Response to Tribune Editorial Praising Elia

Tribune editorialist: Your recent piece “Some Unpopular Stands…” echoes one that I infer the since-kicked-out Ms. Goudreau wrote to defend the first Tribune downsizing a year or so ago. I fear this initial downsizing heralded the paper’s eventual disappearance, alas.

More and more cities throughout the country are losing their daily papers.

Y’all recently had another layoff of more people. The editorial on school superintendent Elia’s putative financial genius harmonizes with the paper’s agitated psyche after this second downsizing. I infer it to be an oblique comment on the wish that Media General had cut to the bone a long time ago so as to keep the paper alive. The editorial’s tone is both desperate and wistful.

You are selective in your choice of Ms. Elia’s cost cutting. You do not mention her splurges that drained the budget. She invented an in-house job for buddy Dr. Jim Hamilton on his retirement to tide him over until he had cooked up a lobbying scheme that involves eight school systems and the school-board association.

It is testimony to how school administrations blow state tax money on quixotic projects.

I think Dr. Hamilton cold-called for this scam to the state’s K12 suckers from his ROSSAC-created-job. His high-sounding administrative sinecure had no real duties. This convenience ad hoc, on-site job pulled down $140,000 a year, of which he spent $70,000 before this free-loader departed, whereupon Ms. Elia did away with the job. What did the board do about the featherbedding job and Ms. Elia’s setting up Dr. Hamilton as lobbyist flimflam factotum that the schools did not need? Nothing. That’s what the Hillsborough County board usually does.

This Hamilton lobbying scam costs $65,000 a year for Hillsborough and, one infers, also for the other schools and state-board association. None it seems are loath to throw tax money around with a hey nonny nonny. The Hamilton lobbying job replicates the duties of Ms. Connie Mileto, whose government-relations job Hamilton slipped by qualified candidates that had condign degrees and experience while Mileto had been a kindergarten scholar. Hamilton’s motive for this job sleight-of-hand that elevated Mileto from the land of “Eencie, Weencie Spider” to the halls of the legislature peeps through when one learns that his heartbroken wife divorced him and retired from her principal job in the schools during the season of this elevation of Mileto by the there’s-no-fool-an-old-fool ancient practicum still robust in its use.

The $65,000-per-school fee for Dr. Hamilton, who does not know the difference between “you’re” and “your” and cannot write a literate paragraph, is lavish recompense for ignorance mixed with thuggery. This lobbying scam will make Hamilton a double dipper of heroic proportions: pension plus half a million lobbying loot. His thuggery while in the Hillsborough administrative building involved among other foul deeds was being chief enforcer in trying to run Mr. Erwin crazy and fire him without his pension because Erwin insisted on reporting bid-rigging, theft of school property, and shoddily constructed school and also demanded that the administration do something about the crime. My guess is that Erwin was cutting out under-the-table business done in administration territory and had to go.

You did not mention when you applauded Ms. Elia’s balancing her budget on teachers’ backs that, in addition to Ms. Elia’s loading the teachers down with an extra class with no pay, she not only created Dr. Hamilton a faux job on his retirement date but also gave him the lobbying slot with no advertising a few months later. He could then retire his pretend job in Hillsborough County and begin another pretend job gadding about the state chewing the fat with old K12 buddies. While throwing money away, Ms. Elia blew another $30 million in tax money for the Spring doodad to replace math and English books. The Spring had failed in other venues and is failing now in the local schools. As far as one can tell, Ms. Elia decided to buy this thing-a-ma-bob cooked up by greedy commercial types without consulting teachers who had to implement it or board members who ratified the purchase after she had already bought it as they would ratify her purchase of a nuclear deterrent in usual potted-plant mode.

Any prescient superintendent would have seen the transportation breakdown coming and avoided the crash that cost $350,000 in consulting fees while upsetting worried parents and frightened children. The incumbent break-down bus section head had been a bus driver before her elevation. Ms. Elia kept her and her assistant on at their same salaries when she replaced them, doing what, God knows. I think both of these bus refugees make over one hundred thousand a year—maybe more since the administration recently got a nine percent raise compared to teachers’ two percent. Ms. Elia took credit for board member Griffin’s insistence on getting an outside head for the busing area instead of elevating another of Ms. Elia’s inside unqualified pets and buddies, the customary incestuous practice.

Then there’s the matter of Ms. Elia’s lavish outlay of money to rescue the principal of Alafia Elementary, Ms. Smith, whom the parents rejected as unable to lead a school because she didn’t know how to treat people like human beings. Ms. Elia hired a former principal buddy to “mentor” Ms. Smith at $340 an hour. La Elia was also revving up to enroll La Smith and her assistant principal in a psychological charm school at Eckerd for $4500 a pop. Steve Hegarty, Public Affairs head, said more rescue efforts for the messed-up principal were in the works such as had been carried out four or five times the previous year to rehabilitate disastrous principals. This invidious practice compares with the administration’s cooking up cases in the Professional Standards gulag, run by home-ec degreed Linda Kipley. Ms. Elia and La Kipley plot to fire teachers who say the least thing critical about the administration and especially of Ms. Elia. One special-ed teacher, Steve Kemp, is now suspended because of a cooked-up case against him but really because he has a blog that occasionally says something that the paranoid administration interprets as subversive. That’s treason to La Elia, and the malefactor must get the boot by fair means or foul—mostly foul.

Mr. Hegarty replaced Marc Hart to save Board Member Falliero’s “reputation.” Pole Girl Falliero had stalked Hart into an affair that ended his marriage and has made his two young children suffer financially and emotionally. When the Alafia parents wouldn’t have the mentored and seminared Smith as principal, Board Member Pole Girl Falliero and Ms. April Griffin, whom Falliero had tried to kick out of the board room when Falliero was in one of her board-chair frenzies, kissed and made up and journeyed in the dark of night on a diplomatic mission to Smith to get her to quit so as to save Elia’s face and neutralize the board’s augmenting reputation for being terminally inept. Pole Girl Falliero and Griffin wanted to save the board franchise because they aim to be incumbent board potted plants until the Pleistocene Era rolls around again. Bottom line is that both board drones have a school racket to run, and they are determined to do that job and nothing else.

I could go on. And on.

But I must protest the selective accuracy of your editorial praising of Elia’s financial savvy with her bulldog determination. This savage leadership does harm to the teachers’ trying to get an honorable place at the table in the decision making. Ms. Elia and the board shut teachers and students out of everything. Your editorial will provide the shield behind which Elia can hide for a coon’s age with the board’s uncomprehending cooperation in the continued exclusion of teachers and students from the board room.

People seem to forget that the people writing newspaper editorials are human beings. Today, these poor ciphers in newspapers are hanging on by their fingernails to an industry in swift decline. More and more cities have lost daily newspapers. Tampa, my guess is, will experience that fate as well. I live on the beach and walk down Gulf Boulevard every day for exercise: none of the Tribune newspaper containers have a paper in them. Most of the Times’s do. That absence signals Tribune retrenchment.

The Tribune has twice recently laid off staff and sucked it up financially.

Two of the recent layoffs that I heard about are the black guy who editorialized and Dan Ruth, the only writer on the paper who could make people laugh out loud. These two layoffs were not good management. I understand that the leadership of the paper is now predominantly women. I expect better from the x-chromosome sex. I have not worked for forty-five years in the Women’s Movement to see women fail in leadership jobs.

You press refugees of the similar business reality as that on the last days of the Titanic regard Elia’s harsh financial governance as perhaps what Media General should have done in some way to save the paper. But papers are different from schools. Newspapers succumb to technology; schools are forever and absorb technology.

You applaud Ms. Elia’s rough governance and ignore the messy details. Does your praise of fiscal comfort at the expense of abused employees include the rumor too often repeated to be apocryphal that Ms. Elia curses out underlings in her office, besprinkling her invective with the “f” word? I have asked Me. Elia if the rumor of f-wording people in her office be true. She has not answered.

Write us an editorial, pray, on the use of the f-word as a management technique. You might want to read some recent psychological studies that deal with the privilege of using harsh language as a marker not only of bullies but also of a perquisite of seniority.

Before retirement, I taught college English for twenty-eight years. The most frequent complaint of prospective employers was that applicants for their companies’ jobs couldn’ t write: didn’t know how to organize a paragraph much less an essay and, worst of all, couldn’t punctuate. The comma in the first line of your editorial is dead wrong: it splits a compound verb. Bone up on commas. You may need to know punctuation lore if after the Tribune you go into a job providing content for Web news pages.

Lee Drury De Cesare

C: All HC Board Members

Ms. Elia

All HC ROSSAC Administrators

Rosemary Goudreau

Steve Otto

Dan Ruth

Letitia Stein

Marilyn Brown

Paul Tash

Et al

Editorial that appeared in the Trib on Dec. 30

Some Unpopular Stands Paying Off For Schools

The Tampa Tribune

Once Hillsborough School Superintendent MaryEllen Elia makes a decision, she tends to plow ahead, and isn't afraid to ruffle feelings. So she has taken her share of hits from parents, teachers and this editorial board during her 3½ years on the job. She never seems far from controversy.

But even her strongest critics should acknowledge that Elia has managed to put the district in far better shape than most to weather the current financial crisis, which could see Hillsborough schools lose $100 million in funding over the next two years.

Elia can point to steps that have saved the district roughly $64 million, and many of those moves were controversial.

Consider: A year ago a lot of Hillsborough high school teachers were furious Elia wanted to cut their planning time by requiring them to teach six out of seven periods. They were accustomed to having two periods for planning.

Some teachers attacked the plan, labeling it a pay cut. A few even threatened to just go through the motions and not work during the extra period.

The plan was initially poorly communicated, which probably strengthened resistance, but Elia persisted.

Now the move looks inspired. It is projected to save the district $38 million a year, since it reduces the number of teachers who must be hired.

It also better utilizes high school teachers' time. And the requirement they teach 300 minutes a day, as elementary school teachers must, is hardly inordinate.

The reorganization of the school transportation system was another controversial matter.

But placing bus stops farther apart and eliminating courtesy pickups is dramatically cutting costs. The district expects to save up to $10 million.

Elia and her staff have taken other steps to cut expenses. The district eliminated close to 50 positions, ranging from administrators to laborers to save more than $5 million.

Elia says the cuts are carefully selected. "We are going to be a district with fewer employees but more teachers."

One cost-cutting decision will affect the classroom, Elia readily admits. She has decided to stop allowing teachers to extend their time in the state's Deferred Retirement Option Program, or DROP.

Previously, with the administration's approval, teachers could continue to work long after the date they had agreed to retire. They continued to make their same salaries. This kept experienced and talented teachers in the classroom. It also kept the district paying top-of-the-grade salaries.

Now Elia says there will be no extensions. If teachers who signed up for DROP - where employees agree to work five years while the state pays benefits into an interest-bearing account - will have to retire when their time comes up. If they want to return to work, they will be hired at the beginning salary.

This will cost the district some outstanding teachers, but it also will save about $4.5 million. And given the state's current financial crisis, that seems justified.

Say what you will about Elia's forceful leadership, but she can say her willingness to take unpopular stands has gotten the results Hillsborough needs to endure these tough budget times.

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