School-Board-Election Monkey Biz

School board run-off candidates and others not on life-support:


I have written about April Griffin's mendacity before. Next to Motel Breath Falliero, April is the most addicted liar on the board--and the remainder is no slouches in the bending-the-truth department. One day they are ordinary truth-telling citizens; the next day they get elected to the school board and become serial liars since they sense getting elected is a bona fide occupational qualification for good standing on the board.

They also succumb to delusions of grandeur. I don't know what it is about becoming an elected official--even of a low-end political berth such as member of the Hillsborough County School Board--that makes ordinary human beings, even those on the nether reaches of the Stanford-Binet such as April Griffin--assume Great-Chain-of-Being royal privileges as if that be the reason why voters elected these C students. It's a wonder that democracy survives such faux public-office delusions of society's dimwits. I don't think it survives well in the democratic badlands of Hillsborough County. In these forlorn regions, we are far gone. We confront the danger of becoming acolytes of elected dumb-asses who pretend to be God's Chosen.

When I wanted to evict Adultery Queen Jennifer Falliero from the board, I wrote to the churches in her district and told them that as guardians of morals in the community, they were obliged to oppose her continued incumbency on the school board. Using Ulysses' "Molly's Soliloquy" as rhetorical model , I wrote in rhetorically clear sentences why I believed so. I wasn't born in a postage-stamp-sized Georgia town with a Winn Dixie, a Target, a half dozen filling stations, and a dozen born-again churches for nothing. If you want the news to get out and for something to be done about a community outrage, you send written heralds to the churches' ministers and in addition to the contingent women's sodalities that make all the potato salad for church dinners on the grounds. I don't know why it is, but people in little towns of the South can and do write elegant Standard English squibs to be distributed from the filling stations in community upheavals and do so with prolix gusto. It's a cultural gift. I have seen dozens of specimens testifying thereto. It makes me proud to be a hillbilly.

I don't know for sure if my effort helped in the Falliero defeat. But Fallieres is out, thank you, Jesus, whatever reason. I played the Women's Sodality in Hillsborough County.

Now we have at this time a specimen under the microscope who wants re-election but who is a habitual liar: La April Griffin. I have but a few days left before the election to notify the churches that they must unseat the school-board fibber, but I don't think they would respond as vigorously to Griffin's lying as to Falliero's fornicating. The former is not in the Ten Commandments. So I am maybe going to let this slide and see if the challenger has the chutzpah to cut Griffin off at the pass by presenting the facts of her shoddy board incumbency. I catalog them in my blog. I know I could do the job of defeating April were I the opposing candidate. I would begin by leafleting her neighbors.

But you know what? I don't think the voters care much about the ethical sleaziness of a board member who supervises their children's lives despite their nattering about how education is the most important subject in politics and blah, blah, blah. So much for the sanctity of hypocrisy among the electorate.

I doubt that the challengers will do diddly to kick Griffin out of office. The pas-de-deux will follow the usual opponent choreograph; he or she will hunker down and pray that fate favors the challenger on election day. Griffin's opponent, Sally, would make a promising board member. Sally chirps right up and so might move some exotic democratic motion on the board dais such as discussing in full view of the public why teachers are turned in and turned out of a job with terrorizing procedures conducted with Elia's guidance in the Professional Standards Office with marginal or made-up charges against the teachers but that administrators, were they to murder the Pope in the parking lot on the job, would never get fired or even rebuked and board attorney Tom Gonzalez would represent them in court. The Alafia principal case of Ms. Smith proves this thesis. MS Smith was not fired. Elia, Griffin, and Falliero cozened her into not squawking about withdrawing with the swap of a made-up job with an equivalent principal's salary and benefits. Her price was to be quiet about her situation with a new job that paid the same as her old principal job. La Smith should have been fired. Ms. Elia with Griffin's and Falliero's assistance, bought her off and billed the taxpayers.

I don't have much hope for druggist White, who looks likely to be elected. He doesn't answer citizen calls or emails even before election, so we know he will be mum afterward. White has counted too many tetracycline pills to depart from protocol. Druggists take pill-counting courses to get their degrees and never encounter The Federalist Papers, the Areopagitica, or Plato's dialogues on government. Their Web site reels off a stream of platitudes of ancient political vintage. They have no data that entitles them to deserve public office. But people trust the person who counts out their blood- pressure or thyroid pills, so Stacy, alas, is a shoo-in and will enter the board bowing down to the crook who acts superintendent who got her job from school-system politics, not from ability. If somebody were to take Mr. White's vital signs as he slumps in his board chair at meetings, he or she would find the druggist board member is a candidate for cardiac perk-up cables.

Mr. Bartels, Falliero's replacement, was a principal. We will see whether his synapses kick in to administrative loyalty from that job history or whether he has the cojones to speak up from his status of highest-level insider no longer wedded to the system and with concern sufficient for voters and students to protest the evils he is bound to know about already or can spot in a nanosecond. One will see whether he will make motions on the board podium that will panic Ms. Elia and her mini-Mafia Outback administration. The synapse pattern here is everything. Will Bartels cave into his ancient automatic obedience pattern from his principal days, or will he clamp his jaws firmly and oppose schools status quo malevolence? That would be Nobel-price behavior.

But don't hold your breath.

Pivotal Question: Is democracy better than military juntas whose leaders appoint their illegitimate offspring to high office, or is it six of one, half dozen of the other?

The performance for the new school board in Hillsborough County, Florida, will answer that question. ldd

copies to the board, La Elia, the press, the board candidates and all the ships at sea.