The biggest lie has always been to keep quiet; and the best life-enhancer is to provoke, unsettle, rile – in short, to make people face the truth.
Gore Vidal
Gentlepeople of the Hillsborough County Legislative Delegation:
How closely do you follow the conditions that prevail in your community and take the initiative to make them better?
Or do you just get voted into office and romp up to Tallahassee to preen as legislative stars in the Senate and the House and forget the people's wellbeing that voted you into office back home?
If so, for shame. In classical Greek times, the citizens of Athens, who modeled our first democracy, would have given you a thumbs down in the forum and would have either exiled you for 20 years or killed you. Athenian citizens took democracy seriously, so the leaders did too.
Thucydides got 20 years banishment for bad army leadership, and now scholars worship him for his history of the Peloponnesian War. Often generals who returned from battle to Athens after fighting another Greek city state were put to death for failure to advance the interests of Athenians. I think that law would work well for Florida. If you came back to your home base and had done nothing for the citizens of Hillsborough County, maybe the citizens should gather on Franklin Street and give you a thumbs down.
Athenian citizens were tough. They put Socrates to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. He was, in a sense, head of the Athenian schools. The schools in Hillsborough County need that kind of pitiless evaluation. Its leaders--both board and administration--are lousy. They treat teachers badly, use the Professional Standards office to frame them for cooked-up charges to shut them up by threatening their jobs with false charges.
The board and administration don't want anybody to reveal anything about the way they run the schools before it is run through the Public Affairs spin Laundromat.
Maybe we need those banishment-put-to-death protocols in Hillsborough County.
It's worth pondering. The legislative delegation has not done a thing to counter the depredations in the schools due to bad board members and greedy administrations; the current specimens in both phyla retain the same sicko DNA of management as obtained when Dr. Lennard tried to prove Mr. Erwin crazy in the early '90's because Erwin reported graft and theft in the schools. Instead of Superintendent Lennard's investigating these charges, he tried to invalidate them by proving Erwin berserk. The administrartive brigands and board clones joined in the task with energy and glee.
Dr. Lennard's conduct makes this citizen believe that the graft started at the top with Dr. Lennard, now elections supervisor. The internal auditors of the Supervisors of Elections office should be on the q.v.
On my schools blog leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com, I catalog the underbelly of the vile job the board and administration do in managing the schools.
I tell how badly they treat teachers, how indifferent they are to education (two lack a college degree; how can they care about the county's children's education when they don't care about their own educatiion?), and how grasping they are about tax money that pours into the schools based on the student headcount. They bloat administrative salaries for the C students who pour into administrations after graduation from second-tier schools while the A and B students go into teaching. The administration and board use tax money to hire buddies and sycophants. Two board members have children in administration working their way up the ranks to become top operators to continue the wretched tradition of lower-quartile specimens that clog the administrative ranks. The board spends thousands of dollars for joy rides around the country under the aegis of learning how to be better board members. So far, one does not detect any improvement on the board dais from their pricey tax-paid peregrinations. They may have become more expert in the rituals of room service, but they don't show any sign of learning data that help the children in the county schools.
The only way that we can get a new attitude towards education from the top is to clean house in the complicit board.
Jennifer Falliero, April Griffin, and Candy Olson are all up for re-election. They have opponents, thank God. The three are all terrible board members who do not care about the wellbeing of the schools but care about travel money and making $9.000 more than beginning teachers for doing nothing but lolling on the board podium and gadding around town posing as benefactors of education.
They all three are androids for Ms. Elia, corrupt board superintendent. I pray the opponents win for the good of the community. The Hillsborough County legislative delegation should help the opponents of Griffin, Falliero, and Olson win if they care about their community and keep that possible citizen congregation in the Franklin Street forum hereabouts known as the voting booth.
Members of the legislative delegation must have concern for what's going on in their county's schools if they care about their community. The schools are in the thrall of a greedy, obtuse board and administration whose only interest is to tap into the money pit of state funds based on student head count so that they can strut around town and look important at all the tax-paid political summits they attend, create bloated-salary jobs for buddies and sycophants, and hand out no-bid contracts with or without graft.
The legislative delegation should work through its budget power to rein in the villainies committed in the schools by the board and administration.
Money they understand. The legislature controls the budget. Review the fine print of the budget to see how you can make things better for the teachers and students in the Hillsborough County schools. As Tennyson says, "Live true, right wrong, serve the king (community), else why born?"
When your romance with Tallahassee ends, you will come back to your home in Hillsborough County. Will the school leadership have improved because of your Tallahassee sojourn, or will we have still a corrupt board and administration presiding over our children's and grandchildren's education about which you were too indifferent about or too cowardly to fix?
We measure a person's life by the deeds he or she has done or omitted to do. Will yours show your deeds to have been those that bettered your community with your time in state office, or will it show that you did everything to balloon your ego with your "public service" but nothing to make your community--especially the schools--better?
On my blog are analyses of the up-for-election incumbent's on the board. If you do not like what you read about their conduct--I present my view of all three board candidates' history and psyches--then do something about it. Talk to the opponents of the incumbents and see if they have potential to change the vile system that now prevails if they beat the incumbents. Give them your advice on how to win if you find them apt.
And don't pour tax money into the Hillsborough County board and administration's coffers for them to squander it as they now do on bloated salaries, no-bid contracts, and hiring buddies, board and administration children, and sycophants.
You have the facility to turn off the spigot in Tallahassee to school boards and school administrations who abuse their power in order to pamper themselves and to impoverish the students and teachers. Use it.
Lee Drury De Cesare
20-year resident of Tampa's Beach Park
Now retired teacher at Madeira Beach, where my husband was mayor for 12 years after he got tired of fishing. My children went to Grady, Coleman, and Plant. I still have one grandchild who begins Plant in the fall.
Brandon Law People: look at the profile of Jennifer Pole Girl Falliero, your board member, on my blog.
Do y'all want Brandon to have a person with such louche morals leading the schools where your children attend, other people's children attend, and my grandchild attends? Pole Girl's opponent is a pharmacist. I believe he lives in Valrico. Get in touch with him and offer your support. Nobody could be worse than Pole Girl Falliero, whom other board members--all of them--voted to be chair despite their knowing her on-site adultery. This maneuver gives you a pivotal clue in judging the board's moral calibre.
The Capitol 400 South Monroe Street Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001 2/6/2010
To: Chief of Staff Eikenberg Governor Crist
Chief of Staff Eikenberg:You did not respond to the below letter to you with the Secretary of the Children's board name.
Nothing makes a voter mader than a politician's not responding to a request for information once in office.
This negligence differs markedly from the rapt attention a voter gets when the candidates are on the stump.
Please see that Governor Crist gets the below communication and that he acknowledges that he has done so. Thank you.
Lee Drury De Cesare 15316 Gulf Avenue 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708 leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com
Governor Crist:
I append a letter to the Secretary of Children's Services, George Sheldon.
I asked for an investigation of the ongoing child-abuse practices of the Special Education retarded children's care in the Hillsborough County schools.
I append as well a picture of the junk room the administration assigned these children as a classroom. The picture is grainy, but it gives a flavor of the squalor and danger to the children of this classroom: it has unstable furniture piled against the walls that inquisitive children can pull down and injure themselves or others, That danger, a teacher alerted me to.
In addition, the junk class room has a storage room next door with a door that goes unlocked between the room and the children's classroom. The same teacher told me this adjacent room could contain dangerous substances. I can't confirm the last conjecture because it is seldom possible to get a straight answer from the administration and board. They are either in Nixon Ian cover-up or limited hangout mode, or they just plain lie.
In addition, one special-needs child wore a bus restraint throughout the class day. His having one on in class violates the state restraint laws as I read them. I infer the supervisors of this area--Mr. Smiley and Ms. Morris-- allow the regular staff members to keep the bus harness on the boy for its members' convenience, although these quixotic supervisors used the restraint law to trap untrained substitute teacher Steve Kemp into a Professional Standards restraint-violation charge that Superintendent Elia planned to use to fire him in a case of the pot's calling the kettle black.
The reason for the plan to fire Kemp, in my opinion, was that he had a blog discussing the schools. The board and administration don't believe in free speech and don't want the schools discussed; they want to sanitize all information about the schools by running it through the Community Affairs office to turn their depredations in to happy talk to fool the taxpayers.
In the Steven Kemp case, the special-needs supervisors did not follow the protocols listed in their job descriptions when admitting new, untrained substitute teacher Kemp into the classroom.In fact, the administration via Mr. Smiley, division head, and Ms. Morris, principal, put substitute teacher Kemp in this junk classroom without giving him a word of instruction or training of any kind in how to supervise these children, a specialty in which teacher Kemp had had no academic or workshop training. The board lawyer Gonzalez claims in a letter, however, that Mr. Kemp had training after a false charge of child abuse filed against Kemp by special-ed division supervisor Smiley with the sheriff's office.
Mr. Smiley's job descriptions and that of the principal involved, Ms.Morris, both say that they are responsible for orienting new teachers. They did not do so in the Kemp situation. These two have received no corrective action from Ms. Elia or other higher-up bureaucrats as far as is publicly known.Instead, these responsible for filing child-abuse charges against Mr. Kemp continue in their supervisory positions as far as the world knows.
The special-ed administration after Mr. Smiley's filing the child-abuse charges against Kemp then irrationally kept Kemp on duty in the classroom six days after the putative incident occurred, illogically and carelessly letting a teacher whom the administration labeled a child abuser remain in the classroom with the child whom he was accused as abusing and with other special-needs children as well.
Although they excel in skullduggery, the administration and board do not show stellar abilities in logic.
I filed Professional Standards charges against these errant supervisors. The Professional Standards office's head, Ms. Kipley, claimed after several months had gone by that she had not received my charges and then authored what she thought was a linguistic coup based on a copy of my inquires.
Ms. Kipley's academic background of home-ec degree does not prepare her to perform a linguistic coup or even an adequate job of punctuation. She is capable only of trapping teachers with Professional Standards charges when the administration wants to terrify these teachers about their job security.
La Kipley quoted my email out of context and with no scholarly indication of omissions and additions. This lack of skill is not to be wondered at since we deal here with a person with a home-ec degree that nevertheless makes $150,000 a year to carry out the administration and board orders to frame teachers who show the slightest signs of resistance with a Professional Standards charge.
The administration never files a Professional Standards charge against administrators, only teachers, because the Board and administration want to shut up teachers' complaints about how ill the Board and administration run the schools. So they have allocated Professional Standards charges to menace teachers and threaten their jobs.I recently asked the Professional Standards office via the Community Affairs office for public information about teachers' and administrators' Professional Standards complaints. I got sufficient teacher filings, but I got no administrator filings even though an administrator at King High School had recently invited pubescent boys into his office, ordered them to close the door, ordered them to remove their shoes and socks, and proceeded to fondle their feet.
I later learned that the administration had secretly had this apparent foot fetishist examined by a psychologist after parents' complaints and some question of lawsuits, but the administration and board typically did not release this information to the public.
Teacher complaints have validity because the public believe in teachers; hence teacher complaints if allowed menace administration and board power, their control of tax money, and their freedom to hire buddies without advertising the jobs, not to mention exercising other ad hoc perquisites for administration and board delectation.
Ms. Kipley is a prime example of unqualified people hired into administrative positions without credentials and without advertising. Ms. Kipley has home-ec degree in a job that calls for a master's in a valid academic area.
To top off this outrage against taxpayers, Ms. Elia recently hired Ms. Kipley's husband as an accountant. He had a high school diploma and no accounting experience. I examined applicants' submissions, and at least four had an accounting degree and experience. One was a handicapped woman for whom an affirmative-action plan should apply. The schools have no affirmative action plan for the handicapped as they should have according to Federal regulations.
Ms. Kipley got the job without its being advertised presumably because the board and administration could count on her sycophancy in pressuring teachers they targeted with Professional Standards cooked-up charges.
Both Kipleys' hiring is emblematic of why the administration features such ubiquitous academic mediocrity, having only one Ph.D. in administrative midst, although the pay of administrators shows bloated, especially compared to that of teachers.
I know that you are involved in a threatening campaign with Mr. Rubio, who just won a straw poll in Pinellas, the county in which I live on the beach.
People care about education. Were you to treat this information I send you seriously and address it and let the press know that you are doing so and insist that Mr. Sheldon do so as well, I believe people would take your promise of being solicitous of education seriously.
Junk Classroom That Houses the Special-needs Students
I hope that you will take an interest in this charge that I have filed with the Child Welfare department, which gave it a brusque, unconvincing turndown by saying that the agency had no authority to investigate my charges because, I assumed, they were against high-level school bureaucrats. I further request that you to follow George Sheldon's handling of it. He has not provided me with public information that I asked for several months ago. The Attorney General says 48 hours turnaround is the citizen's right to expect with public information requests.
I want you and your staff to monitor Mr. Sheldon's further treatment of my charge and to let Senator Storms know that you approve of her vigilance in asking him to continue his review. I want you to alert Senator Storms, who took an interest in this important charge when I contacted her.
I have asked Mr. Sheldon to set up a meeting with the superintendent and board for those who want to weigh in on the problem. I do. I know at least two teachers who do. Other teachers would want to comment if the administration notified them of the meeting and their attending would not jeopardize their jobs.
humane treatment of the retarded. I was fortunate enough to have had the help of Senator Ronda Storms in this situation, thank goodness. Without her help, I don't think my charge of child abuse against higher-up school people would have had a chance of being attended to. She asked Mr. Sheldon to report back what he has done if anything to remedy it. Ms. Storms has the courage, all too rare in elected officials, of actually doing her job to help citizens get a decent society that includes humane treatment of the retarded.
Junk Classroom That Houses the Special-needs Students
Inspector General Steckler's online report of the child welfare agency that Mr. Sheldon heads says that the processing of the complaints by that agency is not up to par. I believe the turndown of my case by the local field officer of Child Protection, one young Mr. Turner, apparently ratified by Mr. Sheldon, confirms Inspector General Steckler's assessment.
Please ask Secretary of Education Smith to take a livelier interest in this situation than I have observed him to have done in the past problems that lie outside the bureaucratic rituals over which he presides hermetically sealed in his office complex.
Junk Classroom That Houses the Special-needs Students
c: George Sheldon Mark Rubio Inspector General Steckler Senator Ronda Storms Education Secretary Smith
Dear George:
I have received a copy of Senator Storms's letter regarding my complaint about the abusive conditions that the profoundly retarded children endure in the Hillsborough county schools. Your local bureau chief declined since he said your agency didn't have authority to intervene in abuse by Hillsborough County schools' personnel. That leaves a whole lot of county children uncovered by your agency's protection.
I have asked you for public information that I have not received yet. The Attorney General has said that 48 hours is a reasonable turnaround time for public information.You have far exceeded that time frame in my public-information request. I ask for it again and add this: Give me a copy of the information in your agency manual that confirms that you don't have any control over abuse of children by school personnel; in fact, give me any exceptions to protection that this manual lists.That this in an unexplored issue that your agency has not thought of or avoided is in question. It seems a giant oversight to me and needs attention.
This meeting with the Hillsborough County superintendent and board could be a start.Senator Storms has asked you to get back to her on what you do about this problem.I request that you come to Tampa for a meeting with Ms. Elia, me, and others. Your station chief seems a tentative person to me, and we need a firm voice in this situation. I hope that you can provide it. Also, this meeting should not be shut up.
The school board and administration have a policy of giving out information only through the Public Affairs Laundromat so that the public is kept ignorant of how the schools are really run. So I ask that you not bar any press that wants to attend. Your boss Mr. Crist believes in government in the sunshine, and this allowing of press people in would enhance that goal.I think the board should be at the meeting. This is something they are responsible for monitoring but have not. Their presence would mean that they can no longer say that the problem of the abusive practices in the severely retarded area is something they don't know about.
I also have a couple of teachers who want to come, and they don't get out of school until five. So the meeting should be a few minutes after five.The school board must have a conference room. I suggest that the meeting be there.I appreciate your help in this matter.
Gonzalez moonlights at USF; he made $14,000 last year in addition to the $275,000 from Hillsborough County School Board. Candy's husband is a bankruptcy judge in Ft. Lauderdale. lee From: twinkobie [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com] Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 11:53 AM To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] Rata-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-t...
Dr. Genshaft:
The email exchange below will give you the flavor of the kind of attitude your counselor Mr. Solis has toward a member of the public that pays his salary. It is not acceptable either in tone nor in willingness to answer a public-information question that a citizen is entitled to ask and entitled to get a speedy response to.
I ask you, your board, and your chief counsel to tell me if what Mr. Solis says about hiring the law firm of Tom Gonzalez is indeed coincident with the university's practice of hiring and whether it is coincident with the equal-opportunity hiring laws and the equal-opportunity requirements attached to federal grants to the university. If so, I shall ask for elected officials' and the EEOC's attention to your hiring protocols and the federal government to do a compliance review of the same. Whatever Jesuitical construction you put on not employing him, you hired him for a job--at least one, the Al Arian case---and paid him $33,000 of tax money for his services. That's employment in anybody's book.
Please vouchsafe this citizen a response to this question. I don't know the email formula for Dr. Roy Weatherford of the union's email. Pray forward it to him.
Respectfully,
Lee Drury De Cesare 15316 Gulf Boulevard 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708 tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
copy: Dr. Roy Weatherford, faculty union USF
From: Solis, Gerard D. [mailto:GSolis@usf.edu] Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 1:09 PM To: 'lee decesare' Cc: Mohn, Lori Subject: RE: public information
Dear Lee Druryde Cesare:
If you will review your request, which appears below, you will see that you asked for Mr. Gonzalez's "salary". This word choice is consistent with your question as to whether Mr. Gonzalez is employed by USF:
I would like to know if Tom Gonzalez is the attorney the university uses in its legal business with the workers and faculty, and if those are not areas of his employment at USF, is he at all employed by the university at all, in what area, and what was his salary last year?
We answered that question for you in our response (see below). We can only respond to what you specifically ask for and not what you may have meant or intended.
I interpret your email below as a new public records request because it’s asking something different than your original request seeking salary information. In response to your latest request, I can inform you as of the date of this email there are no records responsive to your request because we have not received a bill for Mr. Gonzalez’s services. This concludes USF’s response to your request of 01/26/10.
Gerard D. Solis Senior Associate General Counsel University of South Florida Office of the General Counsel 4202 E. Fowler Ave., ADM 250 Tampa, 33620 Tel: (813) 974-2131 Fax: (813) 974-5236 gsolis@admin.usf.edu
From: lee decesare [mailto:tdecesar@taMPAbay.rr.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 12:40 AM To: Solis, Gerard D. Subject: FW: public information
Mr. Solis: The Attorney General has said that 48 hours is a reasonable turnaround time for a public-information request. Mine has languished longer than that by far. I ask again to know how much money the university paid the Gonzalez firm last year for its services.
Lee Drury De Cesare
From: Mohn, Lori [mailto:lmohn@usf.edu] On Behalf Of Solis, Gerard D. Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 4:35 PM To: 'tdecesar@taMPAbay.rr.com' Cc: Mohn, Lori Subject: FW: public information
Dear Lee Druryde Cesare:
The University utilizes the law firm of Thompson, Sizemore & Hearing, P.A. on various legal issues. In response to your request, attached please find a copy the agreement between Mr. Gonzalez’s law firm and the University of South Florida. Mr. Gonzalez is not employed by the University of South Florida.
Sincerely,
Gerard D. Solis Senior Associate General Counsel University of South Florida Office of the General Counsel 4202 E. Fowler Ave., ADM 250 Tampa, 33620 Tel: (813) 974-2131 Fax: (813) 974-5236 gsolis@admin.usf.edu
-- Posted By twinkobie to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 1/29/2010 08:50:00 AM
I subscribe to The Sentinel, the black newspaper...
library. You should see Candy's ad! It says, "Hold Fast The Dreams..."
I guess it refers to black history month and MLK's dream speech.
What flim flam and hypocrisy. It's emblematic of the board's and administration's effort to look like idealists to the world while they act like brigands behind the scenes. lee
See at the end of this post the shocking revelation just in from the Candy Ribbet Ribbet diplomatic pouch sent by a South Tampa plant who sees all and tells all to Casting-room-couch. lee
Hurrah, Minions of the Light. Look at the opponents listed on the CountySupervisor of Election's Web.Incumbents Olson. Griffin, and DRUM ROLL!Pole Girl Falliero all have opponents.
This is the rising of the Age of Aquarius.The planets have aligned in our favor, and Candy, we pray to Zeus and Hera, not to mention Neptune and all those underwater gods, to watch over these challengers to the ROSSAC gang of board thugs and to make the challengers' paths smooth.
The way Candy has behaved on the School Board for sixteen mortal years presents a most apt target to aim at for replacement.
Otherwise, the 2010 elections install her for four more miserable years of sneers, putdowns, tricks, and disgraces of the office she has inhabited too long.
Everybody knows that Candy's husband, an attorney and maybe a judge, divorced her. I have heard that he sang in a gay glee club in Sarasota and thence declared himself gay, saying that he had "never been happier" after coming out.My take:I suspect that being married to Candy would make any man rethink his sexual orientation.
Candy lives in District 2's South Tampa. If you listen to her palaver on the board, you would think that the only neighborhoods she represented in District 2 are BeachPark, Culbreath Bayou, and DavisIslands. That's nothing but Candy's socially insecure snobbery talking.
If you look at the map of District 2, you see that there are also in Candy's district Gibsonton, Palm River, Progress Village, a corner of Brandon, Wimauma, River View, and Oh, my God!Plant City.
There is a lot of James AgeeLet-Us-Now-Praise-Famous-Men elements in these districts Candy eschews.
If I were Candy's opponent, I would make contact with the born-again ministers in these forlorn areas and ask them to let me use their social halls after church service to talk to the people about the education of their children. Just because they are poor does not mean that they are not concerned about the children's education.
The new candidate could also explore what the personality of their current board representative is and how she thinks she's above doing anything for anybody who does not live in hoitytoitySouth Tampa. This is not the time for circumspection; it is the time to sock the truth to Candy.
I'd show up in the grocery parking lots and hand our my leaflets and say, "I'm Joe Every Man, and I am running as your school board member to replace Candy Olson in District 2.In her sixteen yearson the board, Ms. Olson has never paid these neighborhoods any attention.She has not done a thing for you and your children and grandchildren who go to school here. Incumbent. Olson is interested only in representing the children of well-off people that live in South Tampa. She never mentions that she is your board member. She is ashamed that you are in her district. I will be proud to have you in mine when I whip Ms. Olson at the polls. Be sure to vote and get your neighbors to vote too. I can't do this without your help."
Candy doesn't want it known that she has all these down-and-out poor constituents, minions of the 45 million who don't have health care, in her bailiwick.
She avoids this information with her nose in the air. She never mentions any section of her district except La-de-dahSouth Tampa. She is afraid that if she campaigns in a trailer park that she will turn into Minnie Pearl.
Does the record, in fact, show that Candy ever campaigned in any district except South Tampa? I want any claim that she did notarized. Has she ever exited BeachPark, Culbreath Bayou, and DavisIslands to ask for the support of the people of the less posh districts?
Candy has her South Tampa campaign kickoff at the Garden Club, of course.You'd be surprised how many women from Wimauma, River View, and Plant City-- not to mention ProgressVillage and Gibsonton--have never set leather-tops-and-man-made soles onto the sacred precincts of the Garden Club.
My old Mercedes will be the only car over a year old there. All of the x-chromosome snoots' cars will be late models bought by their husbands. Many have departed this parking lot of late-model posh cars when their husbands discovered they needed to hook up with an office intern of 18 or 19, a girl closer to the breadwinner's age.
Then these women will clerk in Dillards and drive rust bukets like the rest of us.
Who is Candy's challenger? Mark this down, Minions of the Light.It's no other than Emmet Gonzalo Negrete.
Fan me, Beulah.I am about to swoon.
Emmet Gonzalo Negrete: WHAT A THRILL TO HAVE SUCH AN ALLUSIVE NAME ON THE LIST OF BOARD CANDIDATES.
Isn't that middle name, "Gonzalo," Hispanic? For sure it is. "Gonzalo" will be a big hit in YborCity.He must use his whole name all the time --as in "Howdy, folks: I am Emmet 'Gonzalo' that's right: 'Gonzalo' Negrete, running for the District 2 school board to replace an incumbent who does nothing but sit on the podium and prattle nonsense. I will represent the rich people's children and the poor children's children in my District 2 leadership. This is America, the land of the free. I run to dump an ineffective, snooty, downright homely incumbent."
Heck, "Gonzalo"
may even be Castilian Spanish. Emmet's forebears may go back to the Punic War in Spain during 2 B.C. Or maybe they started a little later with Queen Isabella as forebear; her forebears included members of the royal families of Portugal, Sicily, France, and England.
And listen to this: Queen Isabella was a blonde with blue eyes.Wouldn't that just torque those South Tampa ignoramuses at the Palma Ceia Country Club, who have been known to refer to YborCity denizens as "those dark-complected people"?That's doubtless the reason the lily-white offspring of sharecroppers migrated from the poor Southern states to Tampa a couple of generations ago and hunkered down in South Tampa because land was cheap there then. Now their offspring wouldn't let Hispanics join Ye Mystique Krewe. So Hispanics had to form their own Krewe of Sant Iago.
This is Tampa's history.Nobody can deny it. Don't let us hear any caterwauling fibs about equal opportunity, God bless
America's melting pot, etc.
Tom Gonzales, the Janus-faced board attorney, would just die of envy if Emmet is high Castilian. Tom lives in South Tampa and is so anxious that people not mix him up with those rag-tag, dark-complected Hispanics in YborCity that he stops people in the street to rattle off to them his pristine faux high-Castilian lineage.
Ponder "Negrete." That's a French wine.I swear it is.I saw it from the tour bus in France on a bill board.This candidate is a sophisticated multicultural, folksHis name tells Candy's challenger's story.
"Emmet" puzzles.That sounds like Candy's opponent may be an intellectual eclectic whose witty mother when she named him threw in "Emmet" to put people off the scent of his real heritage. My Lord. He may even be a closet intellectual who reads Proust, Thucydides, and the National Inquirer. The last is the only oeuvre that Candyknows by heart. She thinks the other two names are those offellows who live in Plant City and run 7-Elevens.
When my husband was at the University of Minnesota and we lived a Quonset hut with a bunch of other University of Minnesota students, one of the physics professor'snames was "Emmet." That's a name you run into in the United States in the South and in the state of Minnesota and other states close by Minnesota. "Emmet" is a big name in the garage culture of my home state of Georgia.There is no filling station in Georgia without at least one Emmet that hangs out there.
Emmet's good. "Emmet" gets the stock-car race afincionados votes. It will also appeal to bigots of all stripes.
Do you think Emmet wears a pince nez, folks? Pray that he does. Candy would die of jealousy.She'd just fall over and faint fromthe green-eyed monster's biting her in her envy gland. Let's supplicate Athena, the patron goddess of Classical Athens, to see that Emmet wears a pince nez to make Candy foaming-at-the-mouth jealous.
Let's pray that Emmet is handsome. Is it too late for him to do a Cosmo centerfold with one of his election flyers covering the strategic area of the pudendum?
That pose will contrast nicely with Candy's forlorn dowager persona. Everybody knows that Candy is not a beauty.She's not as ugly as a toad. I didn't say that she was. But she has a toad-like aura. To say so confirms basic anatomy and physiology protocols.
Candy doesn't doesn't do frog calls that I know of--or at least I have not heard her emit the template frog sound "Ribbet Ribbet"from the board podium yet.
But my intuition tells me she could do frog burps.
Cosmetology semiotics tells us that any woman with the improbable tint of blonde hair that Candy affects could in a pinch make a convincing call that replicated that of a frog. Ribbet, Ribbet.
If Emmet is homely, so be it.Being ugly never slowed Henry Kissinger down. One abiding tenet of sexism is that it's ok for men to be ugly but fatal for women.
Now we get down to business and talk battle plans for Emmet aka Gonzalo, the Cute, the putative Ybor boy of the hour. He must beat the beJesus out of Candy.
Let's plan. Put your head into this situation and offer advice.
Emmet can't get voters to listen to all of Candy's flaws.That would take all night.But here are three he can explore observed by this faithful attendee of school-board summits. I have more--lots more-- if he wants to pick from an expansive variety.
1. Candy's hatred of teachers must get emphasis. My first memory of monitoring the school board meetings was Candy's and Elia's sitting next to each other and putting their heads together to smirk over any aspersionand defeat of teachers or teachers' concerns.They won't give teachers and students a special slot on the board agenda to make teachers and students know they are welcome to come to board meetings and have the dignity of a special slot on the agenda to share their thoughts.Board members and ROSSAC denizens despise teachers and fear them but can't say so out loud because without teachers and their students there would be no schools. The ROSSAC think tank would be a ghost town. Without teachers and students, no tax money would pour over the transom at ROSSAC for the C-student administration to waste and gad about town assuming the importance of people in control of a whole lot of money.
Candy is one of those creatures who will throw her lot in with extant power people no matter who they are.If Hitler had become school-board superintendent, Candy would be his chum and learn to goose step expertly. Surely Ms. Elia is not too dumb to have ascertained that fact. Maybe she is. She is so needy of approval that she probably is not objective and will take ersatz approval in a pinch.
Ms. Elia's elevation to superintendent did not come from credentials and experience but from ROSSAC incestuous politics. The board wanted an in-house candidate for superintendent, someone who would condone their flaccid performance on the board and not ask them to do anything as an outside, qualified superintendent candidate might do.
So the board did away with the doctorate requirement and descended to Ms. Elia's master's degree. The duplicitous rascals then ran a $35,000 nation-wide ad billed to the taxpayers to cover their asses for putative equal opportunity when they intended all along to appoint La Elia because the probably unspoken but clearly understood deal was that she wouldn't disturb their little social club that endowed these losers with the personae of people who cared about education. Two of them don't even have a college degree. One has a "ED.D., clearly bought and paid for. They also get paid $9,000 more than beginning teachers, many of whom have to work a second job to make ends meet.
The teachers do real work. They earn their meager pay. The board members mess around and dither about tremendous trifles and avoid any tough issues. If they stepped up to the plate and dealt with a challenging issue such as the recent question about equitable allocation of religious holidays, there would be a thunderclap over ROSSAC.
What the pusillanimous board did in that religious-holiday meeting was shuck and jive and bob and weave to run out the clock.Their cowardice makes you want to puke.
In reading the folder of candidate applications for the supervisor slot over two years ago when Elia ascended the throne of the superintendency, one notes that Elia was the least qualified of the applicants.Her experience was all in-house. and it was botched stuff.The division she headed did not see a real-estate scam ongoing under her nose that a SPTimes reporter walked in off the street and spotted. She overbuilt classrooms too in a second wretched administrative error so that she had to displace children and upset communities to coincide with the boundary changes needed to fix that problem after she got to be supervisor. No board member questioned or rebuked her, so lax are they in serving the tax payers and schools instead of Ms. Elia and the ROSSAC troops.
I have never seen so many parents as poured into the board room to protest those irrational boundary changes.
But the board stood by mess-up Elia's mismanagement as it always does. Board members have a perfect record of kowtowing to Ms. Elia's every whim and overlooking every stumble no matter her lack of managerial wisdom or just plain common sense.
The board routinely gives the voters the shaft in a contest with Ms. Elia.
Ms. Olson was particularly sycophantic recently in saying what a bargain the schools got in Ms. Elia's $300,000 salary, $47,000 stolen as a "bonus" from teachers' work to raise student scores.
Compare Elia's unjustified salary to the U.S. President's $400,000 and House members' and senators' $147,000.That bloated $300,000 is a bargain for HillsboroughCounty according to Ms. Olson.
No it's a rip-off that the board condones and that taxpayers cough up without knowing that they are doing so. Emmet should tell the poor people out in the areas that Candy neglects the teachers' first-year salary, that the board's exceeds the teachers', and that the superintendent's haul beats the President's and Congress's pay.
People don't know these outrageous rapes of tax money for greedy board members and administrators.
Rapacious career education administration bureaucrats country wide have a bloated salary scam going to rip off taxpayers.They cite each other's inflated pay to up their own demands into the stratosphere of uncalled-for wages that don't coincide with their education and smarts.A school board that had the intellect of Daffy Duck would stop that scam by offering a reasonable salary that harmonizes with the teachers' pay.
Believe me: candidates would come.In fact some would come with solid degrees and impressive experience to apply for the superintendent job if they got assurances that they could emphasize scholarship to prepare students for a competitive world. These paragons would make no deals explicit or implicit with the board members to continue the latter's slothful performances on the board.
Not every school administrator who wants to be a superintenedent is a glutton.Some are interested in helping children to learn and to achieve.
I aver that every candidate in the applicant pool that competed for the superintendent's job had better bona fides than Ms.Elia.
What they did not have was a sub rosa agreement between Elia and collusive, unethical board members that if she got the job, she would not disturb their pretensions of being the trustees of the students' learning while continuing to enjoy their board-travel racket.
Campaign point 2:
Candy does not believe in upholding the law.First of all, she does not believe in citizens'having free-speech rights when they come to address the board.She sneers at those of us who do brook this disdain to address the board. Candy looks bad enough when she's not sneering.When she sneers, its like that Greek Medusa harpy with all those snakes as hair is one of the board members.
Le Olson and lawyer Tom Gonzalez recently cooked up a little board buck and wing pas de deux about the bullying law, HB 669.The language of the bill plainly says thatstudents and staff and teachers all merit coverage.But the board and Ms. Elia don't want teachers covered because that means teachers and staff could invoke the bullying law for the board's and Ms. Elia's using the Abu Ghraib Professional Standards office to trap them into job-threatening cooked-up charges. Ms. Olson sings the praises of the Abu Ghraib director Linda Kipley, she of the see-through plastic high heels. Teachers hate Ms. Kipley--not for her shoes but for her cooperation with Ms. Elia and other administration sadists to use the Professional Standards office to trap and punish teachers and terrify them with the loss of their jobs.
Ms. Olson and Le Gonzalez choreographed off stage in secret a scenario for Gonzalez to declare that the bullying bill did not cover teachers so they could not use the law as a defense against false Professional Standards charges.
The language of the law makes a lie of Mr. Gonzalez's "expert" opinion.
The board submitted to Secretary of Education Smith a false promise cooked up by Elia and Gonzalez, one infers, to cover both students and staff in the submission to Education Secretary Smith. Isn't that what one calls a whopper? They are now fighting bullying's covering teachers and staff even though other counties' teachers have used the bill to protect themselves from bullying.
It is well for a new candidate for the board to keep in mind that the board and administration never hesitate to lie when it comes to concealing their management skullduggery.
Anybody who has doubts about this grungy technique should request the boxes of documents on the Irwin Whistleblower case from the Community Affairs office. The Erwin saga occurred in the early nineties, and the residual of that attempt to destroy Mr. Erwin for outing graft and theft in the administration is still in the ROSSAC DNA.
Mr. Gonzalez's villainous contribution to injure Erwin for reporting crime and graft in the schools was this: he opened a for-show investigation when the heat was on finally after the press tardily woke up to the situation; then he shut it down when its investigators discovered and reported that its investigation had uncovered only efforts to make Mr. Erwin look like a crazy whacko who was hallucinating about the theft and graft. That Dr. Lennard led the campaign to undo Mr. Erwin by proving him crazy instead of investigating the charges says to an average person that the upper administration and board were getting graft and didn't want Mr. Erwin's revelations to cut it off.
Ms. Candy was on the job in the board then.She was vicious to Mr. Erwin when he came to the board for help.God knows which board members got graft. If I did an eeny, meeny, miney, Moe to answer that question, I would have to guess that my mother told me to pick Candy.
When I first heard the rumor about Ms. Olson's former husband's coming out of the closet, I thought someone had made it up as a joke. There is one rumor about Candy that I would like the truth about. I sense it not to be a joke.
Rumor says that Ms. Olson has gotten jobs for people such as one woman said to be an exotic dancer who intervened with the police to scotch a DWI for a member of Olson's family. The job was said to be teaching. If that is so, it's shockingly irresponsible. It's useless to ask Candy to corroborate or deny this rumor.She thinks she is above being questioned.
In the Erwin case, Board Member Olson knew what was going on and did nothing to get to the bottom of the crime. In fact, I understand she greeted Mr. Erwin with a hostile, "You had better have proof of your accusations!" I find that inhumane and tolerant of stealing and graft in the schools by a board member. Somebody has to replace her for the good of the community.
After Mr. Erwin won his Whistleblower suit against the school board, the board fired nobody.Lennard should have got the sack for starters along with his sidekick Dr. Hamilton. I infer they were the lead harassers of Mr. Erwin as well as probable graft takers.
But the board and other culprits hunkered down and rode out the storm and evaded responsibility because nobody in public life or any private citizens demanded a trial and justice.The taxpayers paid Tom Gonzalez's firm $34,000 dollars for losing the case and Mr. Erwin a $165,000 settlement.When Gonzalez and his cohort complained about the size of the Erwin settlement to the judge, His Honor retorted that it would have been more had Mr. Erwin had a better attorney.
The eager immersion in all the foul and ubiquitous misbehavior of the board and administration nailed down Tom Gonzalez's cement-secure seat as board attorney. The board sensed he was possessed of conveniently flexible ethics and would be their legal tool when it came to twisting the law to fit their despicable behavior.
The logic was also, I believe, that the board did not dare fire him because he knew too much and might write a tell-all book called Castilian Tom Comes of Age and Lives To Make Big Money off the Taxpayers in Hillsborough County's School Administration Badlands. And the board doesn't object to paying him $275,000 of tax money while he moonlights at USF to squeeze out $14,000 more citizen tax loot last year. He filches over $300,000 a year in tax money while the board snoozes.
A third issue an opponent could use against La Candy is her ignorance about democracy. She took the oath of office to uphold the laws and didn't know the laws and the Constitution from a hole in the ground. She routinely sneers at citizens who go up to address the board.I think she may have made a few derisive frog noises too but can't be sure.
Ribbet.Ribbet.
I shall have to sit closer to the front to hear any low-level Ribbet, Ribbets.
Ms. Olson demonstrated this ignorance of the laws she is supposed to uphold and an appalling ignorance of how a democracy works with elected representatives when April Griffin first came on the board and tried to do something brave by asking that the no-bid contract of a former administrator come off the consent-agenda conveyor belt for discussion.
The non-competitive hires by the administration are just one more way both board and administration rip off taxpayers by giving contracts to buddies without competition, not to the lowest and most competent bidder.
Attorney Gonzalez approves this process since he got his job from Dr. Lennard on a handshake with no equal-opportunity protocols observed.Mr. Gonzalez is usually noninvolved in board business; he pares his nails, contemplates eternity, and occasionally eats chips and drinks soda pop during board business.My mother would say he was raised in a barn despite his claim of Castilian Spanish origins.
But Mr. Gonzalez comes alive if someone utters the word "no-bid."He booms a request to the chair to speak and then waxes rhapsodic about the pristine legality of the no-bid process and cites law, made up or twisted is my gloss, hence, his favorite kind of law, to legitimize the no-bid contracts.
The request of Griffin to have the no-bid appointment to a former administrator come off the consent agenda for discussion roused the guardian of the status quo, Carol Kurdell, to come out of her usual trance and object to Griffin's request.Sphinx Carol said that Griffin was being disloyal to the staff by asking a review of the hire.Candy joined in the condemnation of Griffin's defection from board customary acceptance of Ms. Elia's rolling consent agenda saying, as I recall to Carol, "You go girl.
That Olson lacks rhetorical flair despite her assertion that she reads widely and deeply gets no confirmation from such stale board pronouncements. We are talking undistinguished performance on the Stanford Binet here.
Olson and Kurdell's opposition when Griffin called for something to come off the agenda for discussion reveals bothfar gone in blind obedience to Ms. Elia's directives and unconcerned about the rights of the taxpayers to the best deal the board can broker in such transactions.Their response shows as well that they don't know how democratic officials are supposed to conduct themselves in office as representatives of the people who elected them, not asautomaton lackeys of a superintendent and cheerleaders for the staff that does whatever Elia tells its members to do, legal or illegal. Sadly,
Griffin is so gutless that since that attack by Kurdell and Olson, she has morphed into a mute android for Ms. Elia.
I hope Le Emmet Gonzalo Negrete will have the courage to ask Candy in a public forum why a board member has no right to ask for something to come off the written-in-stone rolling consent agenda for public discussion.And I hope, when elected, he promises voters to ask for anything he finds questionable to come off the consent agenda for discussion and to engage in a knock-down-drag-out board fight if needed.I hope as well he has enough sense as Griffin did not to tell Carol and Candy that his allegiance is not to the ROSSAC staff but to the voters who put him into office.
I understand the opponent of Ms. Olson, Emmet Gonzalo Negrete, has a good grasp of the statistical flim flam in the No Child Left Behind figures.Good we want to hear about this subject. People who vote for the school board need all the data they can get on government misbehavior.
If there is a NCLB scramble about the truth of statistics, this would be coincident withthe board and administration’s policy of lying when they think they can get away with it.
Candidate Negreteshould bring these data forward, especially when he goes to the newspaper editorial endorsement interview.
Those newspaper endorsement people are pompous and supercilious, but a candidate can convert them if he has his facts down cold and speaks with steely conviction.
And while Negrete is debating Candy and close enough to hear her clearly, I want him to send me by diplomatic pouch confirmation that Candy does indeed emit frog noises be that the case.
Emmet must report pronto on any “Ribbet! Ribbet!” that he picks up from La Candy’s area.
Just in the diplomatic pouch with this shocking news: Candy Ribbet Ribbet has indeed moved into a condo off Swann Avenue, and listen to this: the building rents out units. Oh, the shame of it all: the snoots in South Tampa will not recognize Candy anymore. Condos are the death of legitimacy in South Tampa. I am not making this up. lee
Ms. Elia's Dog Tiny
