Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch: Hiding Behind the Economy

Bart and Tim's Dog, Hannah

Ms. Elia:

In your message posted below, I believe you hide behind the economic situation in your school-wide message below for two reasons: 1. Everybody is scared about his or her job, so this email about money stirs people's dread of losing their job and makes them acquiesce to your dictatorship; 2. If you talk about money, you don't have to talk about the other issues that affect employees, especially teachers.

These include (a) the use of the Professional Standards office along with a back-up, behind-the-scenes psychological torture committee headed by Lucco Brazzi Valdez to charge teachers with manufactured infractions against professional standards or to use a trifle to hang a firing threat on teachers to scarify their psyches.

You make decisions in chambers and don't bring the proposals and an open discussion of them to board meetings to keep the public and most of the school personnel outside ROSSAC ignorant of the information that is basis for the board's ratifying decisions as they slavishly follow your lead. These affect the whole school family: teachers, students, and staff; they also affect state taxpayers that foot the bill for behind-closed-doors, out-of-the-sunshine decisions that roll by on the Consent hidden-Agenda conveyor belt with the board members' simply pushing a button that keeps the rationales secret from the public and the rest of the school family. This is not open government. It is closed, dictator-style government based on a pas-de-deux between you and the rubber-stamp board's mocking of open government.

A recent example of defiance of open government is the failure to post principal candidates on the Board's Web page as well as your choice for principal so that people can come to the board meeting and comment on the appointments you make in secret with no rationale but that it is your will. La Gaceta discussed this last-named denial of open government by you and the board in the May 1 column of "As We Heard It." There is no reason except the desire to hold on to the power that secret proceedings bestow on you to deprive the public of the principal candidates' names, their qualifications, and your choice among the candidates. Your failure to share this information online shows that you do not believe the public deserves open government with the right to comment and that you have the right of absolute power over this information and can direct its consequences.

You use the Professional Standards Office as a retaliation tool, not as a locus to investigate real defections from professional standards. You and your toady Linda Kipley , home-ec credentialed head Professional Standards, cook up charges against teachers. The purpose of these charges is to target certain teachers for retaliation for infractions against your sense of absolute power. A current example is the extended suspension from the classroom--a school semester soon--for Steve Kemp. He has a blog. Blogs are anathemas to the administration.
The board and administration hate blogs because they give raw information to the public unlaundered by the Public Affairs Laundromat spin machine. The taxpayers get stuck with paying for their own bamboozling because they subsidize the Public Affairs office.

This Kemp situation is another aspect of your hoarding real information about what is going on in the schools.

One of your creatures telephoned Kemp recently to cite a subject that you did not want discussed on his blog, showing that you do not believe teachers have First-Amendment rights. Your hubris shows that as long as you allow them to work in the schools, they must act as your servile creatures who abandon their civil rights as the price of employment.

Recently, there was an unwonted board outbreak of brief and loud discussion of Kemp's case, in which you had falsely charged him with Child Abuse

-- a charge the Sheriff threw out. This verbal scuffle showed that Mr. Valdez had made little if any progress in investigating the case after almost a school semester had elapsed since its filing. This delay confirms the analysis that these cases are psychological torture ordeals aimed at breaking a teacher's will to stand up and be a human being in the face of the administration's goal of debasing him or her to non-personhood and depriving the poor wretch of expressing a shred of resistance to the bad leadership by you condoned by the elected board that shows a lamentable

willingness to bow down to your dictatorial reign and ignore its duty to citizens.

Past offenses against teachers with no discussion and with board omerta include 1. imposing a period of more work for teachers without informing them or allowing them to discuss this issue: 2. forcing grade-inflation practices on teachers apparently to widen the pool of students who allow you to claim more "bonus" money for work done by the teachers; and 3. buying the multi-million-dollar Spring program that has failed in other venues without discussing it with teachers that have to implement it. And apparently you did not even apprise the board about your purchase, although the board must have approved your impulse buying post hoc, gutless creatures that board members are.

And most significantly, refusing a settled place on the board agenda for teachers and students to comment. I have myself asked the board three times for this courtesy to teachers and students. The results were icy glares from around the dais. I even emailed Board Members Griffin and Valdes. asking them to work for a teacher-student slot on the board agenda. They both style themselves as teacher advocates. They didn't even answer my email. Some teacher advocates these two poseurs are.

The abuse of your power includes your creating a job with a fancy title and a salary of $140,000 a year for your buddy Dr. Hamilton--one of the thugs whom Dr. Lennard sicced onto Mr. Sam Erwin to discredit him, fire him, and deprive him of his pension--when Dr. Hamilton was due for retirement but needed an office and income while he cold-called candidates for his lobbying venture. Dr. Hamilton left after seven months, having filled his lobbying quota. You did away with the job, showing that it was not a job integral to the running of the schools but a job integral to Dr. Hamilton's rape of the tax kitty with your collusion.

You adhere to the practice of your assigning jobs without advertising them to whomever you wish, be it sycophant, buddy, or passing favorite in your patronage-jobs program. The board allows you free rein in this jobs racket. Not content with padding Dr. Hamilton's pockets with a cooked-up bridge job, you donated additionally to Dr. Hamilton with no advertising a lobbyist position for $65,000 a year which, I hear, you have now bumped up to $96,000 a year.

Those assignments and the raise got no exposure on the board stage in open discussion. They rolled into reality on the Consent Conveyor Belt. This vignette shows that you appropriate the power of creating jobs with no public need but rather for a buddy's financial convenience and that you don't have an open discussion of this outrage on the board podium, and the quiescent board does not demand one.

Such outrages roll by on the Consent Conveyor Belt, and the taxpayer picks up the tab.

One could go on. But the above are representative of your holding on to your out-of-the-sunshine power and making dictatorial decisions backed by a board that will have trouble explaining this anti-taxpayer collusion if the public gets a whiff at election time of the outrages against good government and against open government that your regime propagates with board collusion.

I flag the punctuation errors in your employment message below. It is not too much for taxpayers to expect basic literacy from a superintendent who makes $300,000 a year to run schools in which parents anticipate that their children will master the basic rules of punctuation that you flout in your email to teachers below. Your cited errors do not connect to abstruse concepts, Ms. Elia; they are the basic, beginning rules that children learn in the ninth grade.

lee drury de cesare

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Let's Bring in the Help of the Attorney General":

Why have a board meeting at all if the decisions have already been made? They are already closing out the public, so why make a pretense of involving the public with a board meeting? These board members are so criminal that they should simply meet in private and break the Sunshine laws (which they already do) and hold their meetings in secrecy. At least they would be more honest. As it stands now they are not only criminal but liars and frauds too.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 3:37 AM

To: All Employees
From: MaryEllen Elia, Superintendent of Schools
Subject: Budget Update
Date: May 5, 2009
Lawmakers are nearing the end of the extended legislative session COMMA FOR COMPOUND SENTENCE and we believe it will end on Friday, NO COMMA: RESTRICTIVE APPOSITIVE May 8. We’re doing our best to keep up with all the last-minute changes that could have an impact on our district. We are pleased to see that legislators appear to be committed to protecting school districts as much as possible.
Also, the state formally applied for a waiver to enable Florida to receive “stabilization” funds under the federal stimulus package. That’s an important step because state lawmakers are counting on that money to keep a balanced budget at this time of declining revenues. We need to keep in mind that the stabilization money is non-recurring,NO COMMA: COMPOUND VERB and will not be available after 2011.
We expect to know a lot more soon about how the budget will affect the state’s public schools. As news comes in from Tallahassee, I will let keep you informed.
Now, I would like to address some misconceptions regarding the steps we have taken to cut our budget here in Hillsborough County.
As I have indicated before, decisions have been made based on student/classroom needs and avoiding employee layoffs. It is true that some employee groups will have a shorter work year, and that will result in reduced annual pay. But let me point out that we have also taken similar measures in the past with other employee groups, NO COMMA: RESTRICTIVE ADJECTIVAL PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE such as assistant principals, nurses, and agricultural HYPHENATED COMPOUND ADJECTIVE FOR COMPOUND ADJECTIVE BEFORE A NOUN science teachers. While we would prefer not to take such steps, they are in keeping with our strategy of making budget cuts with minimal harm to the classroom, making decisions based on students’ needs, and preserving jobs.
Also, we have worked together with the teachers’ union to help out our impacted employees such as those who will see their year reduced from 253 days to 205 days. Those employees will have first claim to summer contracts needed to support students, NO COMMA: CUTS OFF A RESTRICTIVE PAST PARTICIPIAL PHRASE based on seniority. Together with our unions, we are looking out for our employees.
I have heard people say, as I’m sure you have, that my recommendations have not affected “downtown.” As a matter of fact, our administrative and support staff has been affected. We have eliminated administrative positions, cut budgets, frozen positions, and reorganized departments, reducing costs by more than $14-million. Many people are doing more than one job to support all district functions.
The question of whether to rehire retired teachers also has caused some confusion. We have never proposed that the district rehire retired teachers at “minimum wage.” Since most of the retired teachers are at or near the top of the pay scale, it is costly to allow them to come back from retirement at their current pay. This is what we have recently seen criticized in the media as “double dipping.” Many of the retired teachers are wonderful professionals whom I know well. I wish they had not decided to retire. And I know they now want to continue doing the work they love, NO COMMA: COMPOUND INFINITIVE and to continue receiving health benefits and a source of income.
Here’s what we are proposing. We would welcome the option of bringing teachers back at a beginning teacher salary. That would allow us to employ them and have the benefit of their experience with less of an impact on our budget. I believe many retired or soon-to-be-retired teachers would welcome that opportunity rather than remaining retired. However, this is an issue that must be negotiated and cannot be done without a change in our teacher contract. The district and Classroom Teachers Association are currently in discussions COMMA FOR COMPOUND SENTENCE but to date there has been no agreement. We are in a very deep and long recession in our country COMMA FOR COMPOUND SENTENCE and we are trying to balance the fiscal constraints that we are all facing.
It is also important for me to point out that I recognize that the issue of kindergarten paraprofessionals clearly will have an impact on our elementary schools. Though we would prefer not to have to take such steps, this "THIS" WHAT? VAGUE PRONOUN REFERENCE has been coming for some time. The requirements of the class size amendment have caused us to change the staffing in our kindergarten classrooms. We have had to lower class size and hire more teachers and we cannot afford to continue to employ all kindergarten paraprofessionals. We discussed this probability when the constitutional amendment was proposed and for the years since passage have talked about this eventual transition. Right now, we are facing the most stringent class HYPHENATED COMPOUND ADJECTIVE BEFORE A NOUN size requirements at the same time the budget has been drastically reduced. Despite the formula change, our plan still keeps some kindergarten support at each school.
Let me conclude by saying that it is my job and the job of the School Board to look after everyone’s interests. That includes students, parents, taxpayers, and all our employees. When the budget was healthier, the unions and the district made it a priority to raise salaries. We have increased teacher salaries over the last three years by 20 percent. Now, during more difficult financial times, we have made it a priority to save jobs. With the help of union leadership, our students and employees will continue to thrive, and we’ll get through this crisis in good shape.
Thank you for your continued help and support.