Crooked, Slipshod Public Officials

Susan and April:

On the board meeting on 11/3, I shall bring up in citizens' comment time the fact that the board has declined to enforce the bullying law as it is written not only to include students but also to include any person drawing a salary from the state for school employment. Those encompass administrators and the board as well as students.

I see the Bullying Law's full implementation as the solution to the bullying problem that the teachers face from the Professional Standards Office as well as any other problems of bullying from administrators.

I have filed a bullying charge under the Bullying Law against Tom Gonzalez, Ms. Elia, and the board for bullying teacher Steve Kemp in the support of Mr. Smiley's lying charge against him for child abuse that the Sheriff's office threw out the same day Smiley filed it.

Steve Hegarty, carrying out Ms. Kurdell's orders, destroys my sign-ins to comment on the agenda items marked for comment. Hegarty's hinted rationale for this destruction of my requests to comment that I suffer from Alzheimer's. That's bullying of a citizen.

Neither of you has objected to this unconstitutional suppression of a citizen's free speech and right to approach elected officials for redress of grievances. You took an oath of office to support the Constitution. This refusal to intervene in board chair Kurdell's unconstitutional suppression of free speech and suppression of a citizen's right to express grievances to an elected body puts both of you in the position of liars in the swearing-in ceremony and in the refusal to correct your chair's unconstitutional behavior. It also suggests that neither of you is educated enough to know what the Constitution entails. Your conduct as two with no college degree convinces me that a requirement to run of the School Board should be an earned college degree.

I supported you both when you ran for the School Board. I gave you money and encouragement, Susan more than April. You promised to "clean up the school system." Some cleanup. You have both been profound disappointments. You have fallen in almost immediately with the long-time board calculated inertia, ceding all decisions to a corrupt superintendent, pretending ignorance to protect yourselves from responsibility that you promised voters to assume if they would elect you.

Nothing could testify to your corrupt reason for running for the board, Susan, more than your chalking up a $50,000 traveling lark tab when the poor children of Hillsborough County can't afford supplies so that they can join in their class work. Nothing shows your gutlessness, April, better than at your meeting with Steve Kemp about his year-plus suspension for a false charge you told him, that "good things are happening behind the scenes" and that he should not tell anyone of your meeting with him. That is my understanding of your meeting with Kemp. The "behind-the-scenes" gloss shows that you support secret government, not government in the sunshine; nothing shows your lack of care for teachers more than your injunction to Kemp not to tell anyone that you two met.

Why, one asks, is it verboten to mention a board member's meeting with a teacher? Why is this circumstance disreputable and to be kept secret? Does it in some way deduct points from your status as a board member loyal to the board and administrating but disloyal to teachers? How can you claim to be pro-teacher after such a cowardly performance? Why does concern for teachers' well being equate to being disloyal to the board?

If you two don't insist that the board carry out the bullying law as including adults' drawing salaries from the school system as well as students, you are not doing your job. If you lack the courage and initiative to do your job by making the board and administration liable for responding to bullying charges concerning adults, you should resign your seats and make way for more conscientious board participants. These will insist on the law's full implementation because new board members will want to carry out the bullying law as the legislature wrote it, not as the administration of the Hillsborough County schools have truncated it to suit the purpose of avoiding teachers' having the right to file bullying charges against the Professional Standards gulag, the superintendent, and board members who sponsor intimidation of teachers to shut them up about administration and board depredations against education to protect their sinecures.

These selfish aims of the board and administration have nothing to do with the best interests of the schools and their students. They have nothing to do with implementing state laws as they are written. They have nothing to do with good government and everything to do with twisting the laws to accommodate the corrupt agenda of the board and administration.

Shame on you both.

lee drury de cesare

c: Patrick Manteiga, publisher, La Gazetta, Marshall @spt.com;solcheck@spt

-posted on leedrurydecesarescasting-room couch.blogspot.com

Touch Base with the Long Lost and Hit Up the Fellow for A Favor

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/31/judge-orders-chirac-stand-trial-in-embezzlement-ca/?source=newsletter_world-news_headlines

The above hyperlink is to a piece about corruption in France that caught my attention. It shows that voters should be vigilant about elected officials everywhere.

I take an interest in all things French because I speak the language with a Lady Bird accent of course, and once on a lark while I was teaching at HCC I applied for and was rewarded a Fulbright grant to teach in France for a year. I pondered and reluctantly turned it down because I didn't know how my four children would adapt to France. They probably would have had a wonderful time because France has enlightened government-sponsored child care.

Go to the comments section and read John D's latest blasts. He makes a good point about my indulging Vox in truncated profanity. Vox, drop that habit. I know when you put your mind to it that you can write perfectly standard insults.

I am a teacher and know dumb and smart. John D is smart. I cannot figure out why he has fixated on me for his vitriol. The impulse must come from his childhood, from some figure or situation that deeply injured him then and that he still carries in his mental furniture of pain. Everything comes from our childhood.

John and Vox are a complementary pair. I sometimes feel I provide the Web space for them to go at each other. There is some kind of unorthodox attraction at work in their dueling insults. lee

Now here's a piece of good news. See below. I have known George Sheldon for a long time. When you live as long as I have, you get to know a lot of people. lee

John D: I have published your comments, but I will cut you if you use any more raw terms as you just did to Vox. I think the milder epithets can add color and force to a comment, but vulgarities add nothing but skunginess. I think you enjoy your being the only naysayer on my site; but to keep that privilege, watch your mouth.

Sometimes Vox uses vulgarities, but she truncates them so that they come across as funny, not offensive to anyone but you is my judgment. But I watch Vox too. I won't have my site become a haven for potty mouths. I am the teacher. I make the calls on this site. Look up some of Chaucer's epithets in Middle English and use those. There are some good ones. Let's have a little class in the cursing. lee

Dear Ms. De Cesare:

Thank you for your October 25 email to Lt. Governor Kottkamp regarding your inquiry into the head of child protective services in Florida. Lt.

Governor Kottkamp asked me to respond to you on his behalf.

In September 2008 Governor Crist appointed George H. Sheldon Secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF). Secretary Sheldon s contact information is as follows:

Secretary George H. Sheldon

Florida Department of Children and Families

1317 Winewood Blvd.

Tallahassee, FL 32399-0700

Phone (850) 921-8755

Email: george_sheldon@dcf.state.fl.us

The Florida Department of Children and Families oversees child protective services in Florida. To learn more about DCF please visit the following

website: http://www.state.fl.us/cf_web/ . As State Director of the

Office of Family Safety, you may contact me to discuss any issues you may have. I can be reached at (850) 566-5670.

Thank your for your inquiry.

Sincerely,

George Sheldon, Secretary
1317 Winewood Blvd.
Building 1, Room 202
Tallahassee, Florida 32399-0700
dcf-osc@dcf.state.fl.us
850.487.1111


Dear George,

Warren Davis of Governor Crist's office has referred me to you.

I attach a charge I filed with the state Child Protection agency. It is not the usual complaint against an individual but a charge against the administration and board of the Hillsborough County school system. Please read it and see my reason for charging the administration and school board for a situation that I describe in detail.

The area Child Protection bureau chief is located in Tampa and sits on the Children Board with three members of the administration---Superintendent Elia, Board Member Ethridge, and a administrator I don't recognize. The rest of the board is composed of the usual suspects that inevitably turn up on such boards. The chair is running for the County Commission seat of White, the sexual predator that the citizens will have to subsidize in the final payout of a jury's finding him guilty of sexual harassment. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see the local populace elect him again because when inattentive citizens go into the voting booth, that will the only name they recognize. Name identification trumps criminality every time.

I am afraid buddyism will vitiate my charge with the local guy, given his Children's Board seat. I am trying to find out the name of the new top guy of the Child Protection services. He is the fellow the governor hired as head just recently. I read in the Times that this new head is a Christian who believes in whipping children. That's just the sort of enlightened view we need in that job for sure. If you know his name, pray send it to me. I want to sic him on the Tampa Child Protection guy to make sure he doesn't ignore my charge because it would miff his school buddies on the Children's Board.

Don't sit on this request and pursue the usual government bureaucracy's flim flam to bamboozle a citizen. Pray do what you can on this problem. You might call up the FBI in Tampa to see what it is doing with my charge of corruption against the administration and board, using the text of the complaint that I will attach for your review. I complained to my Congressman Bill Young (Tom and I moved to our beach condo when we sold our house in Beach Park; he was the longest-serving mayor of Madeira Beach until he quit, not being able to take the bickering any longer. He now devotes him to those around-the-clock sports channels that I tell him will make him dumb.)

I also wrote to FBI head Mueller and told him I would like the charge assigned to the Miami or Jax office of the FBI since the local office is reputed to be knee-deep in reciprocity with the local political bigwigs, such as they are. I wrote Ms. Obama because I figured I would be on her good list since I sent Mr. Obama $500 the minute he announced in Philadelphia. I wrote the new state Secretary of Education Smith; if he were any less active in his position, he would be motionless. I also wrote the new national education. I have learned in my long servce in civil rights to hit all the buttons.

We still have no corruption investigation of the schools that are run by a bunch of crooks. Recall the Erwin case in the early Nineties when Erwin reported theft and graft in the Hillsborough County schools and asked the board and administration to do something about it.

What Earl the Pearl Lennard and his ROSSAC thugs did--including the board attorney Gonzalez--was to set upon Erwin to try first to convince people he was crazy and when that didn't work to try to frame him in some manner so as to fire him and deprive him of his pension. Mr. Erwin finally gave up on the people with whom he had worked for thirty years and hired lawyer Priscilla Ryan for a whistleblower suit against the board. Mr. Erwin won. The jury didn't believe a word of the lies that the administration and board rascals told on the witness stand.

Naturally, Earl the Pearl Lennard is Governor Crist's choice to replace Phyllis Busansky as Elections chief. Phyllis was honest and was going about dealing with the pile of debt that that Buddy Johnson, that pig's feet and fried-chicken restaurant guy, had run up in his incumbency. I can't wait to see what pickle Earl the Pearl will get himself into since I believe the graft he and the board were trying to cover up in the Erwin case all went to the top administrators and selected board members. Old habits die hard.

Pray pay attention to this request, George. You owe me for when Doris and I came up to Tallahassee years ago after you had lost your seat in the legislature and was shopping for just such a job as you have now; Doris and I repapered a room in your new house. You didn't even thank us. So now you must tardily do your duty to the kid here in my request to you for the help that I know you can give if you will.

The problem I see with our government is that when people get inducted into some posh bureaucratic post, they suddenly forget their promises to serve the people and spend all their time evading citizen requests for help so that they will have more leisure to cement their positions by coddling the influential people above them who affect their tenure in the government bureaucracy. Elected officials act the same way. They don't want to offend anybody and to hell with the citizens because these soi-disant public servants are maneuvering to run for the next highest office. I have just read The Wars of Watergate. What a country. The book exceeds my fears. I have even got Tom to reading it between football games. "My God," is his most frequent comment.

Pray let me hear from you, or I will assume you have filed this request for help in the waste basket.

I sent Alex Sink $500. I think she would make a good governor and that her opponent McCollum, who became an elected official in his bassinet and has never looked back, would use the post to prep for the next office. I had sent Ms. Sink's husband money. He ran the worst campaign in the history of the genre in Florida and lost.

lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Surprising Interest in the Erwin Attorney and Judge

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Clumsy Scam for Getting Away with Evading the Bull...":

Perhaps the judge meant to do just that. He HAD to enforce the law (LOL at most of them in tampa who do just the opposite) but at the same time did not want a stellar atty to build a reputation on that case. To wit: oh if he had a better attorney. He could have awarded MORE. Maybe if doug erwin had a BETTER judge is another way to phrase that. With all due respect to what may be one of the last HONORABLE members of the tampa judiciary. I do not know the judge's name. I wonder if ms. ryan is being stalked now for her part in this as maryEllen is known to stalk and harass her victims. She will do this either personally or through their children or via teachers or administrators that she hand-picked for her GANG.



Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 12:42 PM'

This response to my comment on Priscella Ryan has determined me to try to meet her and talk to her about the case if she will. I don't know when I will have time, but I will find someway to try to meet this lawyer. lee

Sent to Education Commissioner Smith, Governor Crist, Attorney General McCollum, and All the Usual Suspects at the School Board and Administration

Commissioner Smith:

Hillsborough County schools are not administering the bullying law as it is written: it covers both students and any people who draw a salary from the school system.

I filed a bullying charge against school people who bullied a teacher by putting him on involuntary leave from the classroom after the Sheriff's office had thrown out the administration's charge against him the day the administration filed it.

This maneuver by the Professional Standards office is the standard way that the administration intimidates teachers into silence so that teachers will not complain about the mismanagement of the schools by the board and administration. The board and administration take away teachers' free-speech rights by threatening job loss to the teachers who speak out. The board and administration are especially eager to intimidate teachers who have blogs so that they shut them down for fear of losing their jobs.

The Public Affairs head, Steve Heggarty, wrote me my complaint against adults was "Inappropriate." This means that the Hillsborough County administration is only partially carrying out the bullying law; its scofflaws refuse to carry out the law's provision to include adults who work for pay for the school system. The administration and board, in effect, are disobeying the law.

Tell me what you will do to see that school systems like Hillsborough carry out the law as the legislature wrote it, not in the partial way it now carries out the law.

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

c: Governor Crist

This Says It All with Addenda

Annie Oakley, my role model

See reader comment at the end. lee

The next board meeting is November 3. I did not attend the last two, but I will go to this meeting and print out a copy of my reader's letter below and hand it to one of the people at the end of the board to pass to the board members.

I want them to confront how dismal is the public attitude toward their behavior. Watch and see how I do at this attempt to shame them. lee

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 8:15 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Clumsy Scam for Getting Away with Evading the Bull....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Clumsy Scam for Getting Away with Evading the Bull...":

There is no one to turn to when you want to report unethical behavior of school board members or administrators. They can bully all they want and get away with it. They can, and they do. This has been going on for years. The governor or Education Commissioner will tell you to go up the chain of command in the district. When you do that you get the runaround. A bunch of criminals is what they are. The longest standing school board members Carol Kurdell and Candy Olson know how corrupt things are, and they do nothing. Pulling a homeless person off the street and putting him on the board would be more effective than having those two on there.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 5:15 PM

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Clumsy Scam for Getting Away with Evading the Bull...":

Priscilla Ryan is a name every teacher has to remember. Lee says the judge thought she wasn't good, but she still won. If she can win against Gonzalez and the tons of taxpayer dollars he has to drag things out, she must be halfway decent. She must have ethics. Everyone remember her name and look her up when your turn comes to having your name, reputation, and career ruined by the crooks in the school district administration.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 3:58 AM

That's the name: Priscilla Ryan. I can't find it with search engines. But now I will remember it. And I will take this readers assessment of the Ms. Ryan's abilities.

Tom Gonzalez is not a good lawyer. He is slipshod and doesn't do his homework for the $275,000 yearly that the taxpayers pay him to sit on the dais with his brain in idle mode. He is not smart. I think his IQ would show him merely average. He's also lazy.

But the board, who is intimidated by Gonzalez because he is a lawyer, for God's sake, does not have the nerve to ask him questions such as why he didn't advise the board to take out sufficient insurance to cover the cost of the a new school's entire wall's falling down or why he didn't read the Sheriff's assessment of both Goader's and the Toe Clicker's investigations before blabbing on the podium that only the Toe Clicker's said he was ok. Nobody nailed Gonzalez on either of these mistakes; nobody nails him on anything. I ask for his firing on the podium every once in a while. But they all conveniently label me crazy. Anybody who has advanced the human race in any way or degree is labeled crazy. Look at Galileo for starters.

I think Gonzalez is scared of Ms. Elia, as most people are. He knows she holds the key to his job. If she told the board to hire a new attorney, Gonzalez would be sent packing by those gutless twits.

I am encouraged by the way that I have heard no more rumors of Ms. Elia's cursing people out ever since I brought up this matter in memos to her and in statements on the podium.

I bought another copy of Death by Educaation, Wiesner's book on the county school system. Bart Birdsall called my attention to it several years ago. Wiesner too won his case against the board, but when he returned, Lennard, who came up from the basement's vo-tech department to blossom as superintendent thanks to the complicit board, sent Wiesner to teach prisoners although he still drew his same salary that he made before the case. He finally gave up on the school system and left. I have not been able to track him down.

I am sure Mr. Erwin would have gotten the same post-trial torture as did Wiesner if not worse after his won his case if he had resumed his job instead of fleeing to Georgia.

The administration uses psychological terror in its most basic forms, and they don't get defeated in the long run because nobody holds their feet to the fire. One irate granny is not enough people to storm the dais barricades in the board room. Sometimes I think I would spend my time better by nagging my old man to sell this beach condo, now worth a fortune after we bought it for a song 25 years ago, and go live in Manhattan so that I could go the opera, museums, theater, and Bergdorf's in my declining years. But then I would be too far from all my Florida-based grandchildren and the high excitement of Hillsborough County board meetings.

lee