Bullies Complaining About Bullies

My Granddaughter Graduating from Plant: She goes to college to become a grammar-school teacher. I know she will love it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/health/09klas.html?em Times article on bullying


The school board Hillsborough County is singing a different tune on bullying than it did a few years ago when I became acquainted with Bart Birdsall, who along with the mother of a gay son at Hillsborough High was trying to get the board to do something about the bullying of gay children.

Bart, who is gay, had gay students' telling him they wanted to commit suicide because of the bullying they endured in the schools.

I recall running Dr. Lennard down at a Tiger Bay meeting in a pair of Manola stilettos to catch him and get him to promise to have the seminars Bart pleaded for that has worked in Miami schools to quell bullying. He promised he would. He lied.

I also recall my first encounter with Candy Olson at this time. A teacher had a Bible on his desk and used it to proselytize a gay student, telling him he would go to hell for being gay. Since this school was in Olson's district, I wrote her to complain about this teacher with his Bible's torturing the gay student.

Ms. Olson, who now gives full-throated support to the new awareness of the need for controlling bullying, sent me back a snippy email in which she said, "The last time I heard, we still have the First Amendment."

She has not shown much fondness for the First Amendment in my observation of the board for two years. Nor did she fulfill a promise to Bart Birdsall to attend to a gay student being bullied at the time when she was sending out asinine emails to people complaining about a teacher with a Bible on his desk torturing a gay boy by telling him he would land in hell for being gay.

I am never one to suffer obnoxious public servants in silence. I wrote back to La Olson with one of my crisper rebukes and called the principal. She stopped the teacher from torturing the student and made him remove the Bible from his desk, good administrator that she was.

Suddenly, bullying is getting not only local but national attention, and things are looking up for abused children. This is no thanks to board members like Ms. Olson who has sat on the board forever and never raised a finger to intervene, although she promised Bart Birdsall that she would.

Now she is in full-throated praise of the bullying situation's coming to the attention of the flaccid group of administrators who sit on the board and never see what's before them for the needs of the students. They are too busy scurrying around trying to propitiate bully Elia and get on her good side, a fruitless task since Ms. Elia has no good side.

Ms. Olson, Dr. Lamb, and Ms. Kurdell, all on the board when Dr. Lennard and his two ghouls Hamilton and Davis, were systematically torturing Mr. Erwin, trying to run him crazy, claiming his was crazy, trying to fire him, and trying to deprive him of his pension until Mr. Erwin shut them down with the jury's help in his Whistleblower suit against the board.

Bullying is just fine with board members if it's the administration's bullying teachers with the Professional Standards bullying machine or an administration's bullying an administrator who asks the superintendent and board to do something about rampant crime on campus or some other pressing need not felt at ROSSAC.

This situation is political hypocrisy of elected officials if anything is. Ms. Kurdell called Mr. Turlington a liar for not devoting a hundred percent of the lottery money to the schools instead of only 33 percent. Now she knows how people who wanted her and the rest of the board to protect gay children from bullying feel.

The board is all hat and no cattle in the things that count. If Ms. Olson and her board colleagues were any less active in protecting the county's children with both academic and social problems, they would be motionless. lee drury de cesare