Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch: Thank God for Government in the Sunshine

These are the sort of James-Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men children that Candy Olson's poor districts contain; she pretends not to know about them. She pretends to represent only well-off South Tampa's children. If Emmet Negrete, her only opponent so far in the school-board race for District 2, will acknowledge and promise to serve these forgotten people, talk to them and make them understand that their vote counts, he can beat Candy in the race. He would be a jewel on the School Board compared to the feckless, snooty Candy. Any replacement of Candy would be to the betterment of the schools and to the community--including the poor districts--that she is supposed to serve. lee

Linda, I would like to review the files of the Whitehead case. I can come in the morning from the beach on a board day to review them. Let me know when you have them available. The public-records law says these files must be available to the public.

I also want you to correct me if I have been wrong. I have said that Susan Valdez spent $50,000 in one year on board travel; Mr. Schmidt, who attacks her and April Griffin on his blog for political peccadilloes, says Susan spent $50,000 in 2 and one-half years.

Which is right? I want to be accurate when I can. If I can't get information via public information from your office, I am entitled in this and in all things to make negative inferences or to make an informed guess.

I recall that board members had an ugly, undignified podium fight over travel expenses with mutual recriminations of extravagance. That and the possibilty that the legislature would lower their pay were the only things they got disturbed about. They never get riled up by the policies they rubber-stamp for Ms. Elia that disinfranchises teachers and students. With the board, it's always me, me, me.

Where is the Web board notes on that meeting? Give me the URL. Let it be noted for the record that the board fights never for citizens' rights nor student rights nor teacher rights but only for its own parochial privileges to piss away tax money to indulge themselves.

Fetch-and-Tote Hegarty told me at the April 1 board meeting that I could not comment on a board item for which I had signed up online because of "board policy." The item with other board items had a box by it for sign-up comment. I want a copy of the written policy that Fetch-'n-Tote Hegarty invokes so that I can determine how it coincides with the board's claim of Free Speech.

If the board does not allow audience comment on items labeled for audience comment on the Web agenda, why does it indulge in such faux Free Speech show on the site by Hillsborough County School Board Free- Speech scofflaws? This situation is a duplicitous practice that equates to false advertising of free speech that does not exist in practice.

One expects the three board candidates up for re-election--Griffin, Olson, and Falliero-- to explain to voters how the board pretends to allow free speech on its Web site but shuts it down at board meetings.

I hope some relevant authority requires a deposition from fetch-'n-tote Hegarty, former SPTimes reporter for the HC schools who wrote puff pieces on the schools' administration and board and who thus got his head-of-community-services job paying over one hundreed thousand a year when he can't handle grammar and punctuation in a school system charged with teaching the same and in addition absent cited experience credentials. Elia put the unqualified Hegarty at the head of the line because she thought as a former reporter he could get her good press.

Step-and-Fetchit Hegarty told me recently that he "got out just in time" from his previous reporter newspaper job with the SPTimes, the which statement made me call him a rat deserting a drowning ship.

I request to see as well Ms. Elia's conflict-of-interest filing for her using a school attorney to intimidate her residential neighbors into shutting up opposition to her zone violation of beginning a major renovation project without permit: the installation of a God's Little Acre tin roof that the neighbors decried on the basis of aesthetics and devaluing their neighborhood and then Elia's getting an abatement by the roll-over member majority of the City Council. Elia then used a school attorney to prevent her neighbors from deploring the God's -Little-Acre tin roof, an instance of muffling free speech that Elia called "bullying" her. Elia used a school government lawyer to perform the anti-Constitutional deed of intimidating the objecting neighbors' free-speech rights to object to their neighborhood's being devalued by an inhabitant with no taste because La Elia is used to the dictatorial powers her superintendent job gives her with no board intervention, she being one with no scruples about using a government attorney to intimidate the objecting neighbors into silence in violation of their free-speech privilege.

This action by Elia is parallel with the demotion and cut in pay that David Schmidt experienced recently when Board Member April Griffin retaliated against him by lying and saying "a person" had informed her that Mr. Schmidt had employed his step-son to construct a Web site for his school program of instructing legal immigrants in the English language, a program that Schmidt had run previous to Griffin's retaliatory action. Schmidt says nobody told him of a conflict-of-interest statement's requirement when he signed numerous papers setting up the program. There is every reason for up-for-re-election Griffin's lying to punish this guy because he exercised his free-speech rights to criticize her and Susan Valdez on his Web site. There is every reason as well to suspect that Elia authorized a fishing expedition in Schmidt's records to eke out a gnat to hang Schmidt's punishment on.

Elia and April Griffin performed the same danse de cruelte that Elia and the despicable Linda Kipley of the see-through-plastic shoes enacted on Bart Birdsall because he, a gay school employee, criticized the county's shutting down gay library privileges from his home email in the wake of the Storms County ordinance punishing gays with a diminution of

Griffin and Elia demonstrated their weakness in realpolitik by merely demoting and reducing Schmitt's salary. Elia and Griffin lacked the cajones to fire Schmidt outright. If you are going to use Hitler ethics, you must not flinch; you must belly up to the bar and to full-throttle savagery.

One infers that Elia got her buddy Pat Bean of the Hillsborough County Commission hierarchy, the job of whom is in terminal jeopardy, to team up with her so that Elia could strut her dictatorial power stuff in the Birdsall frame-up shortly after she got the superintendent job with the collusion of the School Board despite Elia's lack of credentials. The board hiring committee reduced the Ph.D. requirement to Elia's master's degree and sent out a $35,000 broadly disseminated-- paid for by unsuspecting taxpayers--ad for the job to validate the board's faux "equal-opportunity" credentials and to throw fairy dust in voters' eyes to discern that board rascals were recruiting an on-site candidate with pitiful experience and no upper academic bona fides for the job.

Elia got the superintendent job from a sub rosa understanding that she would not disturb School Board perquisites such as gadding around the country by air and staying at flossy hotel room-service accommodations at taxpayer expense. A Ph.D. from Columbia might have displayed more ethical rigor in board depredations on tax monies.

Thank you for helping this citizen take advantage of the state's Government-in the-Sunshine law. I await your reply.

Respectfully,

lee drury de cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

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Dr. Smith, Florida Secretary of Education