I've Got Mail

I find myself reading your blog from time to time. It seems that you have been extremely vocal about the unfair treatment that Mr. Doug Erwin received at the hands of Dr. Hamilton and other administration and Board members by the Hillsborough County School District. Though, I agree whole heartily that Mr. Erwin was treated unfairly. I think the verdict that awarded Mr. Erwin a settlement in excess of what his attorney asked for was proof to everyone that the Board and the administration didn't get away with this particular harassment. Unfortunately, Mr. Erwin suffered much to receive this award.

I am glad that Mr. Erwin got a generous settlement. Lord knows he had suffered enough from the abuse of Dr. Lennard and his goons to deserve it. I didn’t know it was in excess of what his attorney asked. Good for the fair-minded jury, who had better sense than to believe the glossing over of the outrage presented in court by Tom Gonzalez's firm in defense of the sadists who savaged Mr. Erwin.

The jurors saw that the crucifixion that Dr. Lennard and his thugs Dr. Hamilton and Mr. Davis subjected Mr. Erwin to deserved generous compensation. And Tom Gonzalez deserved to be one of the defendants himself. Mr. Erwin went to him with the then chair of the board now resigned. I can't recall her name. I think it was Bricklemeyer. She took him to Mr. Gonzalez for consultation; then both Board Chair Bricklemeyer and Mr. Gonzalez promised to protect Mr. Erwin but fed him to the administration wolves instead.

And it was the taxpayers who paid for the board and administration crime. The crook paid nothing, not even that guy McClelland, who stole a tractor, lifted about a box car of toilet paper, and bragged about getting rich on the tax payers. The board and administration got away with murder: not single person got punished after the Erwin outrage.

The board fell silent. If it had cared at all for education, it would have fired Dr. Lennard and his henchmen Hamilton and Black.

Dr. Lennard holed up in his office and protested his lack of knowledge of anything--including whether the world still spun on its axis. Board and administration hunkered down and waited for an inattentive public to go back to football games and tractor pulls. It did.

This experience has not deterred the administration from its criminal tendencies. Rather getting away with the savaging of Mr. Erwin only encouraged the board and administration to incorporate criminal protocols in their routine administrative regime. Crime continues today in ROSSAC purlieus. It's just a different flavor of crime: more confident, more outright. The administration with board backup has, for instance, shut up teachers by Ms. Elia’s using the Professional Standards office to either cook up a crime by some teacher or to take a trifle and turn it into a firing offense. So teachers are in terror of losing their jobs if they criticize the administration and board or speak up for their rights.

Currently, with the board’s collusion, Ms. Elia has charged special-ed teacher Steve Kemp with child abuse. The sheriff threw out the charge, but the board and administration continued to hold it over Kemp's head, knowing that Steve Kemp would suffer psychological agony, knowing that if the administrative Nazis fired him for a charge of child-abuse, cooked up or not, he would never get another job as a teacher. He has been on suspension for eight months and counting.

Kemp’s real crime in the administration’s eyes is that he has a blog that has sometimes been mildly critical of the board and administration. They can’t stand even mild criticism. They want the public to have only information about the schools that has gone through the spin cycle of the Public Affairs Laundromat and converts into glowing deeds executed by the board and administration.

Not believing teachers have Free Speech rights, the administration or its designate called up Steve Kemp in a quid-pro-quo move and asked him not to mention a certain subject on his blog again. He agreed. I suggest the unspoken but well understood quid pro quo was "You give up your blog and your civil rights, and we will take you off suspension and not fire you. We will let you go back to the classroom and teach."

Steve Kemp has run out of courage. The board and administration have gutted him and hung him out to dry. Some say he is a coward; but I say he is a human being who suffered all he could take and then gave in. I am a registered nurse. When a patient reached the ultimate of his endurance for pain, we gave him morphine. I judge Steve to be at the morphine stage now. Torture is a routine feature in enemy prison camps. Torture a person long enough, and that person will say what you want him or her to say. That routine is what is closing down Guantanamo. Thank God.

I'm curious, since the Erwin trial went on several years ago, have you ever received any information on Mr. Erwin's replacement? I've read that Mrs. Cathy Valdes who's in charge of the Facilities Divisions only credentials are of early childhood, but I've never seen you address the credentials of the person who replaced Erwin. I wouldn't be surprised if the District saw fit to hire another educator or someone who could easily be controlled to watch over the day to day operation of Maintenance. I would also be interested in knowing if an outside agency routinely audits the business of the maintenance department? As a citizen of Hillsborough County, I would love to have faith that our current School District Administration corrected past behavior with new policy. Hopefully, this new policy is practiced routinely to prevent corruption of their employees and contractors. However, the answers to my questions will reveal how serious the District is about doing what is right for the tax payers or if the District continues to do what is right for their corruption network. I hope you will find my questions of interest to you also and will be reading answers to these questions on your blog.

I don’t know who Mr. Erwin’s replacement is. I am sure the person does an obeisance to Ms. Elia every time she or he encounters her. Ms. Elia is one of those insecure bullies who require a cringing show of worship to make them feel they are important.

I have complained about the ill-educated, ill-trained members of the administration who make four or five times what teachers make. There is only one Ph.D. in the administration, and I don’t know if his is a valid Ph.D. or bought and paid for somewhere in the outback of graduate schools or online diploma mills.

I have several times complained about all the early-childhood-credentialed ciphers in administration. I specifically complained about Ms. Cathy Valdes’s unsuitable early-childhood credentials and lack of experience as well of-as those of Ms. Connie Mileto, kindergarten teacher whom sugar daddy Hamilton promoted past qualified candidates to Tallahassee government representative. She moved from the bottom to top of the ladder on the ancient there's-no-fool-like-an-old-fool gambit. We all know it well.

And everybody in the state knows about her whizzing up as government agent with no suitable experience or credentials and who greased the wheels for her. I have done my best to make sure of that.

Ms. Elia lacks a Ph.D. The board waived it for her because she was the insider they sensed would not disturb their incumbency and its perquisites. I examined the applications for superintendent. All were superior to Ms. Elia. But they weren’t insiders. Being an insider was the sine qua non. Outsiders from Columbia or some such bastion of scholarship might choose the professional path of requiring some effort by the laziest board this side of the San Andreas Fault.

These sitting board members have about as much concern for education as my old bull dog had about opera. Two of them don’t have even a bachelor’s degree. Two have degrees from third-tier institutions. I want to read Dr. Lamb’s Ph.D. thesis and see if he wrote it. He can't speak. I want to see if he can write.

I think board-and-administration corruption continues in new forms. Nobody got punished in the Erwin debacle, thanks to the board’s flaccid refusal to fire the culprits, so why would the administration change its ways?

To show how complicit the board is with the administration in crucifying teachers who give even a whiff of rebellion, I sent Steve Kemp to ask for Board Member April Griffins’ help. She sweet talked him, told him not to tell anybody about their meeting, said that "good things were happening behind the scenes," and then went back to pretending she didn’t know what was going on. Ms. Griffin has pretensions of being solicitous of teachers. She no such inclinations. She merely tries to fool teachers that she has their welfare in mind. She has lapsed into a board yes-person for Ms. Elia just as all the veteran board members are.

The question her gutless, unprofessional behavior evokes is this: If teachers can’t go to board members for help when the administration treats them sadistically as is the case with Kemp, whom should they go to, Mr. Greenjeans?

I believe that the administration and board are worse now than they were in the Erwin saga of sadism. They have gotten more expert at criminal conduct and more apt to pursue it because they got away with it before.

I see your postmark is St. Petersburg. That St. Pete board is awful too. I understand it has a right-wing born-again woman on it who has all kinds of weird ideas about what can and cannot be taught in schools. Go monitor the Pinellas County and start a blog to report the outrages. It’s the least we citizens can do for education. lee