When the Cat's Away, the Mice Will Play

Thomas's Parrot, Fernanda, Who Loves Him Madly

Ms. Cobbe:

Please send me a copy of the Olayinka Toe-Cracking Professional Standards file. I will pay for the copying. Thank you. Also can you tell me where to find on the school's Web site a description of the required knowledge base of people who administer Special Standards? I think that would be the principals and the area directors.

Lee Drury De Cesare, 15316 Gulf Boulevard, Madeira Beach, FL 33708.

Gentle Readers: I have received and reviewed the Steve Kemp file that catalogues his alleged offenses. There is no way that the investigation described should have taken over a year in which Mr. Kemp remained suspended from teaching. I will mount this file on the Web when I get my scanner up and running. Then you can make your own judgment. Mine is that administrative lies are ubiquitous and that Supervisor Smiley and Principal Morris are liable to undergo the liar-liar-pants-on-fire test.

Ms. Kipley, with uncharacteristic generosity, also included in my Kemp packet five disciplinary letters to teachers. One mentions the letters' appearing in the malefactors' files, but I have never seen such letters in any of the many employment files I have examined in the Public Affairs office. Those files are scrubbed clean of any but the most innocuous information.

This maneuver suggests to me that, although the public is entitled to see these Professional Standards disciplinary files, it does not. This situation suggests that the administration maintains two sets of files on employees: one for show scrubbed clean in the Public Affairs office and one with these disciplinary files secreted someplace in the ROSSAC dungeon.