Professional Standards--Administrators: 1000; Teachers: 0

Ms. Kipley: several months ago I filed Professional Standards charges against three administrators--district head Mr. Smiley, a principal, and a administrator in the special-needs-children hierarchy.

I charged the three with flagrant unprofessional neglect of their responsibilities in the Steve Kemp case.

Mr. Kemp has been on suspension for almost a semester for a trumped-up charge of child abuse by these three-- doubtless at Ms. Elia's behest.

This trio of administrators is responsible for throwing Steve into a junk-filled room that acted as classroom for the profoundly retarded children that the three above administrators assigned him to teach although he had no credentials in the teaching of such profoundly retarded children. The three also gave him no orientation about the assignment and failed to prepare him for the situation he would face in the classroom despite the clear instructions of their job descriptions to do so.

Defying logic, the three kept Steve as teacher of that same class for six days even though they had labeled him a child abuser. Their false charge of child abuse had to do with Steve's hooking a restraint sash onto a desk to keep one child from running away while he was chasing another who was running out the door.

None of the responsible administrators had instructed Mr. Kemp about this restraint protocol, which doesn't make sense because apparently it's arbitrary: these children are restrained on buses one infers, hence their wearing the harnesses to class.

If Mr. Kemp were guilty of child abuse as the charge against him with the sheriff's office claimed, why did these administrators keep Kemp with those children as their teacher for six more days after the "child abuse" took place? That behavior indicates not only administration negligence but also administration inability to reason.

The above administrative dereliction of professional duty looms large compared to the so-called child abuse of Mr. Kemp, which the sheriff threw out but which the administration has kept in place for almost an entire semester while it footdrags about dealing with the Kemp case.

The continuance of the Kemp case for a semester has two motives: 1. to scare Kemp into giving up his blog because the administration and board hate blogs that give a different view than the laundered one that emerges from the spin cycle of the Public Affairs Laundromat.

With its usual lack of interest with anything that does not concern board members themselves such as travel funds, the board ignored grappling with the Kemp case's contradictions even when the case was brought up at a board meeting and even as it became increasingly clear that this was a set up to force Mr. Kemp to abandon his blog and to be a negative example to the school system's teachers to warn them to be subservient to the administration or lose their jobs.

You are always swift in filing charges against teachers with little or no justification, the Kemp case being illustrative. Why do you fail to act in the matter of the professional defections of these three administrators?

This is an invidious distinction and a malignantly unfair one.

I shall have an opportunity to talk today to Mr. Whitmore of the Professional Practices Services of the Secretary of Education's staff about the Steve Kemp case among others. I am going to contrast your participation in the sadistic treatment of Teacher Kemp with your ignoring unprofessional behavior by three administrators and especially your failure to answer written charges against them that a citizen has filed.

This invidious treatment highlights the administration's policy of the savaging of teachers for cooked-up Professional- Standards charges to keep them abject while the board and Ms. Elia coddle administrators when they commit unprofessional acts.

This double standard is ethically offensive to any fair-minded person.

I request that you send me your findings on the unprofessional conduct of the three administrators involved in dereliction of duty in the Kemp set-up case to scare him into giving up his education blog and to frighten all other teachers in the school system with Kemp's example so that they will not dare criticize the administration.

lee drury de cesare

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ms. Falliero: I understand you have compiled a list of parents to send messages to that describe how wonderful the board and administration are in your effort to combat the contending information of the blogs.

That list is public information. I request a copy of it via the Public Affairs office so that I can provide those parents with a competing view.

Very respectfully,

lee drury de cesare

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ms. Cobbe:

Please send me a list of the parents' names that Ms. Falliero has assembled for her anti-blog campaign that she announced in a board meeting. Thank you.

lee drury de cesare