Saturday, May 31, 2008

Dear Governor Crist...




Office of Governor Charlie Crist
State of Florida
The Capitol
400 S. Monroe St.
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001

May 2, 2008


Governor Crist:


You ran on a platform of concern for the schools. You should therefore know how far Hillsborough County is from good schools under the leadership of Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia and the lack of leadership of the school board, Candy Olson, April Griffith, Susan Valdes, Jack Lamb, Doretha Ethridge, Jennifer Falliera, and Carol Kurdell.

Ms. Elia leaves teachers entirely out of decisions that affect the classroom. She and the board refuse to give teachers and students a settled place on the school-board agenda. Ms. Elia dumped on teachers an extra class with no warning and with no extra pay. The board did not let out a peep of protest.

The board has fooled teachers that its members are on students' and teachers' side, but they are not. Their welcome to teachers and students when they come to a board meeting is far from hospitable. I have attended board meetings for two years. Never once have I heard a board member say, “We are always glad to hear from our teachers and students.” The board wants teachers and students to be the field hands that provide the basis of the board's pot of money so that its members can look grand and important by doling it out. When teachers attended the board meeting to protest the extra class without having had teacher input, then board chair Jack Lamb chastised teachers for clapping. He said clapping violated Roberts Rules.

Ms. Elia imposed a grade-inflation scheme making her look good in the state school bureaucracy, but teachers saw this as a sham way to make student performance look better on false grounds that would cripple students' chances of getting into a good college of their choice. Ms. Elia and the board did not discuss this program with teachers or ask for their input. They introduce or impose new regimens on the board dais as if teachers and students are irrelevant and as if only the board and administration are eligible to make decisions about what goes on in the classroom.

Ms. Elia's latest gambit of leaving out teachers' input is her purchasing of the expensive Spring program that has not worked in places where it has been tried. Ms. Elia's motive appears to be the same one as that in the grade-inflation scheme: to give Ms. Elia an elevated performance bonus. Ms. Elia's greed is notorious. She makes $300,000 a year although she has only a master's degree, reduced from the original requirement by the board so that she could qualify for the job for which well-qualified candidates with Ph.D.s, extensive experience, and publishing records had applied.

I reviewed the application files. Ms. Elia's application was the least impressive. Ms. Elia can't handle basic grammar and punctuation, but the board preferred an inside candidate for its own comfort level and to hell with the literacy of the school system's top person that parents expect to provide for their children what she can't perform herself.

One must also reveal that even though the board had pre-picked the inside candidate of in-house political corruption--Olson, Ethridge, Valdes, Falliero, Lamb, Kurdell (Griffin was not on the board then)-- its members had no compunction about wasting $35,000 of the taxpayers' money to cover their unethical tracks with “nation-wide” advertising for the position. The board of Hillsborough County's schools has not hired an outside superintendent since 1967.


An ongoing problem leading to mediocrity in the quality of the administration is that the board surrenders to Ms. Elia the patronage privilege of hiring without advertising cronies, sycophants, kin, and hangers-on for high-level administrative jobs with bloated pay. The result is that the decisions coming from these poorly equipped administrators without appropriate degrees or experience invite incompetent performance that the taxpayers must fund and also pay consultants to come in and clean up the messes into which these intellectually unequipped Elia cronies stumble into.

The head of transportation was a former bus driver under whose leadership the department came apart. The school board rushed in a $350,000 consultant which advised only two basic things for that pile of taxpayer money: get a routing computer program; park the buses in a convenient place.

Even average intelligence and competence at the top would have diagnosed and repaired these problems without the cost of a $350,000 pricey consultant. The taxpayers thus pay twice: one for the salary of the incompetent employee, another for an expensive consultant to ride in to fix the mess and teach the incompetent employee how to do his or her job.

The administration head of the technology department has not one computer credit in his resume. He has a degree in early childhood, not an academically challenging degrees, to be sure. The program for teacher pay checks got messed up under early-childhood Mr. Davis's watch greatly to the teachers' inconvenience. Perhaps had Mr. Jack Davis had a technology degree of more heft, this mess-up would not have happened. For the exorbitant salary Mr. Davis gets from the tax kitty, the board could have gotten a Ph.D. ace in computers.

Mr. Davis was one of the three top administrators involved in the famous Erwin case--won by Mr. Erwin before a jury-- who participated in the mistreatment of Mr. Erwin for his whistle-blowing of theft of school property, crooked bid procedures, shoddy buildings that leaked and suffered widespread water damage, and mishandling of funds. Mr. Davis, Dr. Hamilton, and Dr. Lennard wanted things to go on and not let the press get hold of the data Mr. Erwin tried for four years to get the top trio to pay attention to along with an unconcerned board. These three didn't care that criminal elements in the schools and administration were robbing taxpayers as long as they held on to their power and got their bloated salaries on time. But because nobody in administration ever gets punished for incompetence, Mr. Davis hung onto his job and put in an area for which he had not a bit of training:technology.


And where was the board during this festival of on-site criminality? Out to lunch—deliberately out to lunch: the board knows what's going on but pretends it is not aware of skullduggery so as not to be responsible for preventing such criminality on the school property. The board is in for the social eclat of the system, not for the hard work of making sure the crooks inside and outside the system are not robbing the taxpayers blind.

The next time on the hustings one such as Olson, Lamb, or Kurdell –incumbents during the Erwin era--say they promise during another irresponsible term to “save every penny of tax money for the sacred citizens,” some alert should rise to demand what they did during the Erwin-era crime spree.


Another early-childhood degree heads up building: Ms. Cathy Valdez, an Elia appointment. Recently a newly built school's walls collapsed, and since Ms. Valdez. the attorney, and the board had not required adequate insurance, the taxpayers had to pay several million dollars for contractor incompetence which replicates how the schools cited in the Erwin case exposed shoddy construction.


The taxpayers paid the price rubberstamped by the board for first-class buildings but got a third-class product. Mr. Erwin's begging, pleading, cajoling, and importuning Davis, Hamilton, and Lennard for four years to do something about such outrages in the system that he cited verbally and in writing to the lackadaisical received no attention until the press got wind of the situation at last, whereupon Mr. Erwin took reporters up on top of leaking buildings and showed them the holes in the roofs.

At that point, I rose and cheered while reading the trial's court papers. I lamented having no pom-poms so as to jump up and down to wave them for the rectitude of the moment and for Mr. Erwin's finally saying he was mad as hell and wasn't going to take it any more.

But the most egregious case of administrative incompetence laced with sicko sadism is that of the head of Professional Standards, Ms. Linda Kipley. This specimen has a home-ec degree and heads Professional Standards instead of Pots and Pans 101, an area for which her background suits her. One is, first of all, amazed that any institution of higher learning still has home-ec programs; second, that Ms. Elia has no better sense than to appoint this unqualified person to the head of Professional Standards.

The administration, as usual, did not advertise the job and simply put home-ec degreed Ms. Kipley into it with no competition for this $135,000 sinecure. The rumor is that teachers at Hillsborough High rebelled against her principalship there and refused to go into a conference with her without a tape recorder because rumor says that in addition to Ms. Kipley' shallow academic credentials, her addiction to lying is also a problem. I am wroth that the likes of Ms. Kipley, a home-ec savant, was principal at my alma mater, Hillsboroough High. Mr. Vivian Gaither was my principal. Mr. Vivian Gaither was a Latin scholar and a gentleman. A home-ec practitioner with a taste for double-dealing and sadism is a big come-down from a Latin scholar and a gentleman.


To top things off, Mr. Linda Kipley just got a job as accountant that cited a college degree and experience in accounting in the requirements of the job description. Mr. Linda Kipley had neither. There were 19 applicants, fifteen of whom were already employed in the schools. I examined five of the outside number's applications and am awaiting the other fifteen's applications to examine. Three had college degrees of those I examined. Two had accounting degrees. One had a college degree in accounting with extensive experience as an accountant.

Yet Mr. Linda Kipley with no degree at all and no accounting experience got the job. The screening process apparently did not examine the applicants in areas that the job description says is vitally important for the position: writing ability and acquaintance with high-end accounting computer programs.

So much for the careful screening of those whom taxpayers pay to work in the school system: and the untrained and uneducated such as Mr. Linda Kipley get the job simply because Ms. Elia owes his wife favors for having done her retaliation dirty work against teachers and staff whom Ms. Elia wants to frighten into silence about her dictatorial regime.

Ms. Elia's order to hire her buddy in skullduggery against teachers and staff got immediate attention and acquiescence from all involved.

And what did the board do about this spoliation of equal-employment-opportunity that they swear by with fingers crossed behind their backs? Nothing, just it did nothing during the Irwin debacle.


This appointment was a slap in the face for teachers, who have negative feelings about Ms. Kipley for her reputation of sadism in her job as head of Professional Standards and for her reputation of twisting the truth about teachers and staff who go through her office so as to terrify them about losing their jobs such as was the case in the Bart Birdsall pseudo case cooked up by Les Kipley and Elia. One teacher said Ms. Kipley ordered her not to tell people what went on in her punishment in The Professional Standards Abu Ghraib. The Kipley Professional Standards cell block abrogates the First Amendment one sees.


I became interested in the way the administration and board ran the Professional Standards department because Ms. Elia and Ms. Kipley cooked up a case against a friend who is a media specialist in the schools to make it appear he had violated the rule against using the college emails for personal issues. That case was entirely fabricated by Elia, Kipley, and Davis is my inference. Ms. Elia is friends with Ms. Bean, top administrator of the County. My friend Mr. Birdsall had objected from his home computer to the doing away with gays' access to all services of the County library authored by Commissioner Ronda Storms. Ms. Elia told me and Birdsall at Tiger Bay, at which she had spoken, that she passed on the Birdsall e-mails composed at his home to Ms. Kiley because she did not know how to read the "to" and “from” lines of an email. Ms. Elia's judgment ranks so faulty that she expected two teachers to believe this claptrap.

From La Gaceta's recent "As We Heard It, ” in which the publisher, Patrick Manteiga, comments on the long negative history of the school board's hiring record:

The Hillsborough County School System has a reputation with those who work there of hiring and promoting people who are connected or related to those in charge. Stories of favoritism are rampant. This reputation and practice creates an unhealthy work environment. Many employees feel blackballed and trapped because they offended the wrong person. Most know loyalty to the right boss is more rewarded than proficiency or honesty. In this atmosphere, how can the school system claim to be an equal opportunity employer?


The school district needed an accountant II in the District Auditing Office. The individual would perform audits that could involve worker’s compensation, health insurance, transportation, textbook, inventory, maintenance, nutrition service and a host of other areas. This individual could perform audits that encompass budgets from $50 - $500 million. Skills needed are organizing documentation, writing procedural memorandums and communicating with audiences of differing accounting backgrounds. Four years of college or acceptable accounting experience are required. Nineteen people applied, many already in the system, and some with applicable experience.


The $36,000 job was awarded to Tom Kipley. His résumé documents jobs at Home Depot Pro Home Sales, Robbins Manufacturing and a host of electrical and air conditioning contractors. His experience is inside and outside sales., construction and customer service. He did not graduate college and has no clearly listed accounting experience. So why did this guy get the job over others, some who clearly have related experience?


Some speculate that Tom Kipley, being the husband of Linda Kipley, could have influenced the outcome. Linda Kipley is the general manager for professional standards for the school district. She’s the one who investigated employees for wrongdoing. She is the district’s top internal affairs cop.

We’d ask the district to investigate if favoritism occurred in this hire, but we have a feeling that Linda Kipley would find no evidence that her husband, Tom. received any special consideration."

Mr. Crist, A governor who promised attention to education will not let a school system's slovenly school board and bullying, ill-qualified administration blunder in the unethical leadership that taxpayers fund without the scrutiny of a governor's review committee to examine the malfeasance that goes on in the leadership of schools in Hillsborough County.

c: Doretha Edgecomb; Jack Lamb; Susan Valdez; Jennifer Falliero; Candy Olson; April Griffin;



Leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com



lee drury de cesare

15316 Gulf Blvd. 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Cruelty in the ROSSAC Shadows

Ms. Elia: the reason I became interested in the school-board outrages was the failure I observed in the Bart Birdsall case to protect teachers and staff from the sicko retaliation against them by the administration.

You and Ms.
Kipley, with the technology department's assistance, cooked up a case against Birdsall for supposed violation of the misuse of the school emails for private purposes. Meanwhile, Dr. Hamilton was using the emails to air his ego whilst misspelling "your' and "you're" to the disgrace of the school board. Those gaucheries should be a Professional-standards charge if anything should be. I even filed a Professional-standards charge against Hamilton, but Spin Factotem Hegarty laughed off the Hamilton unprofessional illiteracy by saying it was "just a joke." An assistant superintendent who can't differentiate between homophones is indeed a joke in addition to being a disgrace to education.

Because of your girlfriend relationship with Ms. Bean at the County, you agreed to take these Birdsall e-mails that Bart sent from his home computer from Beam for the purpose of accusing him of a made-up charge.You used these as basis for a school investigation, even though the emails were not eligible for the charge since they did not originate on school computers and because Stine was too gutless to answer Bart's emails sent to Stine as a private citizen objecting to Ronda Storms's homophobic shut down of gay privileges in the county library.

One concludes that the wussy Stines complained to boss Bean, who passed the emails on to you to use to scare Bart about retaining his job in an ugly retaliation against a private citizen who also happened to work for the school board. What's a buddy superintendent for if not to scare a teacher with losing his job because he asks the county government as a private citizen for fair treatment of gays?

That is retaliation, the kind that this article below writes about in the NYT today. Mr. Erwin's torture by Davis, Hamilton, and Lennard was also retaliation that the Supreme Court justices' opinion covers. Even that wretched Bush appointment Alito wrote a concurring opinion that retaliation is illegal under the the discrimination laws.

In the Hillsborough County School System, you, and Lennard before you and probably the superintendents before him retaliated against people for even criticizing the administration.

That is why there is such ubiquitous paranoia among teachers about speaking up against things that teachers and staff see as wrong. Thank goodness the parents would come in to mow you down if you had the nerve to pick on their kids.

But you don't pick on the kids because you know their parents would not stand for it. You pick on teachers and staff who you figure won't fight back because of the terror instilled in them by yours and Professional Standards' dispicable retaliation regime.

You and the Professional Standards chief ghoul, Kipley, have worked up a settled regimen to retaliate against people for the slightest complaint about your unfair treatment of them if you think you can get away with it. The payoff for you is that this example of cruelty triumphat will warn them away from complaining about any administration outrages.

Retaliation under your and Lennard's regimes saw you routinely use coercion as a policy to keep employees intimidated and scared lest they lose their jobs if they protest bad treatment. That malignant policy is what the Erwin case demonstrated in the court papers and demonstrates itself daily in the school system. It is a sicko practice of 3rd-rate administrators to hang on to power. You don't lead by example; you lead by intimidation.

The board complies with this vicious practice of the board but denies in cowardly fashion knowing of such a practice. The board's abdication in this matter and its pretending not to know about it are as cowardly and repulsive as this behavior was in the case of Mr. Erwin. The Erwin jury believed Erwin, not the administrative and board thugs. If the unfair-retaliation information to teachers and staff gets out to the public, like the Erwin jury, it will believe the teachers and the staff over the board and administration. Voters are not stupid. They are inattentive, not stupid.


A teacher now writes me about his principal's discrimination against him and what he infers will be the principal's retaliation against him for resisting her discrimination. It's the same old same old: ugly stuff.

The lower-quartile administrators can't seem to comprehend that their behavior will undo them if the person mistreated decides to take the case to the EEOC and not Professional Standards.


If this principal does follow your office's covertly approved retaliation against the teacher, I am going to find out how he or she can invoke the Supreme Court justices' ruling in this area and encourage him or her to file charges against the board that has allowed you and Lennard and the other villains who have sat in the superintendent's chair to mistreat workers by retaliating against them because nobody has challenged the retaliation yet except Mr. Erwin.

You and Ms.
Kipley aim to grind teachers down until they are too frightened to fight back. Your donating a job to Mr. Linda Kipley for Ms. Kipley's years of vile action against teachers at your behest represents the payoff for her participating in the sadistic conduct she has engaged in against teachers and staff. This is despicable stuff.

Apparently, you have felt it was safe to ignore the Erwin jury's finding that the school board did retaliate against Erwin via Davis, Hamilton, and Lennard for you continue to retaliate against workers in the school system using the same covert, despicable policy that Lennard, Hamilton, and Davis used against Erwin. And you encourage unethical administrataors, including principals, to do the same. You continue to think you can get away with this unprofessional, vicious behavior and that the board lets you continue the vile practice because most of its members agree with you.

I don't know how many Mr. Erwins the board will need to repudiate and do away with this malignant policy. I don't know how many board members have to be replaced before the practice changes.

But I will help anyone whom you retaliate against to the best of my ability to fight it and expose your and the board's war against teachers and staff who are not part of your buddy-sycophancy-relative pool of those who are exempt from retaliation because of these connections to you and your major administrators.


I consider your regime to be a disgrace to education, Ms. Elia, as are your lack of education and experience a disgrace to your unearned position; and I consider this sneaky retaliation against employees of the schools not under your buddy-family-sycophancy protection umbrella as that of corrupt conduct that bespeaks your unspeakable abuse of power.

lee drury de cesare www.casting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Justices Say Law Bars Retaliation Over Bias Claims


Published: May 28, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that employees are protected from retaliation when they complain about discrimination in the workplace, adopting a broad interpretation of workers’ rights under two federal civil rights laws.

By decisions of 7 to 2 in one case and 6 to 3 in the other, the court found that the two statutes afford protection from retaliation even though Congress did not explicitly say so.

The decisions are significant both as a practical matter and as evidence of a new tone and direction from the court this year, following a term in which there were sharp divisions and an abrupt conservative turn.

The new rulings were in distinct contrast to one of the signature decisions of the last term, a 5-to-4 decision that placed tight time limits on plaintiffs seeking to file pay-discrimination cases. Justice Samuel A. Alitont> Jr., who wrote the majority opinion almost exactly a year ago in that case, Ledbetternt> v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, wrote one of the two majority opinions on Tuesday. Justice Stephen G. Breyernt> wrote the other.

One of the cases began as a lawsuit by a clerk for the United States Postal Service in Puertont> Rico. The plaintiff, Myrna Gómez</font>-Pérezfont>, 45 at the time, complained that she had been denied a transfer to a different office because of age discrimination. Her lawsuit alleged that as a result of her complaint, she became the target of retaliatory actions by her supervisors.

The other case was brought by a former assistant manager of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, a black man named Hedrick> G. Humphries>. Mr. Humphries> had complained that a white assistant manager had been motivated by racial discrimination in dismissing a black employee. In his lawsuit, Mr. Humphries> claimed that he then lost his own job in retaliation for his complaint.

Retaliation complaints are a growing subset of workplace discrimination cases, because it is often easier for employees to demonstrate that they were retaliated against than that they were victims of discrimination in the first place. Retaliation complaints filed annually with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doubled in the last 15 years to 22,000 from 11,000.

Congress has provided explicit protection against retaliation in two major federal statutes. One is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex. The other is the provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act that applies in the private sector.

However, there is no such explicit protection in the portion of the age-discrimination law that applies to federal government workers. Nor is there explicit language in a post-Civil War-era statute that gives “all persons” the same right “as is enjoyed by white citizens” when it comes to making and enforcing contracts, such as contracts of employment. Those were the two statutes that the court interpreted on Tuesday.

In both decisions, the majority relied heavily on precedent, reasoning by analogy from recent cases that dealt with claims of retaliation under other statutes. The most recent such case was a ruling issued in 2005, before either Justice Alito or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court held then that a law known as Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges that receive federal money, also prohibits school officials from retaliating against those who bring sex-discrimination complaints. The statute itself does not mention retaliation.

In his opinion on Tuesday in the federal age-discrimination case, Justice Alito said that the provision in question, broadly prohibiting “discrimination based on age,” was “not materially different” from the anti-discrimination language the court had interpreted both in the Title IX case and in an earlier decision from 1969, interpreting a Reconstruction-era statute that bars racial discrimination in property ownership.

“The context in which the statutory language appears is the same in all three cases,” Justice Alito said. “That is, all three cases involve remedial provisions aimed at prohibiting discrimination.”

In the Postal Service case, Gómez-Pérez v. Potter, No. 06-1321, the federal appeals court in Boston, which has jurisdiction over federal cases from Puerto Rico, dismissed the suit on the ground that the age-discrimination provision that applies to federal workers does not cover retaliation claims.

In his opinion, which overturned the appeals court and reinstated the lawsuit, Justice Alito said that understood in the context of its enactment, the provision did cover retaliation. He noted that while the basic age-discrimination law was passed in 1967, it was not extended to federal workers until 1974.

In the interval, the Supreme Court had issued its decision deeming that the 19th-century property-rights law covered retaliation. Congress was “presumably familiar” with that case, Justice Alito said, and “had reason to expect” that the new age-discrimination provision would be interpreted with similar breadth.

Justices Say Law Bars Retaliation Over Bias Claims

Published: May 28, 2008

(Page 2 of 2)

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Roberts said that, to the contrary, Congress was “well aware” that the Civil Service Commission had issued detailed regulations protecting federal employees against retaliation. The chief justice said that Congress should be understood to have made a judgment that retaliation problems in the federal work force should be dealt with administratively rather than judicially.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined the dissenting opinion.

These two justices were the only dissenters in Mr. Humphries’s case, CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, No. 06-1431, which held that Congress intended to cover retaliation claims brought under the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that is usually referred to as Section 1981. The court upheld a ruling by the federal appeals court in Chicago, rejecting an appeal brought by the company that operates the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain.

The Supreme Court’s decision last September to hear the company’s appeal was a surprise, because all the federal appeals courts that had weighed in on the question interpreted Section 1981 as covering retaliation. Resolving disputes among the lower federal courts is the Supreme Court’s main reason for accepting a case. The decision to grant this case in the absence of such a dispute spread alarm throughout the civil rights community on the assumption that a majority was prepared to shut the door on retaliation claims.

There was ample reason for that assumption, since Chief Justice Roberts had earlier made clear his distaste for precedents in which the court has gone beyond a statute’s text to infer a basis for a lawsuit.

It was especially significant, therefore, that both he and Justice Alito signed on to Justice Breyer’s discussion of the importance of “stare decisis,” the court’s doctrine of adherence to precedent. Even if the court’s approach to statutory interpretation was changing, Justice Breyer wrote, “we could not agree that the existence of such a change would justify re-examination of well-established prior law.”

He added: “Principles of stare decisis, after all, demand respect for precedent whether judicial methods of interpretation change or stay the same. Were that not so, those principles would fail to achieve the legal stability that they seek and upon which the rule of law depends.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, accused the majority of hiding behind “the fig leaf of ersatz stare decisis,” relying on precedents that had been incorrectly decided in the first place.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Need a Job? Listen Up.



Work in the Noble Field of Education in Hillsborough County, Florida,

Where the Emphasis Is on Excellence in Crony Hiring

Those interested in serving in the glorious occupation of administrative Pooh-bahs in education for the Hillsborough County School Board, heed ye the following:

1. Primary qualification: being a buddy, a supporter, a gofer, a sycophant, an ass-kisser or—let’s get down to street-level verisimilitude—a shameless brown-noser to Ms. Elia, superintendent, or chums with one of La Elia’s tax-paid sycophants now in the highest-level administrative jobs, not because of either education or grey matter but because they are nonstop flatterers of Ms. Elia;

2. Education requirement: don’t sweat it if you have the above sine qua non; in that magic circle, if you dropped out in the 8th grade or even if you were kicked out for smoking pot in the john in the 9th, those will not present impediment if you are buddy, relative, or toady to the ROSSAC highest level Gestapo stormtrooper, Ms. Elia.

In fact, if you got kicked out in junior high for a felony, your being close kin to Linda Kipley or Jack Davis will get you a slot in the Highest of Highest with a guaranteed beginning salary of at least $140,000 per annum and opulent perquisites, not to mention a life-time supply courtesy of taxpayers of an endless quantity of bubble gum and Cracker Jacks.

3. If you can make your subjects and verbs agree and have the slightest knowledge of where to put commas, give up now or disguise these skills. Those accomplishments will turn the superintendent off to your getting the job since La Elia has no idea about such useless information as the accoutrements of literacy in the education racket. She is savvy only about The Spring, which will up the student numbers on which depend her "performance" bonus.

4. If you happen to have married Ms. Linda Kipley and are therefore entitled to the proud soubriquet of Mr. Linda Kipley, you will roll over all competition, even those with Ph.D.s from Harvard in philosophy and nuclear science with minors in intergalactic Frisbee.

Send your application to Mr. Linda Kipley at his temporary official address of the Tampa Hilton Honeymoon Suite while he awaits his permanent digs: a new penthouse floor attached to the ROSSAC Palace, in which he and his spouse dispute who gets the poshest part, where a skylight spreads across the movie and pool room to admit the planetary bodies not to mention all the output of the pigeon poopers who have proprietary dibs on the atmosphere over ROSSAC.

Call for more information: 810-Mr. Linda Kipley. Or leave your application in a pumpkin on the northeast side of the parking lot, whose mouth slot contain the tear-off slogan “Property of Mr. Linda Kipley, now on a glide track to the superintendency, at which point he will shuck his old wife, La Linda, for a new model from amongst the hordes of young women school-board stenos with a favorable hip-to-waist ratio who appeal to guys who dump the faithful wife who has maneuvered their success in the education racket into high gear in Hillsborough County, Florida.


Can You Top This?

Mr. Schmidt is Susan Valdes's opponent.

Mr. Schmidt:

The phone logs of your opponent were a good catch, but I would have been more impressed if you castigated her and the other board members for tolerating the crony hire of Ms. Kipley’s husband for a job with a number of qualified candidates whereas he is not qualified.

The crony hiring of all the administrators and the finding of jobs for their no-talent relatives in the system is a more serious blow to the school system than a board member’s questionable sunshine violation.

The IQ level of the ROSSAC inhabitants will soon be in the lower quartile. Dumb people don’t make good managers. They lack the brain power to be.

lee



Educator of the Year and Other News from the Funny Papers

I forgot to include in the Kappa Delta Pi complaint about Dr. Lamb’s choice as “Educator of the Year” that a blog (I think The Wall) reported Lamb didn’t know what school he is was at for the graduation ceremony. Some educator of the year.

I have pondered why the people on the podium run for public office at all. I believe it comes down to the social and political éclat of gadding about town pretending to be the benefactors of education and the receiving of an endless stream of these education-bureaucracy hyped encomiums for their imaginary contributions to the world of education such as this one from the national education association Ki Delta Pi.

I suggest that we who know the score should alert the national chapters of these organizations to let the top people know the facts on the ground of what goes on in the school system.

All Lamb does is sit on the podium, Buddha in repose and rubberstamper of the Consent Agenda.

The Consent Agenda exists as locus of all the toxic stuff Elia hides in it to whiz past the board unexamined. That the board acquiesces and does not perform its duty to work for the public, the students, and the teachers, not for Ms. Elia, exposes the failure of all board members to do their jobs for the good of education. The board's flaccid performance models a disenfranchisement of the high ideals of education.

Any reasonably alert board member interested in the education of the county’s children instead of their own tinsel la gloire would demand that the items come off the agenda for discussion.

A current item that cries out for scrutiny is the hiring of Mr. Linda Kipley for a job he is not qualified for and which many of the rejected 18 other applicants are qualified for. The Kipleys as a pair will add to the low IQ quotient of the ROSSAC crony pool that comes from the board's collusion with long-time crony hiring practices.

Ms. Kipley has a home-ec degree. Home-ec degrees went out in the Pleistocene Era. No reputable college or university gives home-ec degrees any more. Mr. Linda Kipley has no degree at all but lists on his application that he expects to graduate from USF in 2010. He may as well have projected that he would be a Nobel Laureate in 2010 in addition. The board's lack of vigilance in enacting their equal-opportunity mantra is culpable when one considers the troop of cronies, buddies, and family members that have hunkered down for a fat retirement in ROSSAC.

Given the ethics of the crony hiring protocols, that projected USF degree for Mr. Linda Kipley will be superfluous since he will have by 2010 worked himself up through the ranks to superintendent because the board will have waived his requirement for any degree at all to qualifiy for the superintendency just as its addlepated members waived Ms. Elia’s need for PH.D. and a modicum of experience not to mention overlooking her inability to handle grammar and punctuation at a 10th-grade level.

Lee Drury De Cesare LeeDruryDeCesaresCasting-RoomCouch.blogspot.com

C: All Board Members

From: lee [tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]

Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 10:23 AM

Subject: FW: monkeybiz

Kappa Delta Pi
3707 Woodview Trace
Indianapolis, IN 46268-1158
May 14, 2008

Dear National Kappa Delta Pi:

The local chapter of your organization has named School Board Member Jack Lamb as Educator of the Year.

Good lord. If Dr. Lamb is Educator of the year, Mickey Mouse mapped the human genome.

To give you some idea of Dr. Lamb’s ethics, board deportment, responsiveness to citizen complaints that the First Amendment obliges elected officials to hearken to, and indifference to the stealing of school funds, I cite the following:

· Ethics: Dr. Lamb used school-board stationery and school-board office help to write a letter to Mayor Iorio asking her to abate his condo’s water bill. When the reporters caught him, he lied about the deed until backed into a corner; when a citizen rebuked him for this grubby gesture in the board room, he screamed at the citizen and told her she should stay at home.

· Board Deportment: Dr. Lamb rubberstamps such administration outrages as no-bid contracts, the superintendent’s hiring ill-qualified buddies for bloated-salary administrative jobs, and retaining a lawyer for 37 years who got his job by good-ol-boy mutual back scratching with the then-resident superintendent, Earl the Pearl Lennard, the most profoundly mediocre man in Hillsborough County.

· The slothful fellow condones citizens’ abridgement of free speech by sitting stone-faced on the podium when the chair insults citizens and lets them know the board does not want any public comment; le Lamb once admonished a roomful of teachers when he chaired a board meeting that the teachers' clapping for a colleague who spoke at the mike that the clapping violated Roberts Rules.

· Dr. Lamb once screamed at me that he didn’t care what I thought and that he did not want to hear from me ever again at a Tiger Bay luncheon when I told him that I was offended that he and other board member raised their salaries for their part-time job to eight thousand dollars more than the beginning teachers make.

· Dr. Lamb sat on the board dais a potted plant and paid not a whit of attention to the Erwin-reported outrages in which administrator Doug Erwin tried for four years to get the board and administration to stop criminality on school grounds: it included theft in the grounds department of such things as three tractors and a steady stream of supplies to fence; grounds supervisor McClelland’s handing out crooked bids to chums; the board’s awarding bids to contractors who built shoddy schools with ubiquitous water intrusion, leaking roofs, and cracking walls, not to mention its tolerating employees in the grounds department, including supervisor McClelland, who took time off work without docking their pay.

· If Dr. Lamb is the best that the local chapter can find to laud as “Educator of the Year,” the chapter must be bereft of talent.

Please send this missive to the local chapter. Its Web page has no local contact information. That’s smart marketing. Such gesture is resonant of why the chapter voted Dr. Lamb Educator of the Year.

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Blvd. 802

Madeira Beach, FL

C: all members of the school board

Thank you, Ms. Snodgrass. Lee de Cesare

From: Snodgress, Faye [mailto:Faye@kdp.org]
Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 11:31 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: Your correspondence to Kappa Delta Pi

Mr. Lee Drury De Cesare,

Thank you for your correspondence concerning Dr. Lamb and the Tampa Bay Alumni Chapter of KDP. I have forwarded your concerns to Earl Hall, counselor of the chapter.

If I can be of any further assistance to you, please let me know.

Best wishes,

Faye Snodgress, CAE

Executive Director

Kappa Delta Pi

800-284-3167

www.kdp.org