Never Hesitate to Ask a Rhodes Scholar and the Former President of the Amercan Bar for Help

I have a returning blogger from France. I must greet him or her.

Bonjour, madame ou monsieur:

Ill faut que nous ecrivons in Francais parcque j'ai besoin de practique. lee

Let's see if we get a reply. I think this reader comes from Ile de France. Madame Lee

Mr. Smith:

Imagine my delight when I saw your name on the Web. The entry said that you were still at Carlton Fields. I thought you had long ago retired to the Riviera to become an adornment in the congregation of Beautiful People who throng the beaches in bikinis in the day and the gambling dens in tuxedos in the evening.

Your biography says you have a long career of public-service work, especially in legal help for the poor. I find that admirable. It encourages me to ask you to tackle a local problem that cries out for redress concerning teachers in the Hillsborough County school system. Teachers are poor. Societal hypocrisy salutes them in hypocritical encomiums, but no money accompanies these gaseous outpourings.

The Hillsborough County School Board, the administration, and its attorney, Tom Gonzalez--the firm of whom has held school board-attorney sinecure for thirty-seven years in a good-ol' boy handshake contract-- still evade equal-employment-laws and do not believe that the First Amendment applies to them. Mr. Gonzalez's firm specializes in savaging workers as far as I can tell. Teachers are workers, so Mr. Gonzalez treats them like field hands who have rebelled against the plantation house of the board and administration.

I got the ACLU to give the board and Mr. Gonzalez a homily on the First Amendment after the board chair with no demur from Mr. Gonzalez kicked me out of the board room for mentioning a name in my comments. Due to my work in the Women's Movement, I am a veteran in the experience of being kicked out of places and surviving such experiences the better to cope with subsequent evictions for stating my convictions. Nobody promised that supporting democracy would be easy.

The board, the administration, and the board attorney continue their rebellion against the First Amendment, as the following demonstrates.

To keep teachers in terrified abeyance, the administration with board approval either cooks up Professional Standards cases against teachers outright or takes a trifle and turns it into a firing offense. For fear of losing their jobs, teachers don't dare speak their mind about the way the board and administration operate the schools to teachers' and students' and the public's disadvantage.

Most of these abused teachers are borderline poor. So they come under your law-for-the-poor umbrella

Beginning teachers make $34,000; the board makes ten thousand dollars more than that for miming ceremonial potted plants on the podium; two double dippers, Dr. Lamb and Ms. Etheridge adorn the dais. The superintendent, for whom the board waived Ph.D. requirement for this ill-educated, ill-trained in-house candidate in order to hire her over much better qualified candidates (I examined the applications) makes $300,000 a year, which includes about $40,000 in "bonus" largesse for work teachers do to raise students' scores. Your fellow Plant City denizen the greedy Dr. Earl the Pearl Lennard began this bonus gimmick, The equally greedy Ms. Elia continues it with board approval.

The rapacity of the administrative coterie, composed of C students who majored in academic piffle, makes them head straight for administration perches because that's where the money is. People who majored in weighty areas such as chemistry, math, physics, languages, philosophy, and the classics went into teaching. The administration spends money the government metes out according to student population on various administrative perquisites: bloated administrative salaries, board trips to frolic at the taxpayers' expense with a hey nonny nonny, I'm-a-very-important-person-around-town summits, and a host of other administration-cozening projects.

Here's what I request that you do: discover a way to keep the board, administration, and attorney from depriving teachers of their First-Amendment rights so that they can speak out without fear of reprisal through the board and administration tactic of filing a false charge against them in Professional Standards to shut them up and threaten their jobs. The administrator of the Professional Standards gulag has a home-ec degree. I am not making this up.

A special-ed teacher named Steve Kemp has been on suspension for eight months for a cooked-up charge of child abuse. The sheriff threw it out, but the administration continued it. Teacher Kemp has a blog. That is his real crime. The board and administration hate blogs. Board Member Jennifer Falliera asked the St. Pete Times to make blog commentators reveal their names. This board member has a degree from USF in Lord knows what but must get help from the Public Affairs people to edit her lucubrations to make them fit for public consumption.

Board Member Falliera has distinguished herself by initiating an affair with Marc Hart, former head of Community Affairs, causing him to divorce his wife, leaving his two little children in bad psychological and financial straits. The administration forced him to resign to save Ms. Falliera's "reputation." He brought the divorce depositions at his own initiative to my home in Madeira Beach, so I know the whole seamy tale. After this saga, the board appointmed Ms. Falliera chair.

The administration and board don't want any information to get out that the Public Affairs Laundromat has not put through the linguistic spin cycle to make it innocuous. They are terrified of exposure: hence, their fear of blogs. The newspaper reporting on the schools is too flaccid to give them any concern.

Mr. Kemp's blog reveals that someone from the administration or one of its collaborators called him to ask him not to mention a certain subject again. He agreed. He has run out of courage. The administration-board juggernaut has gutted and hung him out to dry. This administration phone call's purpose sounds like a quid pro quo to me. Steve Kemp will get his job back if he shuts up about the board and administration on his blog and gives up his civil rights. Unfortunately, teachers are scared to push back for fear of losing the ill-paid jobs that they love. Mr. Kemp's case is perfect example of this phenomenon.

I ask you to push back for them.

Your biography reveals that you have formidable credentials to push back. Who else from the fens and bogs of Plant City ever went to Oxford? Who other than you in these legal badlands has ever been president of the American Bar?

But your biography presents a mystery of perhaps lapsed scholarship. You got your bachelor's at South Carolina. I don't see that you are a PBK member. PBK doesn't ask if you want to join. It conscripts you. Didn't South Carolina have a PBK chapter? I can imagine it didn't. I dated some of those South Carolina boys when I went to school in Charlotte. We rendezvoused at Cow Pens. They were still struggling with the multiplication tables.

Could I submit your name as speaker to the Bay Area PBK on your work for the area poor to have legal representation? PBK has a T.S. Elliot scholar speaking next. I won't attend. Elliot's poetry is alluring, but he was a terrible snob who wanted to erase his Missouri origins so became a citizen of Great Britain and uses high-falutin' Latin, French, and even Greek in his poems with no translations for us hillbillies.

In the little and very poor Georgia town where I was born, people call that kind of hoity-toitiness "Getting' above your raisin'."

I arranged to have you speak at a National Organization for Women Diana Awards ceremony about forty years ago. I got the impression that you relished delivering your remarks. I don't know if you would feel a similar elation in haranguing the local members of PBK. There is a preponderant contingent of chemists, physicists--some of whom were in the Manhattan Project, I would bet-- and metaphysical mathematicians who are far gone in the vagaries of calculus. None I wager has read any literature since their freshman humanities teachers made them ponder Wordsworth's Prelude, an experience that has made them hate the humanities ever since.

The chapter has had Dr. Werner von Rosenstiel to address its scholars on Human Rights Law as Expressed at Nuremburg Prosecution Staff at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trial. I don't know if Tampa gaucheries against the poor come up to that standard, but if PBK invites you and if you consent to speak, I advise leaning on adjectives of condemnation: "penurious," "stingy," and "skin-flint" as an attributive noun come to mind. Do not make the mistake of court-room restraint. The Tampa chapter of PBK is a red-meat crowd.

I send this with prayers to Themis, Gaia, and Dike for your agreeing to find a way to help the poor, intimidated, First-Amendment-deprived teachers of the county. Pray over this decision and get back to me. The sisterhood of Gaia, Dike, and Themis are watching. They are chums of mine.

Lee Drury De Cesare

c: President, Bay Area PBK Society: Eddy Burns

Program Chair, PBK Bay Area Chapter: Kathleen Heide

Colloquia Chair, Alvin Woolfe