they know that teachers are the real heart and soul of the school experience for students. Every one of us can name at least one teacher whose influence on us was profound. I can name half a dozen, beginning in grammar school Adams was right: teachers do affect eternity. Board members and administration featherbedders don't.

Not one board member has asked the attorney to obey the law and provide me with public documents. Not one has asked that teachers and students get a formal slot on the board agenda. I am not surprised at the rest of the board, but that Griffin and Valdes do not use their board position to bring about these things does surprise me. That the small things Griffin and Valdes have done so far as nods in teachers' direction look important only because the rest of the board is so hostile to teachers and students.

If we are ever going to have a board that works for the public, students, and teachers instead of being servants of the superintendent, there must be on the board members with enough courage and enough concern about students, teachers, and the public to risk the ire of Candy Olson's, Carol Kurdell's, et al's, and administration's disapproval for designationg teachers and students a place on the public agenda and insisting that the attorney obey the public records laws.

Board members with guts will also pull administrative appointments off the consent calender such as the boutique job Elia created for Dr. Hamilton while he dithered about retiring and then doing away with the job the minute he retired. This Hamilton-specific job cost tax payers $80,000 for the nine months that he dawdled after Elia created the niche job for the old huffer and puffer. Not one board member objected to this arrogant appropriation of public money to propitiate thd old humbug Hamilton, who, I understand, liked to brag that he was a b----rd to work for. I believe he had performance problems and needed IV Viagra as pschosexual prop. You'd have to say that Hamilton was just plain pitiful.

We don't have any gutsy board members yet. The future may produce one or more. I believe Burns will upset Hamilton. Then who will there be to write the mayor on board stationery using board clerical help to give his condo a break on its water bill? That's the kind of perquisite people of Lamb's mentality run for public office to get. To hell with the public, students, and teachers: it's the condo- water-bill reduction that gets priority.

I hope Burns does not disappoint us. If he leads, I hope Griffin and Valdes will follow him. Neither seems to have the right stuff to lead themselves. Leaders have to do what needs doing and not tremble in their boots about somebody's disapproval. Napoleon and Alexander the Great didn't care what people thought of them. Why can't we have at least one school board member who has that fine disregard for cowards' dispproval? lee

Me in my frog dress: I had it made by a South Carolina seamstress; an artist decorated the dress with frogs. I love frogs. Everybody loves something. It's frogs with me.


Yet another rip-off to explore: Lennard thought up this scam below to dip into the teachers' work; now it is continued for Elia as if it were settled policy since the Stone Age. I believe His Wonderfulness Dalai Lama Gonzalez presided over Elia's continuing to get this purloined windfall from teachers' labor.

This kind of rip-off is what Ms. Edgecomb refers to reverently as "institutional memory." I submit its another ROSSAC thuggery rip-off of the schools' money--of which Elia never seems to get enough. Next she will demand her own nuclear deterrent, and the board will not know what that is or where to get one. So its members will hire a consultant to enlighten them for a half million dollars stockpiled from making teachers teach and extra class. The board members will find a nuclear deterrent for Ms. Elia if it kills them. They obey her like coolies. lee

Date:	Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:02:46 -0500
Subject:	Re: compensation package for the superintendent
To:	"lee decesare"
From:	"Linda Cobbe" View Contact Details Add Mobile Alert

See below.

Linda Cobbe
External Communications Manager
Office of Communications
Hillsborough County Public Schools
901 E. Kennedy Blvd.
Tampa, FL 33602
813-272-4602
813-272-4510 FAX

WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
Florida has a very broad public records law. Most written communications (including e-mail) to or from public employees are public records available to anyone who asks. Your e-mail communications and your e-mail address may therefore be subject to public disclosure.



lee decesare <lee_decesare@yahoo.com> writes:
Ms. Cobbe:

Today La Gaceta published the superintendent's performance pay. 1. How long has this system been in effect? Since July 1, 2003. 2. Did it start in Dr. Lennard's tenure or when? Yes. 3,Is there a policy-manual rationale for it on record?

Where is the teachers' performance pay schedule listed? It's in the Salary Schedule, page 2: http://www.sdhc.k12.fl.us/HumanResources/PDFs/SALARY/HCPS_SalarySchedule_Entire.PDF Since they do all the work that results in the performance results, a reasonable assumption is that they get performance pay as least as generous as Ms. Elia. And they need it more than she since she already gets an obscene salary.

I would like to know if Dr. Hamilton got his doctorate from Florida State. Yes.

lee drury de cesare

The following has gone to all board members and Dalai Lama Tom with love and kisses. lee

Board members:

Listening to the discussion at the January 15th board meeting of the lawyer's settlement recommendation for the failed contract with the outfit that built a school which, after completion, had a part fall down, I have questions:

1. Did Ms. Valdez handle this deal? Did she bid it out? How many bids did she get? Who picked the successful bidder, the company that built the school part of which fell down? Did Ms. Valdez do research on the company's history before the she picked it? If not, why not? If she did, is that research available for review?

2. Did Board Attorney Gonzalez write the contract? Who did if he didn't? Did he review it even if he didn't write it? Did he provide the board with a written analysis of the contract? Did that written analysis include the caveat about the extra insurance needed to cover any catastrophic situation that developed such as the building's falling down? He cited the ever-present possibility of such catastrophes in his response to Ms. Faliero's objections. If he did not include that data in his written analysis , why not?

Why didn't one of the board members ask the attorney why he did not include that vital data if he didn't cite it in the analysis of the contract?

Are the board members too in awe of the attorney to rebuke him for not doing his job? Why? You employ him and authorize his salary. So you shouldn’t be deferential. You should be polite, but not deferential. You didn’t give him an exclusive contract years ago and shut out all the other attorneys in town in order to wrap him in cotton wadding. If Mr. Gonzalez flunks contract exegesis, then lace into him in public during the meeting to assure the voters that you are doing your job and won't put up with incompetence; don’t tippytoe around as if the board attorney were Dalai Lama.

If you have elevated Le Gonzalez to that status, you are going to have to buy him some of those chic, floaty saffron robes for board duty. And saffron robes would clash with the beauteous Mr. Gonzalez’s complexion type in my up-on-fashion opinion. So stay away from saffron robes in the name of board-room aesthetics. Don’t let Ms. Kurdell recommend in this area whatever you do. That purple outfit that she affected January 15th looked like Dolly Parton picked it out for her in Woolworth's boutique manque. Ms. Kurdell gets a D-minus in aesthetics.

There is a blank space after His Wonderfulness Dalai Lama Tom Gonzalez's likeness below. Just plow on past it to take up the discussion again after this six inches of blank space that I can't remove.

I believe that the elves that paint Dalai Lama Tom's toenails yellow have thwarted me because they do not like for Dalai Lama Tom to be ridiculed. The elves mistake me. I am face down in reverence before His Wonderfulness Dalai Lama Tom.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Gonzalez

I believe Ms. Valdez does not have the education and training to do the job of head of the facilities department. That job needs a person with a business degree and preferably previous experience. Ms. Valdez got the job without its being advertised in one of those mysterious choices of an insider with no apparent qualifications getting a bloated-salary administrative job for reasons beside qualifications. Ms. Valdez did what Dr. Lamb favors: she "worked herself up" to the job. The skills with which she "worked her way up" were toadying and sycophancy. Ms. Early Childhood Valdez's elevation past her credentials may benefit the incestuous ROSSAC administrative coven's sense of coziness, but it does not benefit the taxpayers, the teachers, the students, or the community that pays the bills.

Incompetent administrators are why the administration needs so many consultants. The administrators require somebody to give them flash-card seminars on how to do their jobs. Taxpayers underwrite without knowing it the ill-trained administrators’ consultant graduate school.

That was the situation in the bus meltdown. The head of that department was a former bus driver. If the head had been a person with a business degree, he or she would have kept up with the school-bus transportation field. Such areas have periodicals--lots of them.

The bus-transportation head would have spotted an article on using computer-routing software and have said, "Hmmm. That can fix our problem, and we won't have the bus meltdown that looms." He or she would have gone to Ms. Elia and said, "Ms. Elia, we need to buy some routing software and get a couple of technicians from the company to come and show us how to use it. That will take care of our burgeoning routing problems.”

One doesn't know if Ms. Elia would have had sense or security sufficient to have accepted the suggestion from a subordinate. If what I have heard about her management style is accurate, she would have ordered him or her to sit down to a lecture on how wrong the recommendation was and how she would instead get contractors in to review and solve the problem. (Ms. Edgecomb calls this repeating of errors "institutional memory." Ms. Edgecomb reveres "institutional memory.")

Ms. Elia's mindset is to have the taxpayers fork over several hundred thousand dollars to cure any problem that my seven-year-old grandson, Noah, could solve in a trice. (I seem to recall the bus contractors charged $350,000 for a contract featuring no organization, slovenly writing, and only two suggestions that they embroidered with many harrumphs and comma splices.)

I underwent the agony of plowing through that contract. It advised this: 1. Buy some routing software; 2. Park the buses in two convenient locations. 3. Send us $350,000 bucks pronto.

You know where these consultant geniuses got the ideas? They got them from the same place a savvy head of busing at the Hillsborough County school system could get them: from the professional journals. People have to keep up with their field. People with business degrees know this fact.

A savvy head of the busing department could have figured out solving the problems without a consultant. But he or she would need a business degree as training. A wiser superintendent would have approved the recommendation above by the imagined business-degreed head of busing. The routing software would have been a lot less than $350,000.

However much a bus driver's heading the transportation section may have tickled Dr. Lamb's fetish about people's working themselves up through the system, the former bus driver head, whom Ms. Elia finally replaced at the urging of a board member now in deep disregard by Ms. Elia, the other board members, and all the administration detritus at ROSSAC, didn't have the administrative know-how to do the job. This higly compensated ignorance cost the taxpayers $350,000.

Dr. Lamb once defended such deficient administrators as Valdez to me by saying that people should be able to "work their way up through the ranks. This was in response to my complaint of the naming Ms. Connie Mileto as $130,000-or-more lobbyist.

Dr. Lamb adores Ms. Mileto, and I know why. I witnessed Ms. Mileto modus operandi once at Tiger Bay. She hopped up on her little Munchkin legs high enough to hug a guy, squealing endearments the while. Very professional, to be sure. This scene strikes me as that which set to murmuring Dr. Lamb's cardio-vascular synapses. The Centers for Disease Control have run a study of the Tampa Bay area that shows with graphs and side-bars that a disproportionate number of old guys in this geographical outback have majorette fetishes. Dr. Lamb and Dr. Hamilton's names head the list of the severely afflicted.

When I complained about Connie Mileto, who got the Tallahassee lobbyist job with the background of kindergarten teacher and the warm sponsorship of Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Lamb invoked his beloved "working-one's-way up" theory. I demurred. If Ms. Muchkin Mileto wanted that lobbying job, she should have not majored in kindergarten lore; she should have majored in political science, public relations, or maybe psychology to plumb the psches of the panhandle savants who inhabit the legislative chambers in Tallahassee.

The logical extension of Dr. Lamb's working-way-up theory would be that grounds keepers at the Mayo Clinic work themselves up to chief thoracic surgeon. Or the kitchen crew at Harvard works its way up to professors in the Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Lamb occupies a seat on the board of a school system. It runs the county's schools. Schools provide education and training to equip people to get jobs. The graduates, one hopes, go on to college to get additional training to qualify for jobs such the administrative job of head of facilities that Ms. Valdez holds bereft necessary training or credentials. She has a degree in early childhood. I would trust her with "Eency Weency Spider" scholarship, not with running a division that requires business expertise. What does early-childhood training have to do with the intricacies of administrative control of the building facilities department? Nothing at all.

But the ROSSAC savants don't see this logic. And the board abets their nuttiness.

Ms. Valdez's case is typical of the administrative appointments that pack ROSSAC. Here's another of many: Linda Kipley.

Linda Kipley, head of professional standards, has a home ec degree. I thought that "degree" went the way of the dinosaurs. No, it still thrives in the ROSSAC building of the Hillsborough County schools. Suffice it to say that La Kipley's pay is way above $100,000 .Professional Standards needs a psychology, sociology, or maybe criminal-justice degree. The work has nothing to do with whipping up a bechamel sauce.

Kipley got the job without its being advertised, of course. Gossip says she got it to move her from the principal's job at Hillsborough High, where the faculty were in rebellion against her bizarre managment of the principal's job there. People secreted tape recorders for interviews with her because she would not stick with what she said but would claim that she said something else.

Hillsborough High is my alma mater. It makes me want to puke to think a person of Ms. Kipley's ilk was principal at my beloved Beat Plant! high school. The sainted Vivien Gaither was my principal. Ms. Dowdell was my dean of girls. They were godly people. The Olypian swells would have been lucky to have Gaither and Dowdell hang out with them. Ms. Kipley is not a god. Her status is terrestrial and probably even lower--where the CEO is Beelzebub.

Dr. Lamb's advocacy that such incompetents "work their way up" invalidates education. His view erases his right to sit on a board of education at all. He doesn't believe in education. He doesn't understand what it is, and he is hostile to excellence and the need for department heads to have solid transcipts that show completion of their areas of concentration in of higher learning. His attitude is as obtuse as it is anti-intellectual.

I read in a blog that the administration does not give full information to the board on which to make decisions. Why doesn't a board member bring up this issue on the podium in the name of transparent government and let the public hear it? Let Ms. Elia respond to the concern of the public. It's a serious issue of administrative thuggery.

It doesn't help open government for the board members to believe that they must retain an artificial prissy decorum on the podium that covers over such vital issues as the administration's putative withholding information from the board; the board needs all information extant so that its members can make good decisions. What this curtailing of data benefits is the administration's grasp of power. Information, in fact, is power. Who was in charge when only nobles and clergy got educations and hence information? The nobles and clergy, of course, were in the driver's seat.

The information, for instance, that the administration and superintendent are running a racket in ROSSAC that disgraces education should be public knowledge. That need explains why I write this blog and sit through school-board meetings, at which I am hated by the board-dais habitues.

La Belle Dame sans Merci and homewrecker Board Chair Faliero, for instance, sneered when it was my time to speak on the 15th, "You have three minutes, and I'm starting to count now," she snapped. I ignore aduterous smartasses. It will be a cold day in hell when such specimens as y-chromosome-administrator stalkers such as Faliero ruffle my feathers. I aim to educate the public to the vile ROSSAC situation. And board's collusion with the superintendent to disinfranchise the public shall bruit about on the World Wide Web as long as I can pull myself up to a CRT screen at the village pump.

If board members are so supine that they allow doctoring of information by Ms. Elia, the board does not serve voters; it serves administrative thuggery. Voters need to know about withholding or distorting of information by the administration to the board and the board's allowing it. The public will then have grounds to demand that the board fire a duplicitous superintendent and her hive of drones or quit the board-racket game.

If the administration withholds or distorts information that the board gets, it shows that the administration does not have enough respect for the board or fear of it to play straight with the members. If the board stands for this situation, it might as well bring its Play-doh to board meetings and stop pretending it is involved in the decision-making that leads the schools.

Better, it should quit and let people mount the board dais who will do the job taxpayers elected them to do.

Lee Drury De Cesare