Board Member Olson's Deportment

My husband's citation stone for hanging in so long as mayor of Madeira Beach. Before suffering as mayor, he was a council person for several years.

He served beyond the call of duty and quit because a new bunch of council people came in and wanted to throw their weight around and fired our city attorney, who was the best we ever had, so Tom quit. Not all elected officials are rotten.

Tom is now the hero of the town and of Suncoast Tiger Bay's elected-official members. I am known as the crazy wife who gets booed at Tiger Bay for asking inconvenient questions. My most recent slur was from a guy who ran up to me when I insulted the head of the anti-Hispanic border patrol renegades.

I walked over to him and said, "What did you say to me, sir?"

"I want you to know that I am a New York City lawyer, and I hate you."

"Which of the crime families sent you out for pizza for lunch on court days?" I asked.

Don't let these uncivilized characters disturb you. Just hit back with the snappiest riposte you can think of. All the ladylike women I know follow that protocol.

"Why's a good fellow like that put up with a crackpot like her?" my detractors ask each other.

Love, romance, Quinvere and Lancelot, four children, ten grandchildren, a Georgia girl who can make a pot of chicken and dumplings fitten' to eat" is the answer.

They better be glad my old man's hearing has gone South, or they would get a punch in the puss from my old knight who sleeps in a NY Yankes tee-shirt. lee

To: candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us; doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us; april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us; jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us; jennifer.falliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us; doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us; Susan Valdes; Linda Kipley; Mary.Lavandera@sdhc.k12.fl.us

Cc: marillynbrown@tampatribune.com; rosemarygoudreau@tampatribune.com; Letitiastein@sptimes.com

Subject: messages from readers on my blog several days ago

Ms. Olson: I received the following two messages on my blog CastingRoomCouch from readers a few days ago. I thought the name Christina Butler sounded familiar. Then a friend reminded me about the school’s sending a child home for her insisting that she was right about the untoward relationship Butler was having with a male student. I think I wrote the board members a rebuke for allowing a child to be punished by sending her home for insisting that she was telling the truth.

The two people below seem emphatic about the comments they make on you, and they represent unethical behavior engaged in by you that cast no honor on the board or yourself. I would like to know if Ms. Kipley butted into the matter and whether she did so on her own volition or on your prompting or Ms. Elia’s. And is engaging in that conduct how she gets her husband hired without a college degree, not even one in home ec against qualified candidates who competed for the job.

I am sure my readers would like to know if the background story about the DUI cover-up is accurate and whether you or Ms. Elia told Kipley to put pressure on a school worker to be quiet about the DUI favors swap. That seems plausible since Ms. Elia and the board have little respect for a person’s First Amendment rights. I got kicked out of the board room by the adulterous chair Falliero for uttering a name, an ad hoc rule she made up because of my revealing the school-based adultery initiated b y her, adultery which accompanied her breaking up the marriage of Mr. Hart and the subsequent misery of his two young children. The board had no objection to tolerating adultery of a fellow board member and even considered it no impediment to her being board chair, although most of the children’s parents certainly would.

Please comment on both your detractors’ remarks, ma’am .The voters have a right to the truth or falsity of this story. Another friend who works in the schools says you are notorious for befriending people in such ways. If so, that’s an unethical habit for a board member.

Lee drury de cesare

maryworth said...

It should not be surprising that the media has paid little attention to the teacher sex scandal concerning Christina Butler, the former stripper hired at Middleton, as it was most likely Candy Olsen who pulled strings to find her that job. A good friend of mine, an English teacher who was threatened by Kipley to shut up about it, connected the dots on this one. Olsen apparently did it as a favor for someone who years ago covered up her own daughter's D.U.I. while a student at Plant H.S. This teacher apparently dated the girl who covered up the D.U.I. and was best friends with Butler. The folks downtown are more afraid of the Butler situation than anything.

7:03 AM

Anonymous said...

This wouldn't surprise me a bit. Olson is as corrupt as they come. She does favors for friends and people she doesn't think can help her get a kick in the shins or ignored if they ask her for help. She is the epitome of the Good Ol' Boy personality. She is an example of the type of people that keep the status quo. If she sold clothing and found out the clothes were made in a third world country by slave children she would cash the check for her millions in the bank anyway. What a waste of a human being! Mother Teresa would have barfed if she met such a person!

I admire the vivid diction my readers exhibit. lee

11:22 PM

Addendum from the day after the 4th and fireworks that you would not believe on the beach:

Teachers' Political Forum Looms

Group of Attendees at the Women's Political March for Choice in DC, to which a million came. I asked the Park Police on horses why there were no park-police women on horses at a women's march. Chauvinists on horses are always polite to grannies with a mop of white hair.

Correction!

Well, heck. This takes the sauce out of my day. I thought a great, gawdy anti-First Amendment measure had been promulgated by the board and Elia. I thought I could go for succor to the ACLU again. The villainy of the moment is at too low an ebb for my taste. What’s duller than archiving old emails? But we can commence sending subversive messages over the school emails and invitations to the Teachers’ Forum.

The problem is that Ms. Elia doesn’t have the talent for superbly bad conduct. Real evil takes talent. And God knows the board is not up to high-level bad behavior with its lower-quartile brains. I did not keep the story in-house. Give me the day’s Ditz Award. I sent it to several press with a hey nonny nony. Now I am sorry I called Mr. Tash an ectopic endomorph.

Aw well, as Scarlett, my role model and that of all Georgia girls, says, “Tomorrow is another day.” Lee

From: Thomas Vaughan [mailto:vaughan88@verizon.net]
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008 3:51 PM
To: lee
Subject: Re: ?

Lee

I read recently where they were archiving old emails. That is the only email maintenance I know of.

Tom

Ms. Cobbe: What is the name of the device that I understand Ms. Elia ordered to put a hold on the email for the schools? How much did it cost? Does it entail extra personnel to run it? Who strains the emails? Does the board have a written rationale for its need, or does Ms. Elia?I would like to have a copy.

Thank you. ldd

We'Minions of the Light have got a problem. We are having a teachers' problem-solving political forum on August 15th at the Columbia Restaurant.

But Ms. Elia is so eager to control anything about the schools that she is putting a strainer on the email system at midnight tonight (June 2) that stops all emails and stores them for four days until the ROSSAC cops can determine if they are subversive to Ms.
Elia's beatific reputation. How they will do this remains a mystery.

Since I have a congenitally rebellious and criminal mind, I bethought myself to rush our invitations (done by one of the Minions of the Light, Holly, as fast as she could) into the school emails before 12 midnight tonight so that invitations to the Teacher Forum would be snugly parked in the individual teacher email kitties when they walk into their offices at the beginning of the semester.

My husband strolled by the computer and said, "Why aren't you watching Hardball?"

I explained to him my scheme.

"Well, aren't you going to mess up your forum plan?"

"What plan do you mean?" I asked.

"The one you have there in the invitation," quoth he.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"The plan to get Ms. Elia and others of the Loyal Opposition to come to the Teachers' Forum. They will get pissed and won't come if you sabotage the email-system shutdown," he said.

"Would they be such party-poopers?" I asked.

"Are you kidding?" he asked. "Aren't these the characters who savaged that poor creature Erwin because he whisltleblew their ongoing in-house graft? Didn't they interrogate him until he was blithering?"

"Yes," quoth I. "I think the court papers said they stretched him out on a table and didn't stop grilling him until Mr. Erwin had lapsed into the blithering state."

"Have you dug up the parking lot to see how many teacher bodies they have interred there yet?" Have you noticed many classrooms without a teaching person up in the front of the room?" he inquired.

"Oh, woe," I said. "You don't think the ROSSAC ghouls are capable of knocking off and burying teachers in parking lots underneath the macadam?" I quivered.

"They're capable of anything. You told me that not once but a thousand times," said my spouse of 52 mostly stressful years.

"My lord, you are right," I answered. "That 'My lord' is not direct address, dear. It's a mild interjection."

I have not lived with a teacher for 52 years without knowing a sentence backwards and forewards," he said. "I even know the pluperfect past participial loop-de-loop gerundial thing-a-ma-jiggy."

"There's no such thing," I replied.

"Yes, there is," he said. "It's a little ditty that has come out since you stopped keeping up with language and immersing yourself in fending off the Powers of Darkness. You'd better
get off the computer and start thinking of some non-lethal way to get out the news about the Teachers' Forum besides sabataging the computer system in the vile environs of
ROSSAC."

I answered with a clause that I have not seen it necessary to employ many times in the last 52 years:

"You know, you may be right, dear," I said.

"You bet your life I am," said my husband.

"Oh, don't use that phrase," I quavered.

"Then get your noggin into a non-criminal mode and think of some way to advertise the Teachers' Forum that does not trip the murder synapses in the left ventricle of the noggins of the ROSSAC gang," advised my old man.

So get your thinking caps on, Casting-Room-Couch readers. Tell me how we of the Minions of Light get out to the teachers the gladsome tidings about the Political Forum by August 15. Don't rest until an idea of genius arrives on this subject and you have passed it on to the kid here.

I don't do that kind of thinking. I never could conjugate regular French verbs. But I was hell on wheels with the irregular ones.

Any ideas will get grateful acceptance. Accompany them with your RSVP to the Teacher Forum hoedown. lee

Holly, one of the minions of the light, did our invation.

Teachers’ Political Forum

Ask everything you want to know at the Teachers’ Political Forum!

We invited School Board members, candidates, and Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia .

Time: Friday, August 15, 2008 at 5pm

Place: The Columbia Restaurant; the King's Room

2117 East 7th Avenue
Tampa, Florida 33605

Price: $18.50 Cash bar, sangria, and tapas

Special Guests:

Tampa Tribune

CTA Officials

ROSSAC Personnel

School Board Members

School Board Candidates

Patrick Manteiga La Gaceta publisher

Teachers: Let your voice be heard, Now is the time to solicit responses from those who set the professional and political climate of Hillsborough County’s Public Schools. Ask about issues concerning the teaching profession including, but not limited to:

• Three -hundred minutes

• 6/7 Plan

• Text-book adoption

• Springboard curriculum

• Final exams’ grading scales

• AP -and-honors placement

• AP bonuses

• Hiring policies and practices

• as coincident with “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer”

• 
  

Let's take this first step and then have the fortitude to stick with things to the end and achieve our goals.

RSVP by August 13, 2008, to

Tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Education Sherlock Needed in Hillsborough County

Good heavens, look what just came in over the transom in the comment page to a previous email. Somebody fill me in. Lee

The Honorable John McCain
United States Senate
241 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-0303

June 29, 2008

DeDear Senator Mc Cain:

I (a Democrat) asked my husband (a Republican) tonight after hearing on TV about your search for a vice presidential candidate, what he thought of the situation. We have been married for 52 years of marital political disharmony.

His response: “Go ahead. Nobody can stop you.”

Since I hear that Mr. Crist, our governor. is high on your list of choices, I want to let you know that there is an important impediment to his candidacy that affects a lot of people. These are anybody with children, grandchildren (ten for this granny), teachers, students, and the horde of administrators and other Superintendent-Elia hangers-on who batten in Hillsborough County's School-board's employ, having made themselves comfortable via the bloated salaries and cushy perquisites bestowed on them by Superintendent Ms. Elia.

The superintendent herself makes $300,000 a year, with the board's being eager to download more on her; she makes the most I can find for a superintendent any place on the Internet. Ms. Elia has no doctorate; indeed, the board reduced the academic credential to a mere master's in a job that requires a doctorate earn its implicit status. The board--Edgecombe, Olson, Kurdell, Lamb, Falliero, and Valdes also faked a “nation-wide search" ad and billed the taxpayers $35,000 for it to cover its tracks. April Griffin was not on the board for the vote then, but I wager she would have joined the majority. My intuition says board members hired hired La Elia because they wanted an in-house buddy at the top who would not mess with their incumbency.

Ms. Elia hires unqualified cronies and hangers on and gives them lavish salaries and a guarntee of iron-clad employment no matter how badly they perform.

The transportation department melted down with a former bus driver as head, and Ms. Elia had to hire a pricey consultant to come in and sort things out. I read the report. Anybody could see that all it did for $350,000 out of the tax kitty was advise getting scheduling software and to park the buses in a more convenient place. A third-grader could have delivered up that thin wisdom. After this bus-meltdown's eclat, Ms. Elia hired an outside person who was not a crony (quelle miracle!) at a board member's urging but kept on the two mess-ups at the top that she had replaced and did not lower their salaries. What they do now remains a mystery. But we know that even the Tribune couldn't hold back from rebuking Ms. Elia for this piece of nutcake arrogance.

Ms. Elia, who lusts for good press above all things next to bonuses, has recently demonstrated the way not to get newspaper approval is by having a public quarrel with the editorial scribes at the Tribune, the only big paper in town. Ms. Elia has been too busy hiring home-ec teachers and their spouses for $130,000 sinecures to consider that anybody who courts a fight with editorial writers is jousting with people who buy ink by the barrel.

And the inattentive board members may consider that the Tribune editors sooner or later will turn a jaundiced opining eye on the board's lack of involvement in seeing that they keep promises they made to voters to have a care about how they let the superintendent run the schools into the ground.

The board never says a word about such gauche hiring practices' being athwart the equal-opportunity laws and the binders on all the schools' federal funds demanding fair hiring even though the board pastes on every available surface, “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” Nor did it object to the administration's hiring a home-ec teacher, one Ms. Linda Kipley, to the important job of head of Professional Standards, although you are probably as surprised as most people to discover that any college or university in the United States still graduates home-ec majors since most think that superannuated degree became extinct in the Diluvian Geological Era.

Kipley, as the head of Professional Standards, which should have a criminal justice or psychology degree, must have been the last graduate home-ec major from Saskatchawan Agricultural College. Just recently La Superintendent Elia hired Ms. Kipley's husband, who has no college degree much less the accounting degree the job description required. Other of the nineteen applicants did. But they weren't married to an Elia home-ec-degreed chum. The board didn't say a word to this torpedoing of the equal-opportunity board promise.

In addition to greed and crony hiring, Ms. Elia has trouble with punctuating and is vicious to the teachers. She springs things on them that affect their jobs and doesn't forewarn them. She cooks up cases against them if they utter a peep and sends them to Ms. Kipley's cell block of Professional Standards for the fun of seeing them humiliated and terrified that they will lose their job in a major economic downturn.

The board looked the other way while Ms. Elia downloaded an extra class on teachers without any warning or discussion. The board itself did not know this information except a couple of Elia's favorites. She as well forced teachers to accept a grade-inflation scheme in a surprise move that devalues students' grades and mars their chances of getting into a good university; this arrogance enraged teachers who felt that grade inflation diminished their professional dignity as well as disenfranchised their students. This scheme allegedly gave the superintendent more bonus money. The board looked on complacently.

Ms. Elia's latest stab at the teachers was her buying for millions of dollars--without consulting anything but her greed for the bonus signing-- an edu-machine gimcrack program called the Spring that hasn't worked other places and apparently replaces the expensive supplies of books on hand to be tossed. She told teachers nothing as usual, although it is they who must use this Spring device in the classroom.

The board apparently knew nothing of throwing millions of dollars at gimcrack edu-machinery, for Ms. Elia didn't let them in on this drain on the kitty but did send an email to teachers warning of a four percent budget shortfall. Ms. Elia seems inordinately delighted to send out to the nervous teachers news of yet another budget contretemps. When the board members finally learned of Ms. Elia's whopping outlay for the machine-learning purchase, one member popped up and said the administration should have a workshop on the device for the teachers, a suggestion that gives some flavor of the board's mental acuity: this board member, nor did any is my guess, realize that such a suggestion was closing the barn door after the livestock had exited since the contract already sat on the books thanks to Ms. Elia's alacrity for the bonus attending the Dr. Who device.

Mr. Crist has paid no attention to my request that he come down or send an emissary to examine the way the board and Ms. Elia mismanage the Hillsborough County school system. So I suggest you examine him more closely for his suitability before you pick him as your vice presidential partner.

If, God forbid, sir, something happens to you once you win in the landslide predicted by my husband, we will have a president a man who does not care a whit about malfeasance in the running of the schools in this or any county. We already have fallen behind even the performance of the students in Borneo and Lower Sri Lanka; lord knows what our national performance figures for schools will clock in as were Ms. Elia and the present board keep their jobs much longer.

Perhaps a hint from you would persuade Mr. Crist to stop dreaming of the vice presidency and start taking care of business here in Florida by coming to Tampa and insuring that a greedy superintendent and a feckless school board improve their louche running of the Tampa Bay Area's schools.

Yours respectfully,

Lee Drury De Cesare

15216 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com