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
The Council of Trent Augmented by the Tampa City Council and Hillsborough County Commission Convenes in Plant City to Decide if Candy Olson should be stripped of her citizenship and sent to Siberia for the duration. The Videotape of the Board's shoddy treatment of Erwin when he came to the board for help is what decided the jury.
Don't miss readers' comments at the bottom. lee Three of the board members who collaborated in the punishment and still on the board are Candy Olson, Carol Kurdell, and Jack Lamb. Not one helped Mr. Erwin to unravel his charges of graft and theft in ROSSAC. They huddled with Team Lennard to make people think Mr. Erwin was crazy and then to find ways to fire him and strip him of his pension.
Ms. Olson was particularly harsh to Mr. Erwin when he came to the board. She told him that he had better have proof of what he was saying about ROSSAC graft and theft--never, "Thank you for your vigilance. We will follow up and find out what's going on."
When the jury in the Whistleblower case reported below ruled for Mr. Erwin, the board punished no one: it should have at a minimum fired Dr. Lennard, who now perches as the Supervisor of Elections, appointed by Governor Abandon-All-Hope-Ye Who-Enter-Here Crist.
But the board hunkered down after the jury rejected board-and- administration lies and ruled for Erwin and waited for the problem to go away. It did. Alas and weladay.
Now Candy Olson is up for reelection after 16 years of doing nothing but abet serially crooked administrations. She should explain her role in the Erwin scandal to the voters in her bid to die on the board. Her opponent Emmet Negrete should call her out on Candy's serial betrayal of the public trust. lee
By LENNY SAVINO lsavino@tampatrib.com Published: Dec 16, 2004
TAMPA - Redemption arrived Wednesday for Doug Erwin when a federal jury accepted his claims that the Hillsborough County School Board harassed him into an early retirement after he exposed corruption within the county's school system.
After nearly three days of deliberations, the jury awarded Erwin at least $175,000 in damages for emotional pain and mental anguish. He could get an additional $196,000 in salary for being pressured to retire 18 months before his scheduled retirement date of July 31, 2003, his attorney said.
Erwin, 59, worked in the district for 33 1/2 years, serving as principal of Robinson, Hillsborough, Plant City and Armwood high schools before a promotion to the district's general director of operations.
Beginning in November 2001, Erwin complained to the media about $560,000 in misappropriated funds, as well as leaky roofs, mold, faulty air- conditioning systems in schools and more, which he said ran up millions in costs to taxpayers. At least two district investigations triggered by Erwin's allegations documented fraud and corruption, and the Florida auditor general later verified accusations of waste and mismanagement.
After two public debates with the school board, the tapes of which were played during the trial, Superintendent Earl Lennard reassigned Erwin in January 2002 to a new job to find the millions in district losses. He was banished to a windowless room with no secretary. He announced his retirement the next day and, in July 2002, sued the district under the Florida Whistleblower's Act, claiming harassment and intimidation.
After Wednesday's late ruling, the former principal was beaming. ``The jury went above the call of duty,'' he said, ``and came back with the right verdict.''
For the past 2 1/2 years, Erwin said, he has driven 20,000 miles back and forth from his new home north of Atlanta to Tampa working with his lawyer in Tampa, Priscilla Ryan. On Wednesday night, after the verdict was announced, Erwin said he and his wife, Pat, were anxious to make the long drive back.
Lennard was present when Judge James Whittemore accepted the jury's verdict late Wednesday. ``Obviously, I'm disappointed,'' Lennard said. ``I don't believe the facts supported the ruling.''
Whittemore will decide how much money Erwin will get in lost pay for retiring early, but the judge did not set a deadline. The jury of five women and three men ruled in favor of two out of the three counts against the school board. They found that Erwin's pressure to retire violated Florida's Public Employees Whistleblower Act, as well as his First Amendment rights to speak out about the corruption. On the third count, however, the jury ruled that Erwin's treatment was not a breach of contract.
School board attorney Gregory Hearing said he will file motions to persuade Whittemore to dismiss the jury's findings. ``If there was no breach of contract,'' Hearing said, ``then there can't be a constructive discharge,'' a legal term meaning being made to work under such intolerable conditions that a reasonable person would feel compelled to resign.
By Wednesday evening, when it appeared the jury could not come to a unanimous decision on each of the three counts, Whittemore suggested both sides agree to accept majority rulings on each count to break the logjam. It worked. After the judge explained the agreement to the jury and told members to return today at 9 a.m., the jury surprised the court by asking for just 15 more minutes. Juror Geraldine Murphy said her peers embraced the majority rule substitute immediately. ``When he told us about that, we were all relieved,'' she said as she left the courthouse. Wayne Morrison, another juror, said he voted for Erwin after the jury was shown a videotape of a school board meeting where the board brought in witnesses to rebut Erwin's claims of mismanagement but did not allow Erwin to call in his own witnesses. ``It had a lot to do with the videotape,'' he said.
Since he retired, Erwin said, he has not been able to find a job as a school executive. ``School districts require three references,'' he said, ``two of which have to come from your most recent two supervisors.'' He has made at least two requests for his two former supervisors to send recommendation letters, but the recommendations never were sent, he said. On a third application, Erwin said he tried walking it through the proper channels. That didn't work either.
Reporter Marilyn Brown contributed to this report. Reporter Lenny Savino can be reached at (813) 259-7567.
While doing my taxes, I ran across this message about the Erwin case that I had misfiled. It gives some flavor of what the Erwin court files reveal about how Dr. Lennard and his thugs tried to retaliate against Mr. Erwin for calling Lennard's attention to the evidence that Mr. Erwin said he had found that indicated theft and graft in ROSSAC. I imagine this was the kind of evidence that convinced the jury to find in Mr. Erwin's case and to award him $165,ooo is his Whistleblower case. lee
Wednesday, January 23, 2002 9:59: 11 AM Page 1 of 1
1::.'''-"=" ~I Wednesday, January 23, 20028:50:46 AM
-_. Message
From: ~ Douglas Erwin
ruElsa Tuggle
Subject: I Fwd: investigation To: I ~ Diane Woodall
Doug,
Good morning!
In November, 2000, John Brungard and I met with Bill Gietzen at John's house. At that meeting, he gave us an overview of what his role in the investigation was and asked us to share what we knew. During the discussion, we indicated that we felt that you were being targeted and held responsible for what Mac was doing. He indicated that we were right to be cautious, as he was hired to try and make you look guilty of wrongdoing. His conversation with us made it very clear that while he was looking for facts and was following up leads, there was also another agenda.
It is interesting to note that after the report was released, I went to Mark Hart's office on December 11, 2001 and looked through all the material that was gathered from the investigations. I came upon a statement from Wayne Dashinger's report that stated that Gietzen indicated he was hired to make Doug Erwin look crazy.
April, this is the guy below--David Schmidt-- whose free speech rights I defended at the last board meeting. It looks like you colluded with Ms. Elia to use staff to comb through his records to find a gnat with which to nail him.
And you led her to retaliate against Mr. Schmidt, although it doesn't take much pressure to get Ms. Elia to nail some person for some manufactured error.
This was the method used by the Professional Standards office with Bart Birdsall to retaliate against him for his free-speech right to protest gay bias in the county library. His retaliatory treatment was why I began monitoring the school board.
And what about Mr. Schmidt's recital of your empty claim of being a "successful business owner"? Those "businesses" you were engaged in with your husband were not "successful." Is it true that a lender had to sue you to get you to pay back a loan? Good lord. How dishonest and tacky.
Remember when you first ran for office I told you never to lie to the press, that its members would find you out and never forgive you or believe you again? I believe that instance of your being caught out by the press was your claim to have had some kind of administrative position in the Boys and Girls Club when you didn't.
And a person who retaliates against a man for criticizing her--that's free speech--does not belong on a school board. In fact, she does not belong near a school. Children should not be taught to lie by example. I told my four, "Don't lie. It's easier to tell the truth because then you will never get mixed up and caught out. It's better to tell the truth no matter how bad you think it is."
I give you the same advice, April. Tell the truth. You didn't have to put false information on your official school portrait and biography. Just say the truth about yourself. This lie makes you look cheap and sleazy and insecure. Our children deserve better board members than one who lies and then embellishes the lie to put on the Web page of the school board.
And I agree with the reader's note that I post below that the guy sent to Mr. Schmidt's blog. Why hasn't the board dealt with Ms. Elia's conflict of interest if she is using a school lawyer to coerce her neighbors into accepting her vulgar tin roof?
Oh, let me add another lie to your list. You promised me you were going to USF and get a degree. You are still running around town preening your importance on the board with no degree. The same goes for Susan. How can you pretend to care about the education of the children of the community when you don't care about your own?
If you get a college degree you won't make so many grammar-punctuation errors on you Web site that I suggested you start. And don't say I didn't tell you to start a Web site because then you would be telling another lie.
lee
The Schmidt Charge Against April Griffin
Sunday, April 11, 2010
April Griffin vs Florida Ethics Commission (Pay Attention SP Times Editor John Hill
Today, I mailed to Tallahassee a Florida Ethics Commission complaint against April Griffin.
For years, she has told us that she was a successful business owner, which gave her a background to provide oversight to our district’s $3.2 billion budget as well as to its day to day business activities.
On the Hillsborough School District’s website, her board member bio also says she was a “successful business owner.”
I always wondered where she gained this “successful” business experience, particularly as a GED grad. So I did some research.
Seems like, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she and her husband created three businesses, now all defunct.
One was called OpenmyOffice.net, Inc. It was opened in 2000 and shows one of Griffin’s home addresses in Seminole Heights. It is now listed as “inactive.” April is listed as Vice-President.
April and hubby Brian started another company in 1999 called CS Consulting Group, Inc. Again, this company has Seminole Heights addresses, either at April’s home or a low-rent storefront. Again, April is listed as Vice-President.
CS Consulting Group evolved into Cybersoft Solutions sometime in 2002. It also had a Seminole Heights business address, with Brian Griffin listed as chief officer. It went “inactive” in late 2002.
Somewhere during that timeframe, I guess business wasn’t so “successful.”
I found in Florida state court records that “CS Consulting Group, a dissolved Florida corporation, Brian Griffin and April Griffin” were successfully sued for an unpaid business loan by Union Planters Bank of Memphis. The Bank received a Final Judgment November, 2003 for $24,991 in principal plus $500 in attorney’s fees, $350 in costs, and $5272 in interest. I guess the Griffin’s hadn’t made a payment for a while.
The above information is the basis for my ethics complaint against April. She lied to the voters in 2006, she lied to editorial writers like John Hill of the SP Times, and she is lying to anyone who visits the district website now.
This coming election, April will have to face the fact that past lies will not help her win re-election.
Much more to come. We need to examine her other work history….as she reported in job applications to the school district in 2004.
See Ms. April....payback is not any kind of a threat.....it is a promise of political action!
posted by admin @ 4:45 PM 1 Comments Monday, April 5, 2010 At April 12, 2010 12:15 PM , Anonymous John said...
As an employee of fabulous SDHC I think your blog and insights are so valuable...Thank you.....Should there be some kind of ethics investigation on what Elia did with the School Board's attorney for her personal matter... I am sure she makes enough to retain one.... Keep up the excellent work....
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C.20202
4/14/2010
Dear Secretary Arne Duncan:
The SACS review of the HillsboroughCounty schools occurs soon.
I believe you should have your staff responsible for the Department of Education's connection with SACS to take an interest in its findings on the HillsboroughCounty schools.
If SACS awards the schools a pro forma accreditation status without proper review and report of the school board and administration's covert policies of handing out jobs to buddies or incompetent administrators, of punishing teachers with job loss via the internal Professional Standards office for speaking out; of making teachers inflate grades to augment the reputation ofsuperintend Elia; of refusing teachers and students a designatedplace on the board agenda to speak their comments to authority, then the Department of Education should cut its ties with SACS.
The Department of Education should not act as umbrella for SACS if it endorses such school leadership.
These practices by the HillsboroughCounty school leadership--board and administration-- are un-American. They should not receive the imprimatur of SACS, backed by the United States Department of Education.
Dear Southern Association (SACS) Accrediting Team:
Your SACS organization will conduct accreditation review of the HillsboroughCounty schools in the next few weeks I understand.
I put this message to you on my blog that deals with the HillsboroughCounty school system: LeeDruryDeCesaresCasting-RoomCouch.Blogspot.com;
Blogs terrify the administration and board. They fear blogs will let the public know what really goes on in the schools. So both target blogs and pursue blogging teachers for firing if they dare exercise their Free Speech rights to comment on the schools. If teachers say anything about the schools, it must be laudatory, or the administration and board target them for a Professional Standards charges, which equates to a threat to their job.
This administrative behavior represents tyranny, not leadership.
I am a citizen interested in the status of this Hillsborough County school system since my four children graduated from it, and I have still one grandson who will attend Plant High in the fall semester.
Please consider my remarks as the review of a taxpayer interested in the wellbeing of the schools and their currently being run by people not interested in the schools' being a resource for the community but in using the schools as an economic and power base to puff up their financial and power status.
I am somewhat familiar with SACS work since your organization did reviews of HillsboroughCommunity College before I retired. I was Professor of English for twenty-eight years.
I reviewed some of the data on your Web page. My professional assessment says that the metaphysical loftiness of your language and its absence of specificity about what your investigation team reviews to determine whether schools qualify for your accreditation imprimatur define an impediment to this reader. The language should be more concrete and less abstract so that an average reader can assess the nature of your review work on a school system.
Your site's first paragraph features a pronoun-antecedent disagreement problem. "SACS" is singular: one organization; the pronoun referring to it should be "its," not "their."
Your text:
"The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) is dedicated to ensuring that their accredited institutions surpass..."
Twenty-eight years of grading freshman- and sophomore-English students' essays makes possible my picking up such errors in my sleep.
Your literature's lack of concrete language or illustrative examples couched in human vernacular cause nailing down what you check in your review of schools tough; but I have rescued two of your Web comments from which I extract concepts that I infer you explore in your school review and speak to them in my own remarks.
The first deals with the scope of your review; the second treats with the leadership on which you promise to focus to ensure that it "communicate[s] with its shareholders."
SACS District Accreditation also assures that "all people, processes, departments, and operations in the school system work in concert to increase student learning and organizational effectiveness." In addition, "The standards require that schools have a clear vision and purpose; have effective and responsive leadership; have a rigorous curriculum taught through sound, research-based methods; collect, report, and use performance results; provide adequate resources and support for its educational programs; value and communicate with its stakeholders; and have a commitment to continuously improve. The standards are derived from educational research (citations would help here) and best practice.
I started to attend board meetings to analyze the board's and administration's conduct after a gay friend, Bart Birdsall, suffered from an administrative-and-board Professional Standards baseless charge. The superintendent uses a retaliatory Professional Standards charge even it seems for the case of a teacher's merely annoying her. In Bart's case I infer she targeted him to test her tyranny wings in her new superintendent position; to impress friend Pat Bean in the county government hierarchy; and to inflate her ego.
Superintendent Elia may also have been expressing a whiff of homophobia in the savaging of Bart.
Bart had protested from his home email to the county library head, one Mr. Stines, also gay, for enforcing the homophobic County ordinance restrictions on gay library privileges, passed under the aegis of then-Commissioner Ronda Storms, now state senator.
One must now preface an assessment of Ms. Elia's legitimacy as superintendent. Observation suggests that Ms. Elia got her superintendent job through back-room, stair-well whispered political intrigue, not from her qualifications.
I examined superintendent applicant files. Ms. Elia was the least qualified.
Ms. Elia had only a master's degree, so the board lowered the Ph.D. requirement to that of master's to coincide with her academic terminal degree. Ms. Elia had meager, incompetent in-house experience in the administrative job she had had in the local schools as her experience bona fides for superintendent.
In this position, Ms. Elia had overbuilt classrooms that caused disruptive boundary changes and overlooked a real-estate scam going on under her nose that a St. Petersburg Times reporter walked in off the street, spotted, and wrote a series about.
But Ms. Elia had the sine-qua-non qualification that sold the board members on her: she was in-house and had managed to convey to the board by osmosis or other arcane political means of communication that she would not mess with board incumbency and perquisites. I know a little bit about such clandestine procedures since my husband was longest-serving mayor of our little Gulf-of-Mexico beach town after he retired. He finally gave up the job from frustration at such self-serving conduct as seems to be routine in political organizations such as small beach towns and the administration of the schools.
The board had published in its faux search for a superintendent a nation-wide ad for the job that cost the taxpayers $35,000 for the board to cover its tracks in having picked the superintendent beforehand.
Taxpayers paid to be lied to by the board.
Ms. Elia thus assumed her superintendency; she did not earn it.
Ms. Elia and Pat Bean, county supervisor now on her way out of her high position for too much on-the-job jousting, were buddies. Pat Bean allowed Elia to use her as reference on her application for the superintendent job. I wrote Ms. Bean to tell her that this action was unethical and unprofessional. She did not respond.
I infer the two buddies cooperated on the Professional Standards charge, making Bart's job life hellish so that he had to enter therapy to deal with sequelae of his Professional Standards manufactured assault. So terrified is the school population of the Professional Standards Scarlet Letter that all Bart's school "friends" avoided him as if he had a case of the plague. This blanket desertion hurt him deeply.
It seems plain that Joe Stines called Ms. Bean about Bart's citizen-complaint emails instead of answering Bart himself. One infers that Ms. Bean called Ms. Elia. The rest is history that lies recounted in tortured, biased prose in the Professional Standards history files.
Professional Standards pressure defines the way the administration and board keep teachers silent so that they don't say anything public that pierces the blanket public-relations cover-up of much that they do that is not coincident with the wellbeing of the schools.
Your nonspecific language in describing your mission in your Web literature does not reassure me that you will get down into the real running of the schools on your SACS tour. Your gauzy language makes me fear that you sit in client administrative offices being served coffee and crumpets and that whilst sipping and nibbling, you flip at the superintendent's elbow through files of bone-dry statistics often cooked that reinforce the administration's goal to make innocents such as SACS denizens see a perfect statistical running of the schools for the good of the students, teachers, and community instead of its being a sanitized skew of reality to cover up with statistical flimflam and other prevarication the problems of the schools to propitiate organizations such as yours to ensure your automatic approval's being added to the tissue of cover-up that shields the real state of affairs underneath the miasma of lies that constitute the board's and administration's download of their PR razzle dazzle onto unsophisticated, gullible people such as SACS field operatives may be who review the school at the administration and board's elbow.
SACS has existed since the turn of the century.It could be the case that such organizations become part of the behemoth of the education industry and move in lock step with them to feed the beast that feads all its stakeholder schools. An adversarial attitude on SACS part would produce more valid results.
If SACS sincerely attempts to determine the state of the Hillsborough County schools, I offer one citizen's observations about what its investigating operatives should zero in on to get to the human nitty gritty underneath the PR tissue of lies that the board and administration impose on the facts.
I spotlight selectively some areas I believe you should review and leave you to put these where they fit in your scheme of check-offs for schools that court your seal of approval. I apply your "professional and effective leadership" rubric to these citations as well as consulting "all the stakeholders."
My belief is that some of my reporting of wrongdoing in the Hillsborough County schools should give you pause about accrediting an institution that indulges in such vile practices as it does. Cooked statistics to divert you do not make these problems go away. They will remain after your representatives move on, and these problems will continue to fester.
Your commentary on the Web makes it seem all your information comes through the administration pipeline in your on-site reviews; none appears to come from teachers and students. Nor do you cite in your Web commentary any attempt to remedy this single-source situation. That circumstance is not good practice for a grounded review of all the "stakeholders"--your term, of the school family.
Those left out deserve time too to convey their views. Your contact with teachers should be such that it does not open them up to retaliation after you have exited. First, the board and administration engage in a long-term, no let-up, no-holds-barred war against the county's teachers. As if the Professional Standards depredations were not enough, at the present time, it appears that the administration plans to use a Gates grant to conduct a faux fair review of teachers to kick out those that don't measure up to the administration's standards of sycophancy and supine acceptance of all that the board and administering mandate is right.
The board and administration suggested in Board Member Jennifer Falliero's published comment to a reporter Marshall of the St. Petersburg Times that she and the board were lying in wait to fire sassy teachers, especially the tenured, and retain the docile ones who won't say "boo" about administration wrongdoing. I am familiar with this situation since I was union president at HCC for a while.
The implications of La Falliero's remarks in the Marshall press snapshotwas that she was virtually licking her chops at the idea of using Gates to dump teachers, especially tenured ones. Ms. Falliero is a power junky.You should see her performance as board chair.When she gets a gavel in her hand, she starts to threaten throwing people out of the board room.
Jennifer Falliero is a deeply flawed current board member that the voters unwisely elected; she is now candidate for re-election.
In the news article that kicked off the election of three school-board- member incumbents and their opponents, Falliero declared herself fully qualified to administer the pecuniary aspects of the Gates million dollars even though a newspaper story recently cited a $60,000 debt she owes, and my blog on the schools details her flagrant school-site adultery with Marc Hart, former head of Community Relations.
La Falliero initiated the adultery by hanging out constantly in Mr. Hart's office, saying she needed his "mentoring."
This "mentoring" resulted in her divorce, contributed to Hart's divorce, scarified her two children, and made suffer the two young children of Hart.
Such moral depredation resulting in the suffering of four children does not reassure that Ms. Falliero is a proper board member for the county students' wellbeing; nor does Ms. Falliero's harem-scarem money conduct that includes excusing her ex-husband of child-support payments as price for his silence on his school-board former wife's adultery suggest that Ms. Falliero brings solid financial acumen to the schools' handling of the Gates windfall.
Since La Falliero rubberstamps Ms. Elia's every suggestion, she is one of Ms. Elia's favorite board members, likely the reason why La Elia tolerated La Falliero's adultery on school premises for so long.
Board members' rolling over counts big-time in the administration's support of a board member in the HillsboroughCounty schools administrative ethos.
However, Ms. Elia's fetish for good publicity finally kicked in, and the administration caromed off Falliero's primary responsibility for the in-house adultery by dumping Hart on a trumped-up charge of drunkenness to save Falliero's "reputation." The school board--all of it-- then voted Falliero in as chair after this flagrant adultery on school grounds,
Ethically flexible board members appeared not to believe that parents of county children would mind having an adulteress as board chair in charge of their children's wellbeing, including their moral wellbeing.
If the two opponents of Falliero in the school-board race had a lick of political sense, they would challenge Falliero constantly on why her adulterous behavior on school grounds disqualifies her from serving on the school board.
But my experience in watching school-board political races is that opponents of incumbents don't have the political sense of a billy goat and possess the political courage of a fishing worm.
To resume on Gates: In the Gates grant, the so-called "peer review" and "mentoring" will evolve into the board and administration's injecting of skewed, targeted criteria so that "troublesome" teachers --i.e., those that speak up--will get the sack on faux findings while collaborative, bovine teachers will keep their jobs. Hijinks are possible behind the scenes when crooks are in charge of such enterprises.
Administrative and board control of Gates to me equates to the smart teachers' getting fired and the less smart retaining jobs. Such results can't be good for the students. The administrative review teams will play along with the board-Elia game plan or lose their jobs. All decisions depend on jobs. This defines the reason why the board's ceding Ms. Elia power to control hiring and firing is such a power lever.
The administration and board don't want skilled teachers; they want docile, obedient teachers who tote that barge and lift that bale and don't let out a murmur of complaint or show a spark of innovation. The board and administration want a teacher population that acts as field hands for the board and administration's state tax booty to keep pouring into their coffers so that they can misspend it at will and look like big, important people in the community. We are talking greed and ego here. It's a story as old as the human race.
This war footing vis a vis teachers means that Superintendent Elia, her numerous overpaid, under-qualified staff police the faculty, and the board-administrative collaborators have turned the Professional Standards office into a Gestapo detail that targets teachers for marginal or entirely made-up reasons to charge them with a Professional Standards violation carrying the penalty of firing.
The leadership style of this superintendent and board is predicated on doing what's necessary to keep teachers terrified, silent, and docile. Teachers are a main but intimidated "stakeholder" that SACS cites in its literature.
The board-administration apparatchiks make sure that the stories of unfortunates targeted for Professional Standards' Scarlet Letters get around to all the schools so that everybody knows via widespread administrative-board propaganda the power of the board and administration to threaten their jobs.
Ms. Elia must not have got much praise as a child because she is obsessed with getting good publicity. So obsessed is Elia with good publicity that she hired Steve Hegarty, a former SP Times reporter, as head of Community Relations without his possessing cited credentials after kicking out Marc Hart on manufactured alcoholism charges to neutralize the adultery saga of La Falliero.
When Hegarty acted St. Petersburg Times reporter for the schools, he wrote puff pieces instead of doing solid reporting. He can't write worth a flip or even wrestle punctuation to the ground, but he's turned out to be a first-rate flatterer and gofer for Ms. Elia. Le Hegarty told me recently that he had "gotten out just in time" from the print newspaper business's meltdown; I called him a rat deserting a drowning ship. As a reporter, Hegarty professed to believe in free speech; as a gofer he has abandoned this belief and carries out the orders of the free-speech-suppressing board not to let citizens comment on agenda items.
Professional Standards blackmail terrifies teachers because its successful prosecution by the administration and board aided by complicit board attorney Gonzalez can mean their jobs. The prosecutions are usually arbitrary and successful since the board and administration are not fastidious about protocol or minimal ethics in this railroading exercise. Hence, teachers don't have much of a chance in the process.
School-board attorney Tom Gonzalez, veteran cog in the board's and administration's iron-fist mode of administration, has recently distorted the intent of new Florida bullying law HB 669 to exclude teachers and staff so that they can't use it to challenge bullying by Professional-Standards Nazis. Teachers in other counties have access to the bullying law. A teachers' union attorney has opined that a court will decide the validity of Gonzalez's arbitrary interpretation, so this question will move along in limbo until a teacher or staff member is intrepid enough to hire an attorney and take a bullying case to court for a judicial opinion on Gonzalez's interpretation. That brave move may not happen until the last trump.
Meanwhile, teachers and staff who are not gutsy enough to go to court get turned back by the administration from filing a bullying charge against Professional Standards bullying.
This arbitrary interpretation aligns Gonzalez's false interpretation with his board and administration bosses' prejudice, not with the law's stated intent.
Such legal accommodations to the board's and administration's prejudices explain why Gonzalez got his job without the competition that Tile VII mandates and why he gets $275,000 a year, highest in the state's board-lawyer ranks. To boot, Gonzalez's board job is part-time while that of the Pinellas board attorney's across the bay is fulltime with a $175,000 salary.
This capricious job situation gives Gonzales the privilege of cultivating clients on the side, which he does, and demonstrates the infirmity of the board to rein in costs despite its constant refrain that its members "will save every penny of tax money."
Tom Gonzalez is an old hand at lawyering the skullduggery of the board and administration when it wants to keep teachers muffled about what is wrong with the schools. He has been at the job informally and then formally at least as far back as the early '80's. when a family named Whitehead sued the board and administration for not treating its Downs syndrome child in a way prescribed by law and in the board and administration's hiding his files from his parents.
Mr. Gonzalez acted previous school-board attorney Crosby Few's sidekick in the defense of the board in the Whiteside family's suit against the schools for not providing services and therapy for their Downs Syndrome son and the administration's and board's covering up vital information about his mistreatment from his parents.
The board lost this case. The Whitesides won $600,000 in damages. The picture of the junk classroom below for current special-needs children shows the administration and board learned nothing from the Whitehead experience and did not change their tactics and continue to treat special-needs children in a cavalier fashion.
Gonzalez was also part of the inner circle of torturers of Doug Erwin, an administrator in the early '90s who discovered theft and graft in the administration and asked the board and administration to do something to quell it. Instead, they both--starting with Superintendent Lennard-- tried first to make people think Erwin was crazy. That ploy's not succeeding, they went on to try to cook up situations to fire him and deprive him of his pension. These HillsboroughCounty school thugs make the Medici look like amateurs. Erwin finally filed a Whistleblower suit, won it before a jury, and taxpayers footed the bill of a $165,000 settlement for administration and board crime in the case.
The board attorneys-Gonzalez's being one- routinely try to dump the jury for a trial. They know that the jury members won't believe their client's lies and their legal prevarications.
Board and administration don't want people to know about the deplorable things that go on in the schools under their administrative and board junta, so they keep their activities secret and teachers quiet with the coercion of the Professional Standards office with its Damocles sword of ad lib false or marginal charges against any rebellious or self-respecting teachers. God help the teacher who steps forward and tells the truth. Truth violates board and administration policy.
An especial offense of a teacher that puts him or her on the watch list of Professional Standards is to have a blog that comments on education and the schools. The administration via Professional Standards goes after this Free Speech renegade like a heat-seeking missile. It puts the culprit on a watch list to trap the person for engaging in some exotic or manufactured peccadillo and then slaps a Professional Standards charge on him or her.
The Professional Standards Gestapo will swoop in on the targeted blog teacher with garrote in hand. Then it's Katy, bar the door as far as dirty tricks go.
That vignette played out most recently in teacher Steve Kemp's manufactured case. You accreditors can review his one-sided file if you ask the superintendent for it. The Professional Standards office houses the document. Be suspicious for signs of redaction. The Whiteside special-needs child abuse case lost by the board did not alter its routine of shafting special-needs children. The administration and board seem to have developed a liking for mob tactics over the years even though they have sometimes exposed the board and administration in their naked clumsy and sometimes criminal behavior. At the bottom of this missive is a picture of the junk-clogged classroom that special-needs children inhabited when Steve Kemp fell into the Professional Standards trap at the time he worked in this classroom as a substitute teacher. Mr. Kemp said there was an unlocked door from the make-shift special-needs classroom to another storage classroom reputed to house poisonous substances. I don't know if Kemp is right about the poisonous substances, but one would never find out the truth by asking the administration.
This abuse of and neglect of special-needs children continue after the Whiteside case and after the board and administration became acquainted with this deplorable housing of special-needs children in the recent Steve Kemp case. The board and administration have gotten away with skullduggery for so long that it's part of their DNA even though it sometimes fails spectacularly as it did in the two court cases cited above.. A cynic might say that board and administration suffer from invincible ignorance.
Worth noting is that the person heading Professional Standards is one Ms. Linda Kipley. She makes about $140,000 a year for a job that should have a criminal justice degree, a psychology degree, or even a philosophy degree. The job description calls for a master's degree. She got the job in a transfer from Hillsborough High principal, where her penchant for lying made some teachers refuse to go into an office interview with her without a recorder. The Professional Standards top job got no advertising. The administration put Kipley in it after her failure at Hillsborough High, illustrating the faculty's squib that in the administration, if you mess up, you move up.
Ms. Kipley is in possession of a home-ec diploma and an infinite capacity for toadying. The latter is pure gold in the Elia administration and to hell with academic luster Not only did Kipley get one of the most important, most sensitive of administrative cynosures, but to reward Ms. Kipley for her pitiless service in savaging teachers with her office's power, Ms. Elia recently hired La Kipley's husband, terminal degree high school diploma, as an accounting employee when four accounting candidates got turned down to make a place for Mr. Linda Kipley. These four competing candidates had not only the required bachelor's degree in accounting but also the requisite job-description-cited experience. I reviewed these applicant files to determine this fact.
I recall board member Susan Valdes's asking personnel director Valdez's opinion on whether Mr. Kipley were the best candidate for the job. Le Valdez said he was. This scene mimes why academic weaklings fill the administration. I am sure that Mr. Valdez was acting on Ms. Elia's orders.
Everybody knows that when baccalaureate recipients step off the plane after graduation, the C and D students race for administration; the A and B students fly to classrooms. This behavior is a constant in school populations.
The board has ceded a jobs program to Ms. Elia as superintendent perquisite; Ms. Elia's own background features minimum scholarship and maximum politics; so it's to hell with qualifications in her scheme of values. La Elia fills jobs with buddies, sycophants, and family members. Two of the school board have children who are administrators in the system, I understand. I would love to see the curriculum vitae of these board children and those of their competitors who applied for the jobs snagged by the board members' offspring because of the latter's inhabiting the inside track. Ms. Elia recently created a lobbying sinecure for her old buddy Dr. James Hamilton, former administrator and torturer of grammar who doesn't know the difference between "your" and
"you're," and soi-disant ROSSAC Don Juan, who promoted his favorite, Ms. Connie Mileto, past other candidates to the Tallahassee post of the schools' government representative even though her degree is in kindergarten instruction. His wife divorced him in this turmoil but remarried him later. Now Ms. Elia sends him back up to Tallahassee to rendezvous with the alluring Connie. The make-work job for Hamilton pays $65,000 a year, had no needs study done to justify it, got no advertising, but got rubberstamping by the board despite these administration deficiencies.
This hiring racket ceded by the board to the superintendent is a major perquisite of the job. But this superintendent privilege means that taxpayers do not get their money's worth in administrative hires with brains and education. I have suggested that the board list jobs on its Web site with hyperlinks to the candidates' curriculum vitae. The board members looked at me as if I were crazy.
Lax hiring protocols fill the administrative ranks with minimally qualified people who often require pricey consultants to fly in at thousands of dollars in fees to teach incompetents their jobs with flash cards. Recently, the consultant brain trust sped to the rescue to advise on the going-down-the-tube transportation department. Things were at crisis level. The thousands-of-tax-dollars consultants advised the common-sense cure of 1. putting the buses in one place and 2. getting a software scheduling program. This expensive but basic advice is not rocket science but beyond the vision of the transportation upper employees paid sky-high salaries compared to the bare-bones teacher pay. The head of the transportation operation was a former bus driver, no doubt an ardent admirer and unquestioning supporter of La Elia. This Elia admirer obviously lacked the professional sophistication to read bus-administration publications.
When a person replaced the bus driver, Ms. Elia moved her and her assistant at the same salary into some administration cul-de-sac for out-to-pasture incompetents.
The administration has one Ph.D. presently. He filled the job of one Mr. White, who didn't know a thing about computers but whom previous superintendent Dr. Lennard put in as head of the computer department because he wanted another ROSSAC in-situ thug to assist him in punishing Mr Doug Erwin for reporting graft and theft in the ROSSAC environs. As I recall, Mr. White was in possession of an Early Childhood degree. Dr. Lennard, Dr. Hamilton (I complained to UF president that he had not written his own doctoral dissertation because he did not know the difference between "your" and "you're" or basic essay construction), and this parvenu computer guy, Mr. White, formed the administrative posse to track down and hang Mr. Erwin. Campaigns such as that against Mr. Erwin are what this administrative culture counts as adroit leadership. Gossip says Ms. Elia didn't like White when she assumed the superintendent diadem and since her incumbency has sent him skulking past the graveyard into retirement.
So the exotic Ph.D. in computers took the incompetent past factotum White's place. There must have been a temporary dearth of incompetent sycophants who knew how to turn on a computer when La Elia hired the current Ph.D. in computers. Ms. Elia's coterie seems strong on sycophancy but weak on credentials.
Most of the administration quidnuncs wander around in the ROSSAC office building sans credentials but lavishly paid for their incompetence. Their primary duty is to suck up to the insecure Ms. Elia,who seems famished for reassurance.
The taxpayers foot the bill for the superintendents' bottomless pit of lust for praise. Psychotherapy for the superintendent would be cheaper.
A recent rumor said Ms. Elia habitually cussed out lower-level employees in her office. I wrote and inquired if she did. No answer. So I asked her about this reputed vile practice in a board meeting. No answer, but I have not since heard of any more cussing-out of lower-level employees in her Star Chamber. Ms. Elia would benefit from Freud's talking cure.
The board pretends it does not know about the Professional Standards punishment machine for teachers. It pretends that it does not know that only teachers receive punishment through the Professional Standards gulag, never administrators. I asked under the open-records law from Ms. Kipley files of teachers punished. She sent me a stack. I asked for sample files of administrators punished by Professional Standards: she sent none. Professional Standards is a teachers-only punishment-and-terror machine. The taxpayers pay for it but do know about its selective purpose and use. Its name of "Professional Standards" is the scab that covers the administrative putrescence underneath.
A recent example of the double standard of punishment is the cases of teacher Kemp and Administrative Toe Cracker of Pubescent boys at KingHigh School.
The board pretends not to know what is going on in anything. That everything gets decided in the superintendent's privy council out of board earshot and put on the Consent Agenda suit board members to a T.
The goals they cited when they ran for office do not reflect in their accepting responsibility or taking a hand in the active running of the schools once elected. The "I don't know what you are talking about" summarizes the board's deniability habitual maneuver.
Betimes its members robotically stamp the rolling consent agenda's mysteries on the podium. They don't ask for discussion of anything.
I suggested that Steve Kemp, the teacher caught in the Professional Standards punishment maw, ask Board Member April Griffin to meet with him to discuss his case of manufactured offense. I figured her being the newest member would have made her the least corrupted.
I was wrong.
La Griffin met with Kemp and advised him to "be quiet," that "good things are happening behind the scenes." These were happening in violation of the government-in-the-sunshine law, of course, a law that Board Member Griffin does not know about or, if she does, does not regard as one that she should obey.
Taking the oath of office to protect the Constitution is an exercise in meaningless blather for board members. They do not know about or care about the Constitution.
Jennifer Falliero, the resident adultery board member, had such a hazy idea of the First Amendment that her ignorance finally prompted Attorney Gonzalez to rise from his slumber to give her a Romper Room breakdown of it.
After the Gonzalez lecture, Chair Falliero opened the next board seminar with, "Mr. Gonzalez says that the First Amendment means that people can come before the board and say any mean thing they want to."
That's right. It does. That's democracy.
People in public office should know the price of the job and get used to it. If they are not strong enough to face the stringencies of Free Speech in a democracy, they should not run.
Griffin also told Kemp not to tell anybody that they had met as if a board member's meeting with a teacher was something to be ashamed of and to be covered up. I think this cowardly behavior on Board Member Griffin's part was due to her being morbidly afraid of Ms. Elia.
The board is supposed to be Ms. Elia's boss; but Ms. Elia is its members' boss. The elected board has all allowed and even invited its subordinate status to Ms. Elia. Board members lack the brains and the nerve to lead even an exploration of the layout of a gym. Until a person gets elected with enough courage and savvy to face Ms. Elia and inform her of his or her real opinion in a matter--which is what voters expect a board member to do--the board of the Hillsborough County school system will be a bunch of flaccid puppets.
I believe the relationship between the board and the superintendent should receive SACS scrutiny. I believe SACS is obliged to ask about the rolling Consent Agenda's lack of consonence with the Florida Government in the Sunshine law. The Accreditation Association members, unless they openly cede their autonomy to collusion in a system of false legitimacy, should not be naive supporters of rubberstamping approval of schools they timidly review.
For a thorough review, SACS's field team has gone down into the basement and checked out the water pipes and garbage disposal apparatus of the school under scrutiny. In the HillsboroughCounty school system, this tactic is obligatory.
The accreditation people should not submit to charm offensives or to soothing by false assurances of probity by either board or administration. I believe SACS should make tough queries and require straight answers to questions that would occur to people with analytic minds who take their job seriously. They should resist board and administration schmoozing.
This is test time--not open book, no cheating tolerated. The field team should be cool and non-reactive.
SACS operatives should save candid reaction for the SACS report itself.
Good schools require and can withstand that scrutiny. SACS should talk to a random selection of students and teachers, not ones the administration and board choose but ones that perhaps the CTA president suggests. Or SACS missionaries can just stroll the halls and pick out teachers and students randomly. Your invitation will make them feel honored and included.These are the usually neglected, most imporatant stake holders. SACS should get a rounded view of the real operation of the Hillsborough County schools, not a programmed, massaged presentation in the superintendent's office that coincides with what the superintendent's, the administration's, and the board's view confines what reality is.
A long-simmering problem between faculty and administration has defined chacteristic leadership by Ms. Elia. She simply dumped an extra class on teachers as Mussolini would have on his troops. The board did not rebuke the superintendent for this arrogant discourtesy and unprofessional conduct toward the district teachers. This callus gesture characterizes Ms. Elia's leadership style. It shows her attitude toward the teacher stakeholders. I characterize her as an instinctive bully. Bullying is Ms. Elia's management style. As far as she is concerned, the county schools have one stakeholder: that stakeholder is she. As for the board, I have observed that if the matter does not deal with board perquisites, the board does not say anything because it's not interested in anything but the schools' contributions to board members sense of importance and éclat. So since it did not concern them, board members did not say anything to Ms. Elia about the insult she delivered to teachers that aimed at their educational professionalism. Not a word came from the board potted plants.
One of the most telling and embarrassing scenes of board inability to deal with the problems that boards should deal with was the time when the school holiday schedule that was in turmoil because of its Christian-centric make-up. Jews and Muslims wanted holidays for their children too. Preachers and rabbis came and addressed the board. Some--especially the rabbis--were erudite. The preachers were linguistically ruggedly eloquent. But erudition and eloquence are out of the board's league. The clerics' comment to the board was pearls before swine. The board hemmed and hawed, cleared throats, examined their cuiticles, and frequently sighed.
Most of the board was silent.But Ms. Betty Boop Griffin delivered a startlingly inappropriate non sequitur in which she ruminated about how hard it was for the board to figure out schedules and how stressful was the exercise to all of its members. I am not making this up. Review the board tape for confirmation.
Ms. Elia also forced teachers to inflate grades to make herself look better in the state educational bureaucracy. I trust that SACS will ask for the before and after statistics in this breach of scholarship and professionalism. The board did not rebuke Ms. Elia for such academically barbarous behavior that did not help students get into good colleges and universities and that degraded teachers' professionalism.
This contamination of grades should be a red flag for SACS. SACS field workers should beware of a superintendent who would engage in and a board that would sponsor such behavior.
Moreover, Ms. Elia purchased without consulting teachers who would have to implement it or the board that would have to rubberstamp its price a multi-million-dollar gimcrack program called the Spring that had failed in other venues. In the uproar that followed the revelation of Ms. Elia's go-it-alone purchase, the board did not rebuke Ms. Elia or insist on the principle that she must consult teachers and board about such intervention in the teaching of students.
A citizen aware of the administration's record is entitled to ask whether graft were involved in this irregular purchase. My understanding is that the Spring flopped in HillsboroughCounty, too, sending millions of tax dollars down the drain of Ms. Elia's bloated ego. SACS should ask in which warehouse the corpse of Spring resides.
Ms. Elia's yearly pay is $300,000, $47,000 coming purloined from teacher work in raising student scores. This raid on teacher industry to support superintendent greed saw its beginnings under the previous superintendent, Dr. Earl Lennard, he that was bent on running Mr. Erwin out of the district with no pension for Erwin's discovering graft and theft in ROSSAC.
Dr. Lennard is the one who headed the effort to convince people that administrator Erwin was crazy when the latter reported to the board and administration the graft and theft he discovered in the administration. Dr. Lennard's failing to convince people that Mr. Erwin was crazy, meant that he then mounted a campaign to deprive the Whistleblower of his job and pension.
Keep in mind that such skullduggery on the part of the administration gets funded by unaware taxpayers.It's a lure to be a crook if you don't have to pay the damages out of your own pocket.
Mr. Erwin won his Whistleblower case and fled to retirement in Georgia, where I hear he can't get two recommendations from his previous employer to apply for a principal's job in that state. The board should provide those recommendations as compensation for its cooperation with Lennard and his thugs' attempt to destroy Mr. Erwin for discovering theft and graft in ROSSAC.
The Lennard "bonus" steal from teachers' work continues in Ms. Elia's payment package as perquisite as if it were of venerable vintage arising from the time that the first teacher grasped a piece of chalk in Hillsborough County and sallied up to the blackboard to begin Lesson 1.
The board sat mute and turned on the green light of acquiesence during this tableau of its rubberstamping this superintendent greed in stealing teacher-earned raised student scores.Board members never uttered inquiry or protest of the superintendent's rip-off of teachers' work.
Besides the board's cooperation with the administration's devaluing and punishing teachers, it demonstrates its own particular disrespect of the faculty and student body by refusing to give both a settled place on the board agenda to comment and give their ideas about the conduct of the schools. The truth is that the board like the administration does not want to hear from students and teachers. Its ceremonial board members want these populations to be mute and to serve as the economic base of the board's and administration's lust for éclat and greed for perquisites.
Even HillsboroughCommunity College, not the apex of good behavior toward teachers where I worked for twenty-eight years, gave students and faculty a front place on the board agenda. The board and administration members did at least recognize both teachers and students as front-line participants in the college community.
My judgment says that the Hillsborough County school board and administration want the community to think that the schools are all about them and that students and teachers are incidental accoutrements, not the major "stakeholders" your Web commentary cites. The board and administration have to put up with teachers to get their downloads of tax money.
The board does not care about the schools as vehicle to educate the young and prepare them to be tomorrow's leaders. Rather the schools' parochial purpose according to board thinking is to serve vehicle for the board's convenience to preen its members' egos and gad about town posing as beneficiaries of education. . What interests the board is its perquisites such as board members' air travel to cities such as Las Vegas, not a hub of education, and stays in fancy room-service hotels on taxpayer tabs. Its members gad about the Bay Area to government-paid hog-trough chowdowns that augment their girth and make them therefore more resistant to start a childhood obesity program that Ms. Obama now touts to deal with the nationwide childhood obesity epidemic. Such program would shine the light on board as well as students' obesity problems.
Only one of the board is within normal weight range. That's the board adulteress in residence. Ms. Falliero can't afford to get fat; doing so would wipe out her school adultery franchise.
The board does not get exercised about anything that does not directly apply to its members' own self-interest. The only two times I have witnessed board fights is the knock-down-drag out that ensued on the podium when the board backed into a discussion of runaway travel funds by board members. Mutual recriminations about travel-charges' excess caused an internecine kafuffle of sprightly energy and vivid name-calling. Board members had at it with naming fellow members spendthrifts who used tax funds to underwrite their for-fun peregrinations.
Susan Valdes won the unofficial HOG AWARD for running on the slogan of "saving every penny of taxpayer money" while, when elected, spending more than $50,000 in travel in a two-plus-year travel orgy during which time the poor children of the county couldn't participate in class activities for lack of supplies.
Candy Olson, who neglects the poor areas' needs in her district and pretends she represents only the well-off South Tampa area, went on a lark to Alaska for God knows what reason, a good guess being to act judge in the Chamber of Commerce Nanook of the North contest in Anchorage: Nanook's status is an in-depth education concern impacting Hillsborough County's schools, to he sure.
The other board internecine warfare took place recently when a state-education-committee senator proposed reducing board salaries to the $21,500 part-time pay that he and other legislators got. Upon hearing this proposed reduction, Board Member Adulteress-in-Residence Jennifer Falliero (see a full review of her activities on my blog leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com if you have the stomach) blew up and called board members all over the state to get them to join her protest. She never called statewide to get supplies for poor children's not being able to participate in class work for lack of them.
I saw the divorce deposition of Mr. Hart, with whom Ms. Falliero was involved adulterously. Mr. Hart called me for permission to come out to the beach and show its validity with the divorce deposition.
There is no doubt that Ms. Falliero disgraced her office, her family, and the citizens of HillsboroughCounty by adulterous on-the-job behavior, using her board position as a launching point for this vile conduct. And there is no doubt that the board and administration during the tenure of two superintendents tolerated Falliero's adultery and even promoted it by their quiescence and thatmorally defient board members elected Falliero board chair as a final fillip of disrespect for their position, for the community, and for the students and teachers.
I don't know if the foregoing data touch upon your assessment criteria of the Hillsborough County Schools for SACS commendation, but it ought to clock in somewhere in the interstices of the rarified language that wafts above your program on the Web.
My considered opinion says that the board at Hillsborough's County schools cares little for education and students and teachers and the reputation of the schools but cares instead for everything to do with its own selfish stake in the taxpayer pie that the schools represent and the éclat of faux fame that their soi-disant exalted positions provide. They could be running a pencil factory if the rewards were the same tax-money downloads.
These concerns should give the Southern Association some unexplored areas to research and consider in its accreditation adventure in the HillsboroughCounty schools, the quality of its leadership, and the concern for all stakeholders, not just the board and administration.A citizen must trust that SACS accreditation is not pro forma and involves scrutiny of the schools' conduct of education. I infer that to be SACS's purpose.
I see that you have some marginal connection with the Federal Department of Education. To protect that status, I suggest that SACS owes its allegiance ultimately to the citizens of the state and the country who will, if I mistake not, foot the bill for the organizations' report.
SACS should judge whether the behavior I have outlined satisfies its criteria for "effective, responsive leadership" from both board and administration as well as concern for "all stakeholders." My view says that it would be a perversion of SACS's purpose to issue a pro forma approval of a school system that, if SACS auditors bother to look below the surface outside the statistics page-flipping in Ms. Elia's office, should not get approval from any oversight organization until the pathology of the way the board and administration run the system for self-serving interests is exposed and remedied.
Please inform me of the following: 1.What percentage of the institutions you review get approval; 2. Who is responsible for the bill for your accreditation activities in Hillsborough County's schools; 3. How much it costs; and 4. Whether you can fulfill my request to send me a copy of the invoice directly as well as the report or whether I should ask my Pinellas member of the Florida legislative delegation to secure a copy for my review.
all members Hillsborough county legislative delegation
all members Florida house education committee
all members Tampa city council
mayor of Tampa
all members Hillsborough county commission paultash@sptimes.com; parrickmanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com solocheck@sptimes.com; marilynbrown@tampatribune.com; marshall@sptimes.com joeguidry@tampatribune.com
4/11/10 Dear Southern Association Accrediting Team:
Your SACS organization will conduct accreditation review of the HillsboroughCounty schools in the next few weeks I understand.
I put this message to you on my blog that deals with the HillsboroughCounty school system: LeeDruryDeCesaresCasting-RoomCouch.Blogspot.com;
Blogs terrify the administration and board. They fear blogs will let the public know what really goes on in the schools. So both target blogs and pursue blogging teachers for firing if they dare exercise their Free Speech rights to comment on the schools. If teachers say anything about the schools, it must be laudatory, or the administration and board target them for a Professional Standards charges, which equates to a threat to their job.
This administrative behavior represents tyranny, not leadership.
I am a citizen interested in the status of this Hillsborough County school system since my four children graduated from it, and I have still one grandson who will attend Plant High in the fall semester.
Please consider my remarks as the review of a taxpayer interested in the wellbeing of the schools and their currently being run by people not interested in the schools' being a resource for the community but in using the schools as an economic and power base to puff up their financial and power status.
I am somewhat familiar with SACS work since your organization did reviews of HillsboroughCommunity College before I retired. I was Professor of English for twenty-eight years.
I reviewed some of the data on your Web page. My professional assessment says that the metaphysical loftiness of your language and its absence of specificity about what your investigation team reviews to determine whether schools qualify for your accreditation imprimatur define an impediment to this reader. The language should be more concrete and less abstract so that an average reader can assess the nature of your review work on a school system.
Your site's first paragraph features a pronoun-antecedent disagreement problem. "SACS" is singular: one organization; the pronoun referring to it should be "its," not "their."
Your text:
"The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) is dedicated to ensuring that their accredited institutions surpass..."
Twenty-eight years of grading freshman- and sophomore-English students' essays makes possible my picking up such errors in my sleep.
Your literature's lack of concrete language or illustrative examples couched in human vernacular cause nailing down what you check in your review of schools tough; but I have rescued two of your Web comments from which I extract concepts that I infer you explore in your school review and speak to them in my own remarks.
The first deals with the scope of your review; the second treats with the leadership on which you promise to focus to ensure that it "communicate[s] with its shareholders."
SACS District Accreditation also assures that "all people, processes, departments, and operations in the school system work in concert to increase student learning and organizational effectiveness." In addition, "The standards require that schools have a clear vision and purpose; have effective and responsive leadership; have a rigorous curriculum taught through sound, research-based methods; collect, report, and use performance results; provide adequate resources and support for its educational programs; value and communicate with its stakeholders; and have a commitment to continuously improve. The standards are derived from educational research (citations would help here) and best practice.
I started to attend board meetings to analyze the board's and administration's conduct after a gay friend, Bart Birdsall, suffered from an administrative-and-board Professional Standards baseless charge. The superintendent uses a retaliatory Professional Standards charge even it seems for the case of a teacher's merely annoying her. In Bart's case I infer she targeted him to test her tyranny wings in her new superintendent position; to impress friend Pat Bean in the county government hierarchy; and to inflate her ego.
Superintendent Elia may also have been expressing a whiff of homophobia in the savaging of Bart.
Bart had protested from his home email to the county library head, one Mr. Stines, also gay, for enforcing the homophobic County ordinance restrictions on gay library privileges, passed under the aegis of then-Commissioner Ronda Storms, now state senator.
One must now preface an assessment of Ms. Elia's legitimacy as superintendent. Observation suggests that Ms. Elia got her superintendent job through back-room, stair-well whispered political intrigue, not from her qualifications.
I examined superintendent applicant files. Ms. Elia was the least qualified.
Ms. Elia had only a master's degree, so the board lowered the Ph.D. requirement to that of master's to coincide with her academic terminal degree. Ms. Elia had meager, incompetent in-house experience in the administrative job she had had in the local schools as her experience bona fides for superintendent.
In this position, Ms. Elia had overbuilt classrooms that caused disruptive boundary changes and overlooked a real-estate scam going on under her nose that a St. Petersburg Times reporter walked in off the street, spotted, and wrote a series about.
But Ms. Elia had the sine-qua-non qualification that sold the board members on her: she was in-house and had managed to convey to the board by osmosis or other arcane political means of communication that she would not mess with board incumbency and perquisites. I know a little bit about such clandestine procedures since my husband was longest-serving mayor of our little Gulf-of-Mexico beach town after he retired. He finally gave up the job from frustration at such self-serving conduct as seems to be routine in political organizations such as small beach towns and the administration of the schools.
The board had published in its faux search for a superintendent a nation-wide ad for the job that cost the taxpayers $35,000 for the board to cover its tracks in having picked the superintendent beforehand. Taxpayers paid to be lied to by the board.
Ms. Elia thus assumed her superintendency; she did not earn it.
Ms. Elia and Pat Bean, county supervisor now on her way out of her high position for too much on-the-job jousting, were buddies. Pat Bean allowed Elia to use her as reference on her application for the superintendent job. I wrote Ms. Bean to tell her that this action was unethical and unprofessional. She did not respond.
I infer the two buddies cooperated on the Professional Standards charge, making Bart's job life hellish so that he had to enter therapy to deal with sequelae of his Professional Standards manufactured assault. So terrified is the school population of the Professional Standards Scarlet Letter that all Bart's school "friends" avoided him as if he had a case of the plague. This blanket desertion hurt him deeply.
It seems plain that Joe Stines called Ms. Bean about Bart's citizen-complaint emails instead of answering Bart himself. One infers that Ms. Bean called Ms. Elia. The rest is history that lies recounted in tortured, biased prose in the Professional Standards history files.
Professional Standards pressure defines the way the administration and board keep teachers silent so that they don't say anything public that pierces the blanket public-relations cover-up of much that they do that is not coincident with the wellbeing of the schools.
Your nonspecific language in describing your mission in your Web literature does not reassure me that you will get down into the real running of the schools on your SACS tour. Your gauzy language makes me fear that you sit in client administrative offices being served coffee and crumpets and that whilst sipping and nibbling, you flip at the superintendent's elbow through files of bone-dry statistics often cooked that reinforce the administration's goal to make innocents such as SACS denizens see a perfect statistical running of the schools for the good of the students, teachers, and community instead of its being a sanitized skew of reality to cover up with statistical flimflam and other prevarication the problems of the schools to propitiate organizations such as yours to ensure your automatic approval's being added to the tissue of cover-up that shields the real state of affairs underneath the miasma of lies that constitute the board's and administration's download of their PR razzle dazzle onto unsophisticated, gullible people such as SACS field operatives may be who review the school at the administration and board's elbow.
SACS has existed since the turn of the century.It could be the case that such organizations become part of the behemoth of the education industry and move in lock step with them to feed the beast that feads all its stakeholder schools. An adversarial attitude on SACS part would produce more valid results.
If SACS sincerely attempts to determine the state of the Hillsborough County schools, I offer one citizen's observations about what its investigating operatives should zero in on to get to the human nitty gritty underneath the PR tissue of lies that the board and administration impose on the facts.
I spotlight selectively some areas I believe you should review and leave you to put these where they fit in your scheme of check-offs for schools that court your seal of approval. I apply your "professional and effective leadership" rubric to these citations as well as consulting "all the stakeholders."
My belief is that some of my reporting of wrongdoing in the Hillsborough County schools should give you pause about accrediting an institution that indulges in such vile practices as it does. Cooked statistics to divert you do not make these problems go away. They will remain after your representatives move on, and these problems will continue to fester.
Your commentary on the Web makes it seem all your information comes through the administration pipeline in your on-site reviews; none appears to come from teachers and students. Nor do you cite in your Web commentary any attempt to remedy this single-source situation. That circumstance is not good practice for a grounded review of all the "stakeholders"--your term, of the school family.
Those left out deserve time too to convey their views. Your contact with teachers should be such that it does not open them up to retaliation after you have exited. First, the board and administration engage in a long-term, no let-up, no-holds-barred war against the county's teachers. As if the Professional Standards depredations were not enough, at the present time, it appears that the administration plans to use a Gates grant to conduct a faux fair review of teachers to kick out those that don't measure up to the administration's standards of sycophancy and supine acceptance of all that the board and administering mandate is right.
The board and administration suggested in Board Member Jennifer Falliero's published comment to a reporter Marshall of the St. Petersburg Times that she and the board were lying in wait to fire sassy teachers, especially the tenured, and retain the docile ones who won't say "boo" about administration wrongdoing. I am familiar with this situation since I was union president at HCC for a while.
The implications of La Falliero's remarks in the Marshall press snapshotwas that she was virtually licking her chops at the idea of using Gates to dump teachers, especially tenured ones. Ms. Falliero is a power junky.You should see her performance as board chair.When she gets a gavel in her hand, she starts to threaten throwing people out of the board room.
Jennifer Falliero is a deeply flawed current board member that the voters unwisely elected; she is now candidate for re-election.
In the news article that kicked off the election of three school-board- member incumbents and their opponents, Falliero declared herself fully qualified to administer the pecuniary aspects of the Gates million dollars even though a newspaper story recently cited a $60,000 debt she owes, and my blog on the schools details her flagrant school-site adultery with Marc Hart, former head of Community Relations.
La Falliero initiated the adultery by hanging out constantly in Mr. Hart's office, saying she needed his "mentoring."
This "mentoring" resulted in her divorce, contributed to Hart's divorce, scarified her two children, and made suffer the two young children of Hart.
Such moral depredation resulting in the suffering of four children does not reassure that Ms. Falliero is a proper board member for the county students' wellbeing; nor does Ms. Falliero's harem-scarem money conduct that includes excusing her ex-husband of child-support payments as price for his silence on his school-board former wife's adultery suggest that Ms. Falliero brings solid financial acumen to the schools' handling of the Gates windfall.
Since La Falliero rubberstamps Ms. Elia's every suggestion, she is one of Ms. Elia's favorite board members, likely the reason why La Elia tolerated La Falliero's adultery on school premises for so long.
Board members' rolling over counts big-time in the administration's support of a board member in the HillsboroughCounty schools administrative ethos.
However, Ms. Elia's fetish for good publicity finally kicked in, and the administration caromed off Falliero's primary responsibility for the in-house adultery by dumping Hart on a trumped-up charge of drunkenness to save Falliero's "reputation." The school board--all of it-- then voted Falliero in as chair after this flagrant adultery on school grounds,
Ethically flexible board members appeared not to believe that parents of county children would mind having an adulteress as board chair in charge of their children's wellbeing, including their moral wellbeing.
If the two opponents of Falliero in the school-board race had a lick of political sense, they would challenge Falliero constantly on why her adulterous behavior on school grounds disqualifies her from serving on the school board.
But my experience in watching school-board political races is that opponents of incumbents don't have the political sense of a billy goat and possess the political courage of a fishing worm.
To resume on Gates: In the Gates grant, the so-called "peer review" and "mentoring" will evolve into the board and administration's injecting of skewed, targeted criteria so that "troublesome" teachers --i.e., those that speak up--will get the sack on faux findings while collaborative, bovine teachers will keep their jobs. Hijinks are possible behind the scenes when crooks are in charge of such enterprises.
Administrative and board control of Gates to me equates to the smart teachers' getting fired and the less smart retaining jobs. Such results can't be good for the students. The administrative review teams will play along with the board-Elia game plan or lose their jobs. All decisions depend on jobs. This defines the reason why the board's ceding Ms. Elia power to control hiring and firing is such a power lever.
The administration and board don't want skilled teachers; they want docile, obedient teachers who tote that barge and lift that bale and don't let out a murmur of complaint or show a spark of innovation. The board and administration want a teacher population that acts as field hands for the board and administration's state tax booty to keep pouring into their coffers so that they can misspend it at will and look like big, important people in the community. We are talking greed and ego here. It's a story as old as the human race.
This war footing vis a vis teachers means that Superintendent Elia, her numerous overpaid, under-qualified staff police the faculty, and the board-administrative collaborators have turned the Professional Standards office into a Gestapo detail that targets teachers for marginal or entirely made-up reasons to charge them with a Professional Standards violation carrying the penalty of firing.
The leadership style of this superintendent and board is predicated on doing what's necessary to keep teachers terrified, silent, and docile. Teachers are a main but intimidated "stakeholder" that SACS cites in its literature.
The board-administration apparatchiks make sure that the stories of unfortunates targeted for Professional Standards' Scarlet Letters get around to all the schools so that everybody knows via widespread administrative-board propaganda the power of the board and administration to threaten their jobs.
Ms. Elia must not have got much praise as a child because she is obsessed with getting good publicity. So obsessed is Elia with good publicity that she hired Steve Hegarty, a former SP Times reporter, as head of Community Relations without his possessing cited credentials after kicking out Marc Hart on manufactured alcoholism charges to neutralize the adultery saga of La Falliero.
When Hegarty acted St. Petersburg Times reporter for the schools, he wrote puff pieces instead of doing solid reporting. He can't write worth a flip or even wrestle punctuation to the ground, but he's turned out to be a first-rate flatterer and gofer for Ms. Elia. Le Hegarty told me recently that he had "gotten out just in time" from the print newspaper business's meltdown; I called him a rat deserting a drowning ship. As a reporter, Hegarty professed to believe in free speech; as a gofer he has abandoned this belief and carries out the orders of the free-speech-suppressing board not to let citizens comment on agenda items.
Professional Standards blackmail terrifies teachers because its successful prosecution by the administration and board aided by complicit board attorney Gonzalez can mean their jobs. The prosecutions are usually arbitrary and successful since the board and administration are not fastidious about protocol or minimal ethics in this railroading exercise. Hence, teachers don't have much of a chance in the process.
School-board attorney Tom Gonzalez, veteran cog in the board's and administration's iron-fist mode of administration, has recently distorted the intent of new Florida bullying law HB 669 to exclude teachers and staff so that they can't use it to challenge bullying by Professional-Standards Nazis. Teachers in other counties have access to the bullying law. A teachers' union attorney has opined that a court will decide the validity of Gonzalez's arbitrary interpretation, so this question will move along in limbo until a teacher or staff member is intrepid enough to hire an attorney and take a bullying case to court for a judicial opinion on Gonzalez's interpretation. That brave move may not happen until the last trump.
Meanwhile, teachers and staff who are not gutsy enough to go to court get turned back by the administration from filing a bullying charge against Professional Standards bullying.
This arbitrary interpretation aligns Gonzalez's false interpretation with his board and administration bosses' prejudice, not with the law's stated intent.
Such legal accommodations to the board's and administration's prejudices explain why Gonzalez got his job without the competition that Tile VII mandates and why he gets $275,000 a year, highest in the state's board-lawyer ranks. To boot, Gonzalez's board job is part-time while that of the Pinellas board attorney's across the bay is fulltime with a $175,000 salary.
This capricious job situation gives Gonzales the privilege of cultivating clients on the side, which he does, and demonstrates the infirmity of the board to rein in costs despite its constant refrain that its members "will save every penny of tax money."
Tom Gonzalez is an old hand at lawyering the skullduggery of the board and administration when it wants to keep teachers muffled about what is wrong with the schools. He has been at the job informally and then formally at least as far back as the early '80's. when a family named Whitehead sued the board and administration for not treating its Downs syndrome child in a way prescribed by law and in the board and administration's hiding his files from his parents.
Mr. Gonzalez acted previous school-board attorney Crosby Few's sidekick in the defense of the board in the Whiteside family's suit against the schools for not providing services and therapy for their Downs Syndrome son and the administration's and board's covering up vital information about his mistreatment from his parents.
The board lost this case. The Whitesides won $600,000 in damages. The picture of the junk classroom below for current special-needs children shows the administration and board learned nothing from the Whitehead experience and did not change their tactics and continue to treat special-needs children in a cavalier fashion.
Gonzalez was also part of the inner circle of torturers of Doug Erwin, an administrator in the early '90s who discovered theft and graft in the administration and asked the board and administration to do something to quell it. Instead, they both--starting with Superintendent Lennard-- tried first to make people think Erwin was crazy. That ploy's not succeeding, they went on to try to cook up situations to fire him and deprive him of his pension. These HillsboroughCounty school thugs make the Medici look like amateurs. Erwin finally filed a Whistleblower suit, won it before a jury, and taxpayers footed the bill of a $165,000 settlement for administration and board crime in the case.
The board attorneys-Gonzalez's being one- routinely try to dump the jury for a trial. They know that the jury members won't believe their client's lies and their legal prevarications.
Board and administration don't want people to know about the deplorable things that go on in the schools under their administrative and board junta, so they keep their activities secret and teachers quiet with the coercion of the Professional Standards office with its Damocles sword of ad lib false or marginal charges against any rebellious or self-respecting teachers. God help the teacher who steps forward and tells the truth. Truth violates board and administration policy.
An especial offense of a teacher that puts him or her on the watch list of Professional Standards is to have a blog that comments on education and the schools. The administration via Professional Standards goes after this Free Speech renegade like a heat-seeking missile. It puts the culprit on a watch list to trap the person for engaging in some exotic or manufactured peccadillo and then slaps a Professional Standards charge on him or her.
The Professional Standards Gestapo will swoop in on the targeted blog teacher with garrote in hand. Then it's Katy, bar the door as far as dirty tricks go.
That vignette played out most recently in teacher Steve Kemp's manufactured case. You accreditors can review his one-sided file if you ask the superintendent for it. The Professional Standards office houses the document. Be suspicious for signs of redaction. The Whiteside special-needs child abuse case lost by the board did not alter its routine of shafting special-needs children. The administration and board seem to have developed a liking for mob tactics over the years even though they have sometimes exposed the board and administration in their naked clumsy and sometimes criminal behavior. At the bottom of this missive is a picture of the junk-clogged classroom that special-needs children inhabited when Steve Kemp fell into the Professional Standards trap at the time he worked in this classroom as a substitute teacher. Mr. Kemp said there was an unlocked door from the make-shift special-needs classroom to another storage classroom reputed to house poisonous substances. I don't know if Kemp is right about the poisonous substances, but one would never find out the truth by asking the administration.
This abuse of and neglect of special-needs children continue after the Whiteside case and after the board and administration became acquainted with this deplorable housing of special-needs children in the recent Steve Kemp case. The board and administration have gotten away with skullduggery for so long that it's part of their DNA even though it sometimes fails spectacularly as it did in the two court cases cited above.. A cynic might say that board and administration suffer from invincible ignorance.
Worth noting is that the person heading Professional Standards is one Ms. Linda Kipley. She makes about $140,000 a year for a job that should have a criminal justice degree, a psychology degree, or even a philosophy degree. The job description calls for a master's degree. She got the job in a transfer from Hillsborough High principal, where her penchant for lying made some teachers refuse to go into an office interview with her without a recorder. The Professional Standards top job got no advertising. The administration put Kipley in it after her failure at Hillsborough High, illustrating the faculty's squib that in the administration, if you mess up, you move up.
Ms. Kipley is in possession of a home-ec diploma and an infinite capacity for toadying. The latter is pure gold in the Elia administration and to hell with academic luster Not only did Kipley get one of the most important, most sensitive of administrative cynosures, but to reward Ms. Kipley for her pitiless service in savaging teachers with her office's power, Ms. Elia recently hired La Kipley's husband, terminal degree high school diploma, as an accounting employee when four accounting candidates got turned down to make a place for Mr. Linda Kipley. These four competing candidates had not only the required bachelor's degree in accounting but also the requisite job-description-cited experience. I reviewed these applicant files to determine this fact.
I recall board member Susan Valdes's asking personnel director Valdez's opinion on whether Mr. Kipley were the best candidate for the job. Le Valdez said he was. This scene mimes why academic weaklings fill the administration. I am sure that Mr. Valdez was acting on Ms. Elia's orders.
Everybody knows that when baccalaureate recipients step off the plane after graduation, the C and D students race for administration; the A and B students fly to classrooms. This behavior is a constant in school populations.
The board has ceded a jobs program to Ms. Elia as superintendent perquisite; Ms. Elia's own background features minimum scholarship and maximum politics; so it's to hell with qualifications in her scheme of values. La Elia fills jobs with buddies, sycophants, and family members. Two of the school board have children who are administrators in the system, I understand. I would love to see the curriculum vitae of these board children and those of their competitors who applied for the jobs snagged by the board members' offspring because of the latter's inhabiting the inside track. Ms. Elia recently created a lobbying sinecure for her old buddy Dr. James Hamilton, former administrator and torturer of grammar who doesn't know the difference between "your" and
"you're," and soi-disant ROSSAC Don Juan, who promoted his favorite, Ms. Connie Mileto, past other candidates to the Tallahassee post of the schools' government representative even though her degree is in kindergarten instruction. His wife divorced him in this turmoil but remarried him later. Now Ms. Elia sends him back up to Tallahassee to rendezvous with the alluring Connie. The make-work job for Hamilton pays $65,000 a year, had no needs study done to justify it, got no advertising, but got rubberstamping by the board despite these administration deficiencies.
This hiring racket ceded by the board to the superintendent is a major perquisite of the job. But this superintendent privilege means that taxpayers do not get their money's worth in administrative hires with brains and education. I have suggested that the board list jobs on its Web site with hyperlinks to the candidates' curriculum vitae. The board members looked at me as if I were crazy.
Lax hiring protocols fill the administrative ranks with minimally qualified people who often require pricey consultants to fly in at thousands of dollars in fees to teach incompetents their jobs with flash cards. Recently, the consultant brain trust sped to the rescue to advise on the going-down-the-tube transportation department. Things were at crisis level. The thousands-of-tax-dollars consultants advised the common-sense cure of 1. putting the buses in one place and 2. getting a software scheduling program. This expensive but basic advice is not rocket science but beyond the vision of the transportation upper employees paid sky-high salaries compared to the bare-bones teacher pay. The head of the transportation operation was a former bus driver, no doubt an ardent admirer and unquestioning supporter of La Elia. This Elia admirer obviously lacked the professional sophistication to read bus-administration publications.
When a person replaced the bus driver, Ms. Elia moved her and her assistant at the same salary into some administration cul-de-sac for out-to-pasture incompetents.
The administration has one Ph.D. presently. He filled the job of one Mr. White, who didn't know a thing about computers but whom previous superintendent Dr. Lennard put in as head of the computer department because he wanted another ROSSAC in-situ thug to assist him in punishing Mr Doug Erwin for reporting graft and theft in the ROSSAC environs. As I recall, Mr. White was in possession of an Early Childhood degree. Dr. Lennard, Dr. Hamilton (I complained to UF president that he had not written his own doctoral dissertation because he did not know the difference between "your" and "you're" or basic essay construction), and this parvenu computer guy, Mr. White, formed the administrative posse to track down and hang Mr. Erwin. Campaigns such as that against Mr. Erwin are what this administrative culture counts as adroit leadership. Gossip says Ms. Elia didn't like White when she assumed the superintendent diadem and since her incumbency has sent him skulking past the graveyard into retirement.
So the exotic Ph.D. in computers took the incompetent past factotum White's place. There must have been a temporary dearth of incompetent sycophants who knew how to turn on a computer when La Elia hired the current Ph.D. in computers. Ms. Elia's coterie seems strong on sycophancy but weak on credentials.
Most of the administration quidnuncs wander around in the ROSSAC office building sans credentials but lavishly paid for their incompetence. Their primary duty is to suck up to the insecure Ms. Elia,who seems famished for reassurance.
The taxpayers foot the bill for the superintendents' bottomless pit of lust for praise. Psychotherapy for the superintendent would be cheaper.
A recent rumor said Ms. Elia habitually cussed out lower-level employees in her office. I wrote and inquired if she did. No answer. So I asked her about this reputed vile practice in a board meeting. No answer, but I have not since heard of any more cussing-out of lower-level employees in her Star Chamber. Ms. Elia would benefit from Freud's talking cure.
The board pretends it does not know about the Professional Standards punishment machine for teachers. It pretends that it does not know that only teachers receive punishment through the Professional Standards gulag, never administrators. I asked under the open-records law from Ms. Kipley files of teachers punished. She sent me a stack. I asked for sample files of administrators punished by Professional Standards: she sent none. Professional Standards is a teachers-only punishment-and-terror machine. The taxpayers pay for it but do know about its selective purpose and use. Its name of "Professional Standards" is the scab that covers the administrative putrescence underneath.
A recent example of the double standard of punishment is the cases of teacher Kemp and Administrative Toe Cracker of Pubescent boys at KingHigh School.
The board pretends not to know what is going on in anything. That everything gets decided in the superintendent's privy council out of board earshot and put on the Consent Agenda suit board members to a T.
The goals they cited when they ran for office do not reflect in their accepting responsibility or taking a hand in the active running of the schools once elected. The "I don't know what you are talking about" summarizes the board's deniability habitual maneuver.
Betimes its members robotically stamp the rolling consent agenda's mysteries on the podium. They don't ask for discussion of anything.
I suggested that Steve Kemp, the teacher caught in the Professional Standards punishment maw, ask Board Member April Griffin to meet with him to discuss his case of manufactured offense. I figured her being the newest member would have made her the least corrupted.
I was wrong.
La Griffin met with Kemp and advised him to "be quiet," that "good things are happening behind the scenes." These were happening in violation of the government-in-the-sunshine law, of course, a law that Board Member Griffin does not know about or, if she does, does not regard as one that she should obey.
Taking the oath of office to protect the Constitution is an exercise in meaningless blather for board members. They do not know about or care about the Constitution.
Jennifer Falliero, the resident adultery board member, had such a hazy idea of the First Amendment that her ignorance finally prompted Attorney Gonzalez to rise from his slumber to give her a Romper Room breakdown of it.
After the Gonzalez lecture, Chair Falliero opened the next board seminar with, "Mr. Gonzalez says that the First Amendment means that people can come before the board and say any mean thing they want to."
That's right. It does. That's democracy.
People in public office should know the price of the job and get used to it. If they are not strong enough to face the stringencies of Free Speech in a democracy, they should not run.
Griffin also told Kemp not to tell anybody that they had met as if a board member's meeting with a teacher was something to be ashamed of and to be covered up. I think this cowardly behavior on Board Member Griffin's part was due to her being morbidly afraid of Ms. Elia.
The board is supposed to be Ms. Elia's boss; but Ms. Elia is its members' boss. The elected board has all allowed and even invited its subordinate status to Ms. Elia. Board members lack the brains and the nerve to lead even an exploration of the layout of a gym. Until a person gets elected with enough courage and savvy to face Ms. Elia and inform her of his or her real opinion in a matter--which is what voters expect a board member to do--the board of the Hillsborough County school system will be a bunch of flaccid puppets.
I believe the relationship between the board and the superintendent should receive SACS scrutiny. I believe SACS is obliged to ask about the rolling Consent Agenda's lack of consonence with the Florida Government in the Sunshine law. The Accreditation Association members, unless they openly cede their autonomy to collusion in a system of false legitimacy, should not be naive supporters of rubberstamping approval of schools they timidly review.
For a thorough review, SACS's field team has gone down into the basement and checked out the water pipes and garbage disposal apparatus of the school under scrutiny. In the HillsboroughCounty school system, this tactic is obligatory.
The accreditation people should not submit to charm offensives or to soothing by false assurances of probity by either board or administration. I believe SACS should make tough queries and require straight answers to questions that would occur to people with analytic minds who take their job seriously. They should resist board and administration schmoozing.
This is test time--not open book, no cheating tolerated. The field team should be cool and non-reactive.
SACS operatives should save candid reaction for the SACS report itself.
Good schools require and can withstand that scrutiny. SACS should talk to a random selection of students and teachers, not ones the administration and board choose but ones that perhaps the CTA president suggests. Or SACS missionaries can just stroll the halls and pick out teachers and students randomly. Your invitation will make them feel honored and included.These are the usually neglected, most imporatant stake holders. SACS should get a rounded view of the real operation of the Hillsborough County schools, not a programmed, massaged presentation in the superintendent's office that coincides with what the superintendent's, the administration's, and the board's view confines what reality is.
A long-simmering problem between faculty and administration has defined chacteristic leadership by Ms. Elia. She simply dumped an extra class on teachers as Mussolini would have on his troops. The board did not rebuke the superintendent for this arrogant discourtesy and unprofessional conduct toward the district teachers. This callus gesture characterizes Ms. Elia's leadership style. It shows her attitude toward the teacher stakeholders. I characterize her as an instinctive bully. Bullying is Ms. Elia's management style. As far as she is concerned, the county schools have one stakeholder: that stakeholder is she. As for the board, I have observed that if the matter does not deal with board perquisites, the board does not say anything because it's not interested in anything but the schools' contributions to board members sense of importance and éclat. So since it did not concern them, board members did not say anything to Ms. Elia about the insult she delivered to teachers that aimed at their educational professionalism. Not a word came from the board potted plants.
One of the most telling and embarrassing scenes of board inability to deal with the problems that boards should deal with was the time when the school holiday schedule that was in turmoil because of its Christian-centric make-up. Jews and Muslims wanted holidays for their children too. Preachers and rabbis came and addressed the board. Some--especially the rabbis--were erudite. The preachers were linguistically ruggedly eloquent. But erudition and eloquence are out of the board's league. The clerics' comment to the board was pearls before swine. The board hemmed and hawed, cleared throats, examined their cuiticles, and frequently sighed.
Most of the board was silent.But Ms. Betty Boop Griffin delivered a startlingly inappropriate non sequitur in which she ruminated about how hard it was for the board to figure out schedules and how stressful was the exercise to all of its members. I am not making this up. Review the board tape for confirmation.
Ms. Elia also forced teachers to inflate grades to make herself look better in the state educational bureaucracy. I trust that SACS will ask for the before and after statistics in this breach of scholarship and professionalism. The board did not rebuke Ms. Elia for such academically barbarous behavior that did not help students get into good colleges and universities and that degraded teachers' professionalism.
This contamination of grades should be a red flag for SACS. SACS field workers should beware of a superintendent who would engage in and a board that would sponsor such behavior.
Moreover, Ms. Elia purchased without consulting teachers who would have to implement it or the board that would have to rubberstamp its price a multi-million-dollar gimcrack program called the Spring that had failed in other venues. In the uproar that followed the revelation of Ms. Elia's go-it-alone purchase, the board did not rebuke Ms. Elia or insist on the principle that she must consult teachers and board about such intervention in the teaching of students.
A citizen aware of the administration's record is entitled to ask whether graft were involved in this irregular purchase. My understanding is that the Spring flopped in HillsboroughCounty, too, sending millions of tax dollars down the drain of Ms. Elia's bloated ego. SACS should ask in which warehouse the corpse of Spring resides.
Ms. Elia's yearly pay is $300,000, $47,000 coming purloined from teacher work in raising student scores. This raid on teacher industry to support superintendent greed saw its beginnings under the previous superintendent, Dr. Earl Lennard, he that was bent on running Mr. Erwin out of the district with no pension for Erwin's discovering graft and theft in ROSSAC.
Dr. Lennard is the one who headed the effort to convince people that administrator Erwin was crazy when the latter reported to the board and administration the graft and theft he discovered in the administration. Dr. Lennard's failing to convince people that Mr. Erwin was crazy, meant that he then mounted a campaign to deprive the Whistleblower of his job and pension.
Keep in mind that such skullduggery on the part of the administration gets funded by unaware taxpayers.It's a lure to be a crook if you don't have to pay the damages out of your own pocket.
Mr. Erwin won his Whistleblower case and fled to retirement in Georgia, where I hear he can't get two recommendations from his previous employer to apply for a principal's job in that state. The board should provide those recommendations as compensation for its cooperation with Lennard and his thugs' attempt to destroy Mr. Erwin for discovering theft and graft in ROSSAC.
The Lennard "bonus" steal from teachers' work continues in Ms. Elia's payment package as perquisite as if it were of venerable vintage arising from the time that the first teacher grasped a piece of chalk in Hillsborough County and sallied up to the blackboard to begin Lesson 1.
The board sat mute and turned on the green light of acquiesence during this tableau of its rubberstamping this superintendent greed in stealing teacher-earned raised student scores.Board members never uttered inquiry or protest of the superintendent's rip-off of teachers' work.
Besides the board's cooperation with the administration's devaluing and punishing teachers, it demonstrates its own particular disrespect of the faculty and student body by refusing to give both a settled place on the board agenda to comment and give their ideas about the conduct of the schools. The truth is that the board like the administration does not want to hear from students and teachers. Its ceremonial board members want these populations to be mute and to serve as the economic base of the board's and administration's lust for éclat and greed for perquisites.
Even HillsboroughCommunity College, not the apex of good behavior toward teachers where I worked for twenty-eight years, gave students and faculty a front place on the board agenda. The board and administration members did at least recognize both teachers and students as front-line participants in the college community.
My judgment says that the Hillsborough County school board and administration want the community to think that the schools are all about them and that students and teachers are incidental accoutrements, not the major "stakeholders" your Web commentary cites. The board and administration have to put up with teachers to get their downloads of tax money.
The board does not care about the schools as vehicle to educate the young and prepare them to be tomorrow's leaders. Rather the schools' parochial purpose according to board thinking is to serve vehicle for the board's convenience to preen its members' egos and gad about town posing as beneficiaries of education. What interests the board is its perquisites such as board members' air travel to cities such as Las Vegas, not a hub of education, and stays in fancy room-service hotels on taxpayer tabs. Its members gad about the Bay Area to government-paid hog-trough chowdowns that augment their girth and make them therefore more resistant to start a childhood obesity program that Ms. Obama now touts to deal with the nationwide childhood obesity epidemic. Such program would shine the light on board as well as students' obesity problems.
Only one of the board is within normal weight range. That's the board adulteress in residence. Ms. Falliero can't afford to get fat; doing so would wipe out her school adultery franchise.
The board does not get exercised about anything that does not directly apply to its members' own self-interest. The only two times I have witnessed board fights is the knock-down-drag out that ensued on the podium when the board backed into a discussion of runaway travel funds by board members. Mutual recriminations about travel-charges' excess caused an internecine kafuffle of sprightly energy and vivid name-calling. Board members had at it with naming fellow members spendthrifts who used tax funds to underwrite their for-fun peregrinations.
Susan Valdes won the unofficial HOG AWARD for running on the slogan of "saving every penny of taxpayer money" while, when elected, spending more than $50,000 in travel in a two-plus-year travel orgy during which time the poor children of the county couldn't participate in class activities for lack of supplies.
Candy Olson, who neglects the poor areas' needs in her district and pretends she represents only the well-off South Tampa area, went on a lark to Alaska for God knows what reason, a good guess being to act judge in the Chamber of Commerce Nanook of the North contest in Anchorage: Nanook's status is an in-depth education concern impacting Hillsborough County's schools, to he sure.
The other board internecine warfare took place recently when a state-education-committee senator proposed reducing board salaries to the $21,500 part-time pay that he and other legislators got. Upon hearing this proposed reduction, Board Member Adulteress-in-Residence Jennifer Falliero (see a full review of her activities on my blog leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com if you have the stomach) blew up and called board members all over the state to get them to join her protest. She never called statewide to get supplies for poor children's not being able to participate in class work for lack of them.
I saw the divorce deposition of Mr. Hart, with whom Ms. Falliero was involved adulterously. Mr. Hart called me for permission to come out to the beach and show its validity with the divorce deposition.
There is no doubt that Ms. Falliero disgraced her office, her family, and the citizens of HillsboroughCounty by adulterous on-the-job behavior, using her board position as a launching point for this vile conduct. And there is no doubt that the board and administration during the tenure of two superintendents tolerated Falliero's adultery and even promoted it by their quiescence and thatmorally defient board members elected Falliero board chair as a final fillip of disrespect for their position, for the community, and for the students and teachers.
I don't know if the foregoing data touch upon your assessment criteria of the Hillsborough County Schools for SACS commendation, but it ought to clock in somewhere in the interstices of the rarified language that wafts above your program on the Web.
My considered opinion says that the board at Hillsborough's County schools cares little for education and students and teachers and the reputation of the schools but cares instead for everything to do with its own selfish stake in the taxpayer pie that the schools represent and the éclat of faux fame that their soi-disant exalted positions provide. They could be running a pencil factory if the rewards were the same tax-money downloads.
These concerns should give the Southern Association some unexplored areas to research and consider in its accreditation adventure in the HillsboroughCounty schools, the quality of its leadership, and the concern for all stakeholders, not just the board and administration.A citizen must trust that SACS accreditation is not pro forma and involves scrutiny of the schools' conduct of education. I infer that to be SACS's purpose.
I see that you have some marginal connection with the Federal Department of Education. To protect that status, I suggest that SACS owes its allegiance ultimately to the citizens of the state and the country who will, if I mistake not, foot the bill for the organizations' report.
SACS should judge whether the behavior I have outlined satisfies its criteria for "effective, responsive leadership" from both board and administration as well as concern for "all stakeholders." My view says that it would be a perversion of SACS's purpose to issue a pro forma approval of a school system that, if SACS auditors bother to look below the surface outside the statistics page-flipping in Ms. Elia's office, should not get approval from any oversight organization until the pathology of the way the board and administration run the system for self-serving interests is exposed and remedied.
Please inform me of the following: 1.What percentage of the institutions you review get approval; 2. Who is responsible for the bill for your accreditation activities in Hillsborough County's schools; 3. How much it costs; and 4. Whether you can fulfill my request to send me a copy of the invoice directly as well as the report or whether I should ask my Pinellas member of the Florida legislative delegation to secure a copy for my review.
all members Hillsborough county legislative delegation
all members Florida house education committee
all members Tampa city council
mayor of Tampa
all members Hillsborough county commission paultash@sptimes.com; parrickmanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com solocheck@sptimes.com; marilynbrown@tampatribune.com; marshall@sptimes.com joeguidry@tampatribune.com
The Council of Trent Augmented by the Tampa City Council and Hillsborough County Commission Convenes in Plant City to Decide if Candy Olson should be stripped of her citizenship and sent to Siberia for the duration. The Videotape of the Board's shoddy treatment of Erwin when he came to the board for help is what decided the jury.
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