Rebuke to Thomas Marshal, Cub Reporter

Ok, Tom, you have smashed the chances of Olson’s opponent with your outing of his dumb lies about his resume. (I am going to write him to tell him that your story shows that language matters and that words have meaning and that his flyer’s educationese template language demeans the English language.) Hurrah for the crusading press.

Now it’s time for you to move beyond peccadilloes of rookie candidates and investigate the systematic punishment disparity of teachers and administrators in Professional Standards. The state education outfit says online that the Professional Standards rules apply both to teachers and to administrators. When I asked for data via public information, I got a stack of teacher punishments but not one administrator’s. Recall that when the Alafia principal messed up so badly that the PTA parents said she had to go that Elia made several papal visits out there to bribe the parents to keep Smith; she even promised the parents that she would send both Smith and her vice-principal to Eckerd for a course on psychological makeover at $4500 a pop. The parents did not buy this. So Elia sent Motel Breath Falliero and Betty Boop Griffin out there to the wilds of Alafia to deliver Elia’s promise to create Smith a job at the same salary as her principal job if she would resign so as to stop the stream of bad publicity, which Elia cannot bear. I asked Public Affairs for a job description of this position. It took about two weeks for Valdez to compose one and send it to me. Then I asked for the name of the person who previously held the job: no answer. I bet Smith is sitting in the Book Depository right now filing her nails and doing cross-word puzzles at the taxpayers’ expense. That situation is a real story that affects how the board and Elia use taxes. Yet you mess around with trifles about an unsophisticated candidate’s inflating his resume.

This story on Hernandez should get a companion story on Candy’s serious betrayal of the voters: why didn’t the board fire Lennard after the administration and board crucifixion of Mr. Erwin, a crucifixion that emanated from Lennard’s office and supported by the board, which always claims ignorance of skulduggery because members don’t want to admit they know that the administration runs the schools like a junior branch of the Causa Nostre operatives. Not one person was fired after Mr. Erwin won his case and got a $165,000 settlement. Ask Candy why. Ask why the board continued using the Gonzalez firm after it lost the case but charged the taxpayers $34,000 for their failed defense.

Ask Candy how come she rubber stamped Tom Gonzalez’s job, handed to him by Lennard in a stairwell and not advertised despite the board’s mantra of “we-are-an-equal-employment-opportunity employer.” Follow up and find out why Tom makes $275.000 a year. the highest for a board attorney in Florida for a part-time job. The Pinellas attorney makes $175,000, is full time, and sits in his school-board office all day. Ask Tom G, who makes whopping grammar-punctuation mistakes in his missives and whose style is flatulent lawyerese, why he misinterpreted the bullying law to exclude teachers at Candy Olson’s behest, although other schools cover teachers and the state attorney for the unions says HB 669 bullying law covers teachers. The answer to this question is that Candy, in her dislike of teachers (I don’t know the root of that pathology) wants to deprive teachers of the protection of the bullying law against the administration’s using the Professional Standards office to deprive teachers of their free-speech rights by cooking up cases on them (as in the Steve Kemp case: he had a blog—his real offense) to produce an excuse to fire them.

I could go on. You strive to trap gnats while elephants parade across the board stage at every meeting while you doze in the back of the room.

Shame, shame, Tom. For this you will never get to live in the section of limbo where stands H.L. Mencken’s condo.

May cow dung be rained on your feckless head, may you suffer chronic writer's block, and may your crops fail every single year. And further, may you be condemned for a coon's age to Sartre's Huit Clos with Candy Olson, Betty Boop Griffin, Motel Breath Falliera, and Carol Kurdell as car mates.

Yours as your personal March Hare,

lee drury de cesare

PS: I see you defended yourself on TBO against critics. Never defend. Always attack. If Napoleon and Hitler had known that wisdom, they would not have both bogged down in Russia.