Asleep at the Switch Board Members

Hillsborough County Board Members:

I have just read the court case of student Renee Anderson.

What strikes me is the absence of a school representative to follow the case, to be in the court room to see that the victim wasn't bullied, let her know that the school board is watching out for her in loco parentis, not just backing up the icy administrative attack on her.

This negligent behavior on the board's part ill confirms its constant chorus of being "concerned about the safety of the children." Renee's case is that of a misbehaving black student faced with a hostile white administration in this incident who needs the school board's oversight and concerned care greatly. The board should not guard only the safety of the children who don't misbehave. The at-risk children are the ones who require their safety's being guarded more urgently.

After the trial, the school authorities jumped on Renee Anderson and told her she could be sent to an alternative school and could not apply for scholarships. Who thought up this sadistic conduct for school authorities? Renee Anderson performed community service ordered by the court. Why should the school board, concerned with "the safety of the children." pile on for more punishment of this student?

What would the in-house psychologist who said the Toecracker's fondling pubescent boys' feet behind the closed doors of his office to satiate his foot fetishism say about the board-sponsored treatment of Renee?

On top of the court's punishment as a result of the gang-up of the administration against Renee, the board chimes in with its sadistic treatment of her when she returns to school with the alternative-school, no-privilege-to-apply-for-scholarships dicta. Where was the board-ordered counseling that she needed to migrate back into the school community? Shame on the board for neglecting its primary duty to students--both good ones and especially ones in trouble?

I want to see the rationale that says the board should pile on to the punishment of a student whom the courts have already punished. That is public information. I have requested it from the Public Affairs Office. The board should tell Ms. Cobbe to send it to me.

I want to see any file that the board kept on this student's ordeal. That is public information as well. Don't say this involves student privacy. I will ask her father to legitimize my request.

Ms. Anderson's father wants her record cleared. That apparently is why he continues to pursue his daughter's case. The board should offer its help to him in getting the juvenile authorities to clear her record. They are supposed to do that after a period. The board's inquiry about whether it were done would motivate these bureaucrats to clear Ms. Anderson's record as a juvenile. I believe that would satisfy the father.

Renee has her life ahead of her. She is today attending college despite this setback. The board should add its weight to the effort to help Renee to become a stellar citizen. One counselor's written testimony says Renee is a gifted student with an attitude problem.

I was a college teacher for 28 years. I know about attitude problems of students; I also know how pivotal the oversight of students with problems is to turn them into the right paths of social participation. A school board and administration's piling on students such as Renee in addition to the legal ordeal she has undergone is not the formula to rescue troubled students.

I am not surprised that the counselor states that Renee had an attitude problem. Most blacks have an attitude problem in a society that puts blacks down in all areas of life.

The board shouldn't pile on to a student by augmenting this malignant policy to kick talented school-age black children out into the never-never land of marginal social participation when they grow up by crippling them with alternative-school threats and no-right-to-apply-for scholarships dicta.

Lee Drury De Cesareleedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Reader Endorsement of Bartels

From: Cable Guy [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2010 5:24 PMTo: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.comSubject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on School-Board-Election Monkey Biz.

Cable Guy has left a new comment on your post "School-Board-Election Monkey Biz":

Having worked for Bartel's, he is the ONE person who has been a successful classroom teacher, AP Student Affairs, AP for Curriculum, and then Principal. Two "A" schools attests to that.He has held his administration to levels of performance matching his own. Taking slackers thru the system - often times because other admins ignored them. He always supported his teachers. During the 6 of 7 furor, when a teacher asked him about going in front of the Board, he encouraged them to exercise their 1st Amendment rights. "Just get your facts straight and be logical", he told us. Ya gotta love it!I'm sure Stacey White is OK - but would you elect ME to the Board of Pharmacy review simply because I have filled a dozen prescriptions?I'm pulling for Bartels. He has earned my respect - and that ain't easy!

Publish Delete Mark as spam Moderate comments for this blog. Posted by Cable Guy to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 3:23 PM

School-Board-Election Monkey Biz

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But don't hold your breath.

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

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

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

PANTS-ON-FIRE GRIFFIN

Pants-on-Fire Griffin

Tom Marshall of the SPT cites School Board candidate April Griffin's lying tendency in a recent piece in the SPT. My husband cut it out for me and commented, "She's not a very good liar."

That's not because she hasn't practiced. I have written before about April's lies. She is dumb to lie to the press. It never forgets and never forgives.

I think April's worst lie involved her getting Elia to comb through an employee's file who had written a negative comment about Griffin on his blog so that she, April, could be revenged on him.

She lied to Marshall that "an informer" had called her about the employee's infraction of his stepson's authoring the blog for the emigrant program the guy worked for and the critical blogger's not reporting this fact to the personnel office. Hence, he had committed a "conflict-of-interst" booboo. That putative elf informer, I believe, was a cover-up lie. Instead of blasting the blog critic back in the comment section of his blog, Griffin petitioned Elia to demote the guy and reduce his pay. Just a breath away from petit Mafia status, Elia complied.

Yet Griffin claims to believe in free speech. No, she believes in sneaking around and using her insider position to get back at an employee who exercised his Constitutional right to critiqe an elected official.

What strikes me as vile citizenship is Marshall's reporting of Griffin's not paying her fees at HCC; these were extant when the college purged her from the rolls in '06. Yet she is still claiming to the press five years later that she is pursuing a degree currently. She was dumb enough to put that fib in her newspaper bio. The press can be lax, but occasionally it awakens to fact-check a candidate's claims. The SPT found that April was lying about pursuing a degree.

That nonpayment represents another of April's lies that steals from the public. HCC is a government-supported institution. So Griffin cheated the taxpayers by refusing to pay her fees at the college. These are the same taxpayers she begs to vote her into office again.

These evaded fees echo the sloppy ethical attitude that La Griffin displayed when she helped Elia to set up Alafia principal Smith with an empty job after the parents of Alafia children refused to suffer Smith as principal any longer. That fake job to shut up Smith costs taxpayers $70,000 a year in parallel principal's salary and includes in addition benefits for even more money from taxpayers for a nonperforming employee in a manufactured job that violated Title VII's requirement to advertise all jobs so that all interested applicants could apply. There was no advertising of this scam job, of course, for a principal who should have been fired.

The rubberstamping of this fake job for a failed principal because the board never fires an administrator, no matter the defection, stands in contrast to the board's stamping hither and yon "We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer."

That waste of tax money to bribe a principal to be quiet about her move from principalship to an empty chair is something Griffin endorsed and helped Elia to set up by visiting Smith with Motel Breath Jennifer Falliero to wheedle Smith into accepting the fake job for her resigning as Alafia principal so as to quiet the press attention to the matter. Such ethics as Griffin displayed in convincing Smith to swap a scam job for her resignation as preincipal of Alafia make Board Candidate Griffin a financial hazard to taxpayers whom they should turn out of office so that she can attend school fulltime to get her elusive degree.

Griffin has an opponent in this election named, I think, Sue. I hope Sue beats her: April squanders tax money in both her private life--fees to a public institution that she did not pay-- and also in her public life--scamming taxpayers by assisting Ms. Elia in putting on the books a fake job for the failed principal Smith, who should have been fired. Griffin also violated the Title VII federal laws that she swore to uphold when she took the oath of office.

Griffin does not deserve another term. I hope Sue wins.

lee

Posted by twinkobie at 8:46 AM