Treading Water on Goader's Case

I send out the last of the blog entries today that describes the crucifixion of Steve Kemp, aka as the blogger Goader, by the Professional Standards office at the behest of Ms. Elia.

The board and administrators don’t like teachers. They are jealous of teachers and students’ being the heart of the schools.

The board and administration want to believe that the school system is all about them. They wait like spiders for the state to send tax money to them that the head count of the teachers and their students produces. The loot comes over the transom into ROSSAC’s bunker, sealed airtight against all outsiders and subject to the vagaries of the board and administrations whims.

The board-and- administration parasites use state money do such things as fund the board’s spending $150,000 in a single year to gad about the country on frivolous junkets while teachers have to use their own money to buy supplies for poor children so that these tots can participate in class activities.

Or, using the logic that administrators can do no wrong, Ms. Elia sends out a memo to administrators to support all administrators caught in a contretemps and authorizes a “mentor” service at $340 a day for the disastrous principal of Alafia, Ms. Smith. In addition Ms. Elia tacks on a plan for $4500 each for La Smith and her vice principal to go to Eckerd for a psychological seminar to learn how a human being should treat another human being. Who pays for this personality-adjustment services? The taxpayer, of course, out of the funds that come from the teacher-pupil headcount.

Forced to remove Ms. Smith because of intrepid resistance from Alafia mothers to put up with her no longer, Ms. Elia now has the this specimen of administrator failure on life-support at headquarters. The superintendent ensconced Smith in ROSSAC, where she examines her cuticles while Ms. Elia searches for her a job with more pay and prestige or creates Ms. Smith one as she did for Dr. Hamilton, Connie Mileto’s mentor, to tide him over until he lined up the state suckers for his lobbying racket.

Ms. Smith’s case illustrates the venerable protocol of ROSSAC that if you mess up, you move up. Dr. Hamilton’s case is sui generis. Dr. Hamilton used the $150,000 job Ms. Elia created for him and that the board rubberstamped as it rolled by on the Consent Agenda to sit in his replacement Otero’s office and cold-call dopes of the state school system to hire him as lobbyist.

Ms. Elia gave the rumpled, hygienically challenged former assistant superintendent Hillsborough’s account for $65,000 with no advertising the job in spite of the board’s mantra of “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” The board remained oblivious to this as to other issues. The board gives new meaning to sleeping on the job.

Ms. Elia and her ROSSAC myrmidons have revved up to destroy teacher Goader’s job and his career because he has a blog that is sometimes mildly critical of the board and administration. They are paranoid about anybody’s pointing out what they do to degrade the schools. They have cooked up a case against Goader for child abuse of special-ed children and let him agonize for seven months, suspended and fretting that he will lose his job and never again get another job in education because of the stigma of being a child abuser. They calculate this threat will bring Goader to his knees and make him give up his blog.

This is sadism ROSSAC style.

Ms. Elia prompted Mr. Dan Valdez, the vice-superintendent Lucco Brazzi of the Professional Standards Torture Committee, to pressure Goader until he folds and gives up blogging as the price for keeping the job he loves.


Please, Jesus, don’t let Goader capitulate. Please, all you seraphim and cherubim, stand by Goader in his hour of need. Let him stand tall and not give in to these ROSSAC administrative thugs.

Teacher Thomas Vaughn called me some time in the past when his principal attempted to tag him as a child-abuse practitioner.

Thomas asked me what to do.

“Fight,” I advised. “Don’t succumb to administration job blackmail. Jump up and down. Make noise. Never acquiesce. Invoke every state official you can think of to whom you will rat out the torturer.

Say that you will write the president. Why not? Didn’t he say he wanted to hear from us? Write the bishops of the churches in the state--Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Born-again, and Imam persuasions; and in addition write the national, state, and local PTAs, etc., etc.

Say you will stand in the parking lot of the Tribune and leaflet reporters as they report for work.

These craven administrators can’t stand bad publicity. “They’re not so tough,” I advised Goader.

Warming to the subject, I advised Thomas to go for broke. I told Thomas that subtlety does not work with these barbarians when they rev up to squash a bug teacher to keep their power and control over state money intact.

“Push back, Thomas,” I urged. “Keep in mind that they all reside in the lower quartile of the Stanford Binet. They could not have passed my English 101 course if their lives depended on it.”

Thomas caught on quickly. He squawked loudly. He railed constantly. The reward: He saved his job. Thomas, himself saved his own grits just as Bart Birdsall had saved his with the same strategy when he fought and won against the charge that he was using school emails for political purposes.

To memorialize the experience, Thomas now signs his name to everything that comes across his desk as a way to confirm his rebirth as a citizen. That’s a big step, signing your name instead of signing “ANONYMOUS.”

Any teacher can do what Thomas did. Teachers can fight back when the administration tries to intimidate them. They can do what the people who founded the country did: they can rebel against tyranny. Teachers are educated people. They do not lack the intellectual resources to save themselves from administrative thuggery, all of whom are no better than C students in undistinguished majors garnered in some forlorn third-tier college or university.

The reward of opposing sadism will be extrication from the clutches of the ROSSAC Gestapo. These unspeakables will go on to lie in wait for and scoop up a more docile victim. Your resistance will cause you to be on a list of people they call crazy.

Let’s see who else is on that crazy list:

1. Galileo for saying the the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth, as the church insisted. The church thugs put Galileo on house arrest for the rest of his life. But he still had his telescope and could observe the heavens. And today, who is our hero: Galileo or those ignorant clerics?

2. Samuel Gompers, who fought child labor and didn’t give up till he changed the vile practice of greedy industrialists’ making little children work long hours in dark, dank factories. Look who leaves a legacy of protection of children from sweat shops.

3. Van Gogh, yes, Van Gogh, whom the establishment art dealers called crazy because of his revolutionary art and who would have starved to death had his brother Theo not fed him. Van Gogh sold three pictures in his lifetime. Today Japanese industrialists pay millions of dollars for a Van Gogh to hang in their board rooms.

So be crazy; it makes you invulnerable to intimidation. Grasp the crazy label to your breast as if it were a Nobel Laureate from future generations who will not be as dumb as those who now call you crazy. Do the right thing or the bold thing or the enlightened thing. Let the insults roll off your back with a “Ta, ta, to you, my obtuse buckoes.”

History will vindicate you. Today’s crazies are tomorrow’s savants and heroes. History will bless you as it did Galileo, Gompers, and Van Gogh.

All progress comes from some person’s willingness to challenge authority and rebel against the dead hand of tradition.

Were there no crazy, visionary people to lead the way for us to a new standard of behavior and to fields of dreams that solace the human spirit, we would all still be huddling around open fires in caves, picking fleas off each other.

lee