Tomorrow Is Another Day

PRO On HCPS has left a new comment on your post "Speak Truth to Power--Speak Loudly and Persistently...":

If I knew then what I know now, I would have pursued this issue differently back in 1996. There is irony in this story because the teacher had also changed documents. I had the copy of the original to prove that point.

The then Area Director has long since retired. The last I heard anything about him was he had an unsuccessful bid for a school board position.

The whole group involved in all of the unethical events that happened during that time opened my eyes. The end result was I think I did a pretty good job of advocating for my son, but not changing the system.

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Posted by PRO On HCPS to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 8:21 AM



You do what you can as long as you can, Richard: that is all that duty requires of any of us human beings.

I burned out in the Women's Movement. So much to do, so overwhelming the task. So few people pitching in to help. I became the hit man, and discovered it was not a fun job.

One day I threw out my voluminous files and walked away. Any human being retains the right of hanging up his or her gloves at a time chosen. I read. I went to the opera. I needlepointed rugs for my granddaughters' weddings.I baked cakes. Then I stuck my toe back into the maelstrom to help Bart Birdsall when the Professional Standards gulag framed him with a false charge two years ago.

So here I am now, about to file a charge with the state child-abuse people against the board and administration, the special-ed trio of administrators who choreographed Steve's torture, and Kipley, the home-ec enabler who refused to acknowledge the charge I filed against the three guilty adm inistrators in special-ed authority.

Administration hacks won't even answer my question about what they are going to do about my charges of child abuse in the Special-ed Department, where they framed Steve Kemp. They do not punish administrators. Not ever. One could murder somebody during the height of the board meeting out in the lobby, and Tom Gallagher would stride out to fabricate a case of self-defense. The board follows Elia's lead in backing up erring adminstrators, ready to spend the money necessary to rehabilitate them and set them up in a higher, better-paying sinecure. Look at the Smith case as paradigm. Elia proposed to spend $4500 each for Smith and her vice principal to go to Eckerd's for psychic makeovers and hired Smith a coach to teach her how to be a human being.When the Alafia parents said no deal, Elia esconsed Smith in ROSSAC until she could find her a higher, better-paid job.

Steve wants to just fade back into the classroom now that the administration saw it had to snuff that ridiculous charge against him before it got around town and demonstrated how it treated the teachers to whom they offer false praise from the podium for politics' sake.

Steve naively thinks he is past the hideous treatment he got from Kipley and Elia with the board's collusion. He is wrong. They are vindictive and never forget. Look what happened in the Wiesner case. He won it, but when he came back to work, the torture promptly began anew. They never learn. They just bull ahead to repeat the task again.

Kemp is even naive enough to think April Griffin put in a word behind the Iron Curtain to ameliorate his condition.

If April Griffin had one ounce of courage and concern for the shoddy, dangerous treatment of the special-ed children, she would have blasted the Professional Standards administrators' conduct and demanded an investigation of it. She would have demanded corrective action for the sake of the safety of the special-ed children. She would have waded into the Professional Standards cess pool and made it into a real professional-standards apparatus and not a machine to terrify teachers with losing their jobs by faking cases against one at a time as a continuing negative example of the administration and board's ability do as they please with their power to retain control over the state money that rolls into ROSSAC based on student head count.

April and the board are always preaching children's safety. What's safe about the situation that Steve Kemp's charge adumbrates? What's condign about Linda Kipley's throwing my charge against the three administrators into the trash bin?

Thank God, Steve Kemp had enough chutzpah to keep his blog. I think that's why the administration targeted him: his blog discussed educational issues; the administration and board don't want any information to contradict the sanitized spiels which come out of the Public Affairs Laundromat.

The board and administration are so stupid that they think they can shut down blogs and hence shut down the bad publicity that the truth about how they run the schools provides. To crack their racket, the public must become aware of what is going on at the administration and board that debases the schools. I hope to contribute to that public awareness so that better board candidates get elected.

That county teachers are doing what teachers do--passing on knowledge to their students-- is testimony to their effectiveness. Ironically, the administration that won't even give the students and teachers a place on the board agenda use the teachers' and students' performance as a sign of the administration and board's effectiveness and right to power--arbitrary and sadistic though it be.

I am glad you shielded your son. Most of the special-ed parents are oblivious to how the schools mistreat and disenfranchise their children. The parents trust to the system to treat their children well. Their misplace their trust.

The objective correlative to fuel this mistrust is the infamous picture of the "classroom" for the retarded children that Steve snapped during his time there. It is a junk room with unstable piles against the walls that the children constantly tried to investigate and pull down on themselves Steve said.

The student that Steve hooked to the chair with the harness he wore all day when the aide should have removed it at the time the the student entered the classroom symbolizes what
supervisors allowed because they thought nobody was looking. I am a registered nurse who has worked in mental institutions. Staff often use restraints for its convenience, not for the patients' safety. So does the special-ed division of the Hillsborough County schools.

That unremoved harness represents a violation of the spirit of the state restraint law, but those administrators apparently tolerated it and didn't rebuke people who failed to remove the harnesses when the children arrived in the classroom because the violators were the regulars, not a substitute who was ignorant of all aspects of these children's care. The supervisers felt justified in applying the ambivalent rules to a strange teacher who was not one of the gang whom they threw into the classroom with no protocols explained to him.

Steve's ignorant use of the harness was because he didn't know restraint protocol. He knew nothing about teaching special-ed children. Steve was not a special-needs-trained teacher and had never taught these children before being placed into a classroom-junkroom with severely retarded children without a syllable of orientation. Steve had no proper education for the job.This gesture by the special-ed administrators shows contempt for special-ed children and indifference to their safety and needs.

The administration ignored my charges against these three administrators--Smiley, Sosa, and Morris-- the actions of whom were sustained and systemic. When I filed a Professional Standards charge against Kipley for colluding in the abuse of children by ignoring my charges against the three, she tardily responded by taking some words out of context from one of my past emails to her.

Kipley considered twisting my words adroit administration. That's an index of her intelligence, low-level training, and ethics. Her toying with children's safety is just what one would expect from the home-ec trained Kipley's education, yet the administration awarded her an important and sensitive position after the teachers at Hillsborough High refused to tolerate her lying, unethical conduct of the principal's job. Instead of firing Kipley as the administration should have, it promoted her to a higher-paying, more important position with her name's appearing next to the board members' on school stationery. The head of Professional Standards should be a brainy, super-ethical, highly credentialed person in this sensitive job, not a specimen like Kipley.

On the beach we had a splendid fireworks display last night that enchanted my husband, former longest-serving mayor of Madeira Beach. He declared it the finest fireworks display that the city had ever mounted. The which reminds us that the world goes on outside the foul atmosphere of perfidy and dirty tricks in ROSSAC and the board room of the Hillsborough County school system.

I hope your family had a festive 4th of July. The children on the beach outdid themselves this year with popping firecrackers at frequent intervals until I could have screamed while I read another book on the Manhattan Project and how we started the arms race by bombing two Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

But life goes on. As Scarlett O'Hara said. "Tomorrow is another day." on which we will pick either up the gauntlet again to enter the fray of life's burdens and opportunities or say, "To hell with it." lee

PS: I think that administrator who ran against Susan Valdez the last election is the one you refer to. Susan's bad; but he would have been worse. I think his wife ran against somebody the election before him. Those administrators can't stand to leave the scene of their power and glory.