Here We Go Again

Florida Association of Superintendents: The Web says your association for Florida school administrators has hired Dr. Jim Hamilton as lobbyist. If the association runs with public funds, please send me as public information the ad that you ran for the job and the applications of those who applied for it. I will pay for the duplication.

Thank you.

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 902
Madeira Beach, FL 33708

Dear Superintendent Havercamp: (MARION COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS
An Equal Opportunity School District [posted on the Web])

Marion is one of seven counties in sixty that signed onto Dr. Jim Hamilton’s lobbying scheme.

One questions why Dr. Hamilton convinced so few school boards to adopt this scheme be the lobbying position vital to schools’ wellbeing.

I request a public-records copy of Dr. Hamilton’s contract with Marion County Schools. I would like as well a copy of the needs study that the school board required to create this position. Hamilton’s lobbying costs $65,000 a year for Hillsborough County. If all clients pay this rate, Dr. Hamilton will garner a half million dollars from taxpayers. This is double dipping by this retired assistant superintendent on a grand scale.

I request as well the name and job title of the administrator who hired Dr. Hamilton and would like to know whether the school board discussed the contract and approved the hiring in open session with the public present. I would like a copy of the board secretary’s notes that accompanied the adoption of this position.

One notes the average income in Marion County is $32,398. Thus, if Dr. Hamilton’s perquisite is the same for Marion as for Hillsborough County, it would support two Marion-county families. A great deal of good could come from these lobbying funds if used to benefit students and not an ambitious retired administrator who schemes to have not only his opulent pension but also more of citizens’ school tax funds. This is double dipping that is heroically greedy.

I don’t know the finances of Marion County’s schools, but during state budget cuts it appears that the county should trim superfluous personnel such as a lobbying consultant. I understand that one of the seven school systems has bethought itself to withdraw from the Hamilton deal. I applaud that administration’s and board’s wisdom.

Your Web sites says Marion is an equal-opportunity employer. Please send me a copy of the ad you ran for the lobbying job that Dr. Hamilton mysteriously procured from all seven schools and the school-board association. And send me, pray, copies of the rejected people’s applications. These are public documents.

I am dubious about the need for Dr. Hamilton’s proposed lobbying sinecure for he didn’t convince many client schools to take the bait. I think most schools were concerned about the cost, but the superintendents then turned around and voted for the lobbying frill for their state organization, hitting the state for the cost of this superfluous lobbyist by another avenue.

Even if the lobbying post were needed, I am concerned about Dr. Hamilton’s educational, ethical, and personality fitness for representing the schools of Florida.

The attached file touches on Dr. Hamilton’s temperament. He acts like a spoiled child if someone opposes him. Since some of the legislators whom he proposes to deal with have hypertrophied egos as well, this combination does not augur harmony.

Dr. Hamilton has a PH.D. from the University of Florida, yet a past memo shows he can’t distinguish between the homophones “you’re” and “your” and has the vaguest notion of punctuation. Such errors do not demonstrate competency in Basic English, which is what parents expect schools to teach their children for the job world. Why does a fellow who can’t perform with the basic writing competency that schools are all about become the face of the state schools?

The constant complaint I heard from business people when I still taught college English was, “They can’t write and can’t punctuate. Send us some graduates who can handle the language.”Were a personnel officer to put Dr. Hamilton into a room equipped with only his bare brains and a pencil and to tell him to write a page that explains why he wants to work for the company, I predict Dr. Hamilton would not get the job.

I doubt that Dr. Hamilton’s terminal thesis was his own work.

I shall sooner or later ask the University of Florida president to have the university’s linguistic scholars do a forensics review of Dr. Hamilton’s thesis compared to his unassisted writing. I believe the thesis committee was asleep at the switch when its members approved the thesis as Dr. Hamilton’s original work. I may not get the university to comply with my request, but my complaint will alert it to the thesis scamming that has long gone on and will make the university more vigilant henceforth.

The attached file to Commissioner Smith has more data on Dr. Hamilton’s writing problems, and this Web site has the unsatisfactory thesis I review of Dr. Clayton Wilcox, hired as Pinellas County supervisor as his first job after his terminal degree from NOVA: http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6520837584997793196&postID=3328796914433574826. One expects flawed theses from NOVA, but the University of Florida is our premier university, whose practices of awarding terminal degrees should get strictest scrutiny.

Dr. Hamilton’s ethical status also concerns me vis-a-vis suitability for lobbying for tax-supported schools. While associate superintendent at the Hillsborough County School Board, he used his power to intervene in the hiring process to hire a young woman named Connie Mileto, who had only kindergarten credentials and no condign experience for the Chief Government Relations Officer. With Dr. Hamilton’s urging, the administration rejected other candidates with both education and suitable background.

Such favoritism’s interfering with Dr. Hamilton’s professionalism and the obeying of the equal-employment-opportunity laws and riders on government funding do not show that he takes federal laws and funding mandates seriously enough to have a position representing a school system in which teachers strive to teach children honesty and obedience to the laws. If Dr. Hamilton could engage in such dishonest capers as the unorthodox Mileto hiring when he acted assistant superintendent in Hillsborough County’s schools, what’s to prevent his fudging the truth and pulling off seamy deals as part of the lobbying job?

Another ethical objection is Dr. Hamilton’s involvement in harassment bordering on mental torture of former principal and then administrator Doug Erwin in the early nineties. One infers Dr. Lennard deputized Dr. Hamilton to shut Erwin up about Erwin’s trying to get the administration and board to do something about on-site crime. This crime included bid-rigging, theft of school property, disappearance of department money, and shoddy school construction with numerous flaws in completed buildings including serious leaking that began the day the contractor hammered the last nail into the structure. Yet the board paid these contractors top price with tax money.

Mr. Erwin naively hoped that the administration and board would do something about the crime problem and tried to alert them to it.

But the board looked the other way—three of these dormant public servants still sit on the board: James Hamilton, Candy Olson, and Carol Kurdell-- as Dr. Hamilton acted Superintendent Lennard’s enforcer to shut Erwin up. The plan was to fire Mr. Erwin and deny him his pension. This ongoing punishment of Erwin was vicious and sadistic, and Dr. Hamilton led it at Lennard’s apparent behest... The board and administration pretended that the crime problem did not exist and, instead, tried to convince people that Mr. Erwin was crazy.

After a couple of years of this torture emanating from Dr. Lennard’s office with Dr. Hamilton’s leading the torture and with the board’s studiously ignoring the problem, Mr. Erwin hired a lawyer and won a whistleblower lawsuit. He won and got a settlement of $175,000 against the negligent if not criminal board and unscrupulous administrators. The taxpayers paid this settlement, of course, the price of allowing such unethical people as Dr. Hamilton et al to work for the schools.

Mr. Erwin escaped into retirement while nobody at the schools received punishment. In fact, some got promotions. Dr. Hamilton did.

A logical person suspects graft at the root of this saga of cruelty and probable crime in high places.

I also suggest that Dr. Hamilton lacks the personal polish for the lobbyist position for those seven schools and the school- board association that fell for his lobbying spiel. Dr. Hamilton has been known to blow up when people oppose him. His louche sense of tact led him to include a section in a marginally literate white paper that he required a year to write in which he served up his advice in stilted English and bad punctuation on how new board members should dress even though his own sense of dress and grooming are, in my view, deficient.

I believe this lobbying bonanza for Dr. Hamilton is the kind of featherbedding that has made school administrations burgeon in recent years. It demonstrates also the inside incestuous hiring in the Florida K12 community that reflects lack of its commitment to equal-employment opportunity. The school administration’s signing on to this lobbying scam for a former administrator does not speak well for its members’ collective wisdom; nor does it ratify administrative fidelity to the equal-opportunity laws and government-contract requirements for equal opportunity by recipients.

The reason for people’s getting away with this conduct is that no one has yet complained to the federal contractors.This state-wide lobbying scam may prod me at last to file charges of violation of the equal-opportunity laws and contract riders with the appropriate federal agencies.

A person does not read an assessment of the schools without the author’s noting the unexplained recent growth of administration. Dr. Hamilton’s pricey, make-work lobbying swindle provides one more statistic to fuel the public’s objections to overstocked administrations; it provides one more instance of boards and administrations’ insensitivity to public objections to bloated administrative numbers.

There must be somebody on what your Web page shows to be a plentiful staff that can go to Tallahassee or other venues to lobby when needed. Kevin Chrisban looks like a possible candidate to me. If he’s comely and well spoken, all the better. I think there are two people in the publicity department. One of those at a time could sally forth to lobby.

There is no reason for a superintendent and board interested in making the best use of employees and saving public money not to send a current staff member on lobbying jobs. You could multi-task the duty among the most promising and educate them in politics.

I submit these remarks as a concerned citizen and as a parent of four children who attended Hillsborough County Schools, two grandchildren who now attend Hillsborough County schools, and eight more who attend schools all over the country. Everybody who pays taxes is concerned when money that should go to children’s needs goes to a rip-off concocted by a greedy former administrator. I am one of those.

As my family today watched the inauguration of the 44th president, I reflected on the difference between the reassuring mantra that ours is a nation of laws and the seven Florida school boards and association of school administrators that have evidently bypassed the equal opportunity laws’ contract provisions. They fall back instead into the undemocratic tribal custom that gives a job to a person not qualified for it simply because he has been part of an incestuous system, not because he deserves the job as best qualified. Even if the boards who ratified Dr. Hamilton as lobbyist believed in the need for a lobbyist, the method of choice went athwart the equal-opportunity laws and is un-American in the deepest sense.

I look forward to receiving the requested public information and will pay the copying fees when it arrives.

Respectfully,

(Ms.) Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

C: Commissioner Smith, DOE
Governor Charlie Crist
C: School Board of Brevard County
School Board of Sarasota County
School Board of St. Johns County
State Superintendents’ Association



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