Message from a Reader Deserves Airing lee

Juliet's Balcony: I think it is exactly what one imagines it would be.

This reader has a good understanding of the School Board and Rossac Situation. lee

What people like Elia do not understand and never will is that no one cares if you have a big house or nice car or anything else. People only care if you have touched lives. Go into any school, and you meet dozens of people who literally hate her. She has stepped on a lot of toes during her career and thrown her weight around. I have never met a single teacher or employee who has worked under her (under being the important word) and liked her. People who are her equal or above her love her, because she kisses their butts, and they think she is just wonderful, but she mistreats and snaps at people below her. People who mistreat waitresses or people beneath them are sadistic human beings. Always beware of people like that. The minute people like Elia are promoted they kick those that they used to kiss up to b/c they no longer need those people. When Elia dies she will finally see how she lived her life all wrong. None of the people who like her are true friends. They like knowing the Superintendent and being in her good graces. The minute she steps down they will ignore her and drop her like a hot potato. Then, she will be left with nothing.

The school board members need to take this info to heart also. They cover for the district officials and vote for whatever Elia wants, but the minute they step down from their board position, Elia and other district officials won't return their calls. Only God knows why they have become subservient to Elia and allow themselves to look like big fools to the general public by becoming little puppets and not reforming the schools.

10:18 AM

http://antigrammargrinch.blogspot.com/

You know you have hit the big time when you have hate blogs posted about you. Here's one on me.

My legs are much better than the imposed ones the guy uses to spoof me. Thank God, the legs are the last to go.

My critic sounds really mad. I don't know whether he's down on English teachers are just paranoid. In grammar he doesn't know his ass from his elbow.

Trust me. Would I lie?

lee

You Never Run Out of Cess Pools to Clean Up at the School Board

Juliet's Balcony Courtyard

Folks: I am going to wade into the topic of the Professional Standards Office as the in-house Gestapo to keep Elia or whichever figurehead is superintendent in power. The board and the attorney know what is going on with Professional Standards: it is the Cell Block that punishes anybody who protests unless they protest loud enough and persistently enough that they earn themselves a Teflon zoot suit with their courage. Bart Birdsall did that, and I am proud of him for doing so.

Gonzalez promised me three times to construct a pamphlet for teachers going into Professional Standards that would outline the measures they could take to protect their rights. He lied. The people who go into Linda Kipley's lair get treated like dogs and the board and Gonzalez knows this. It's the dirty little enforcement arm of the superintendent's office.

One think I consider vital: not only must the head of Professional Standards have a suitable degree--and that would not be Kipley's Home-Ec bona fides--but that the person have a psychiatric evaluation before stepping into the job. lee

If you have any thoughts on my approach to this Don Quixote quest, tell them to me. A hundred heads are better than one. lee

The "Poor Communication" Racket

Read Marilyn Brown's piece on Elia's constant lament of "we have to improve" when another is failure-to-communicate catches up with her. It's on TBO.

Brown does her usual good job of detailing the time-after-time series of this strategic Elia excuse to mislead the easily fooled board members, who never call her up on this failure to inform people who need the information that she hoards. The board members are too lazy or too intimidated to make Elia catalog the number of times she has failed to inform people.

This deliberate misleading by Elia is strategic, not accidental. Knowledge is power. The people who know what is going on have the power. Those who don't are at a huge disadvantage. Elia knows this and uses the deliberate deprivation of information as part of her hoarding of power.

I got a whiff of Elia's excluding even the board members on the Spring deal when April Griffin suggested holding a workshop for the teachers when the teachers raised a belated ruckus about Elia's not informing them about the Spring since teachers were on the hook to implement Elia's secret buy. Elia must not have informed even the board of her $30 million purchase on its watch. Otherwise, why would Griffin make the dumb suggestion to have a teacher workshop on the Spring when Elia had already signed the contract, making the board liable for the tab for this excessively expensive program that allows Elia to "earn" more bonus points? Griffin, unfortunately, lacked the moxie to call Elia to account on this lapse of failing to keep the board up to date on her sucking the taxpayers into a $30 million commitment whose chief purpose was to expand Elia's bonus possibilities.

The problem in this failure to communicate goes back to the board. The board lets Elia get away with this scam of information-is-power-so-hoard-it. If the board raised this issue in a public school-board forum and made Elia defend herself and made clear that board members expect her to share information or get fired, she would share information. Elia wants to keep her job to run up the retirement tab that taxpayers will be stuck with when she finally, mercifully leaves.

But the board vote is now 4 to 2 against holding Elia accountable for her actions in this and in other mismanagement decisions. The two for sharing information are Griffin and Valdes. The other five--Kurdell, Falliera, Edgecomb, Lamb, and Olson--are in Elia's pocket and enemies of the taxpayers, the teachers, and the students. These five board members don't see any loyalty as important except their blind loyalty to Elia. Let's hope Steve Gorham beats Kurdell. That would give a 4-3 profile with only four being blindly obedient to Elia.

Make no mistake that Elia knows that knowledge is power. That is why she makes all these moves to hoard it with the shopworn excuse of, "Well, I could have done a better job and will do so in the future." She deliberately does not do a better job.

Elia has no intentions of sharing information until the board puts her job on the line for chronically withholding vital data. Elia is not smart in academics; but she is crafty in pulling the wool over the board's eyes, and the board is too lazy or too enamoured of a system that gives its participants the chance to preen and not do vital homework by reading all the data that applies to the board job. These reluctant scholars of the high purpose of board duty cost the taxpayers, the teachers, and the student and effective school system. lee

c: All School Board Members
Marilyn Brown, Letitia stein, Paul Tash, rosemary goudreau, and Patrick Manteiga