The comment by the reader below adds another dimension to the discussion. One infers that one reason that Ms. Edgecomb ran for the board was to protect her daughter’s career. It certainly wasn’t her goal to help black children. Jack Lamb also has a daughter in the school system administration I believe. Candy Olson is reputed to arrange jobs for people.
One of the perquisites of the superintendent job consists of hiring buddies and hangers on and creating jobs at taxpayer expense. Elia hired the former assistant supervisor Jim Hamilton after he retired, never having learned the difference between “your” and “you’re” for a lobbying slot without justifying with a needs study its need. I heard the pay was between $64,000 and $94,000 a year.
The board never thinks to ask for a needs study for any of Ms. Elia’s jobs-program positions. Hamilton’s wife divorced him because he pushed through doxie Connie Mileto’s candidacy for the Tallahassee position despite her being a kindergarten teacher. A person with a political degree or a history degree should have gotten that job. Now Hamilton and Mileto are back in Tallahassee as a lobbying pas de deux. I guess this means his wife, who had remarried the old goat, will now have to divorce him again.
Ms. Elia’s job lockdown recently resulted in a job created for the principal Smith in the Alafia brouhaha. The parents refused to have Smith principal any more, and even Elia’s promising them that she would send both Smith and her vice principal to Eckerd for a personality makeover at $4500 a pop of tax money if they would keep Smith did not propitiate them.
So because the administration and board couldn’t stand the bad publicity being printed by the usually somnolent press, Elia sent Lie-about-educational credentials Griffin and former board member Motel-breath Jennifer Falliero out to Alafia to a secret rendezvous with Smith to lure her to resign her job with the understanding that Elia would create an empty job but at full principal pay and benefits as compensation. The false job offer worked. Smith got the pretend job and is probably sitting somewhere in the book depository now paring her nails as we speak.
I asked for the job’s description as public information. After about two weeks had given personnel honcho Otero the time to fake one, I got a copy of the job description; then I asked for who inhabited the job before Smith: no answer. QED: it’s an out-of-thin-air job devised by Elia at taxpayer expense to solve a bad-publicity problem. The board has endowed on Elia this create-jobs perquisite as part of the superintendent’s benefits. Why not? We’re talking about taxpayer play money that the board and administration use to preen their power and solve their personnel problems.
The unspoken rule is that administrators never get punished no matter what they do; but if a teacher had been discovered to know about drug activities of another school employee and failed to report the situation--even it were apocryphal as Edgecomb‘s daughter’s case perhaps was, that teacher would be the object of a lightening-fast Professional Standards Gestapo shake down.
But the Edgecomb offspring had not only the tradition of never punishing administrators to rely on but also was a child of a board member. Board attorney Tom Gonzalez would have temporarily ceased drinking soda and eating chips on the podium brought in his mouthpiece bag of tricks to construct a footnote to a footnote to make her not only not liable for covering up a drug danger but also of being beatified to boot along with a Nobel recommendation signed by all the board and administration that have only just recently learned what a Nobel is using flash cards.
One significant way that the board and administration keep teachers oppressed is the tactic of job threats via the Professional Standards gauntlet. I asked for files on teachers’ Professional Standards charges: I got a stack. I asked for administrator files with Professional Standards charged lodged against them: zilch. Thus the board and administration have the power to keep teachers silent for fear of losing their jobs. This sicko sadistic power gives the board and administration the control of teachers’ ability to earn a livelihood. This power renders teachers quiet.
The head of Professional Standards is one Linda Kipley, whom I have observed wearing see-through baby dolls on the job. She was principal at Hillsborough High, but she was bad. Teachers refused to go into a conference with her unless equipped with a recorder so likely she is to lie and manufacture things that had not occurred in an interview.
So bad the situation got at Hillsborough that the superintendent and her thugs switched Kipley into the head of Professional Standards. Kipley has a home-ec degree that went out in the Pleistocene Age in the academic world and occupies a vital, extravagantly paid position that should require a psychology or criminal justice degree. The job description does say it is a master’s degree job, but Ms. Elia can overrule that little prerequisite.
The job got no advertising despite the ubiquitous assurance from the board that it is “an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” This lack of competition violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and violates as well the federal contracts that the school has that all require affirmative action plans for disabled people and equal-opportunity protocols.
But what are federal laws when pitted against the fulsome powers of the Hillsborough County School Board and administration quidnuncs?
Delusions of grandeur are also a side affliction that the board and administration acquire.
ldd
The Villains
Riverview Vice Principal Kevin Massena
VICTIM OF THE BOARD AND ADMINISTRATION: STUDENT RENEE ANDERSON 
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Blurb below from Riverview school site accompanying Riverview Principal Heilmann’s picture with appropriate airhead balloons around his pate.
When the opportunity to help launch a brand new hyphenated adjective high school arose, Mr. Heilmann was instrumental in opening stilted diction: use “helped begin” our new Riverview High School as the Assistant Principal lower case for Curriculum. lower case After the retirement of Riverview’s first principal comma: nonrestrictive appositive J. Vince Thompson, Mr. Heilmann became principal in January 2001. During his educational career, he has coached baseball, hockey, cross country, and track. He has also officiated high school and college soccer games for 34 years. Mr. Heilmann had the distinction of serving on the U.S. international panel of referees capitalize for the sport of soccer from 1991-1994 (each country possessive before gerund having only seven officials).
________________________________________________________________ It is betrayal of taxpayers that a principal of a high school can’t punctuate or show proficiency in grammar and mechanics at a basic level expected of the students.
This balloon-head tax drain probably makes $70,000 a year. The board should be ashamed to continue the employment of such a ripoff of the public as this lower-quartile specimen Heilmann as principal of a high school the goal of which is to impart literacy to the county's children.
The schools don't need as principal an marginally illiterate jock and bigot making over $70,000 who--get this--at one time taught English! What administrative ninny hired him for that job? Don’t the ROSSAC denizens have literacy tests for educators before they hire them, and isn’t there anyone in the building who can read them? I want to see Heilmann’s transcipts and Strong Aptitude Test profile.
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Dear Ms. Edgecomb, Board Chair Hillsborough County Schools:
After the Professional Standards office framed my friend Bart Birdsall on a cooked-up charge because he participated in the pro-gay community protest of County Commissioner Rhonda Storms’s shutdown of library privileges for gays, I spent over two years sitting in the back of the board room observing board behavior. I wanted to know what kind of people sanction such unethical punishment of a school employee.
That scrutiny furnished a Baedeker of evidence for the board’s and administration’s running the schools as if these public institutions were their personal bailiwick. They use their board and administration perches to preen their power and prestige with which to strut around Tampa Bay because they control billions of school tax dollars. That control means they can dish out contracts to people who do business with the board.
That dishing out of tax dollars with accompanying graft turns up in the whistleblower law suit filed and won by Mr. Erwin against the board. One infers where the graft originated when the administration--starting at the top with Dr. Lennard--board, and board attorney Tom Gonzalez conducted a campaign first to run crazy and then to fire whistleblower Erwin before he filed his whistleblower lawsuit for retaliation for his reporting to the board shoddy building practices he had unearthed and asking the board to do something to combat the rip-off of the public.
I read the court files. There is a box of them in the public affairs office. The jury believed little the administration collaborators and board liars said. It found for Mr. Erwin. He got $165,000 for the board and administration crimes against him--paid by taxpayers.
Tom Gonzalez, not a court-room Fred Astaire, lost the case. This telling jury response explains why the administration asks for bench trials. Administration polecats know they can’t fool a jury or tap into the judicial collaborators as they did in Renee’s two trials with the cooked hearing set-up and judicial collaborators who betrayed Renee and justice.
Mr. Erwin fled to Georgia after winning the case but can’t get a job because he can’t get the board and administration to give him a recommendation. That’s the kind of petty retaliation at which the board and administration excel. If there were one board member with courage and ethics, that benign renegade would send Mr. Erwin a job recommendation to Georgia.
Mr. Erwin was principal in the schools for years and universally liked and respected. Earl the Pearl Lennard lured him into the administration and tried to gut him when he turned out to have courage and ethics. Among petty crooks who run the schools, ethics and courage are bad politics.
When Erwin asked the board and administration to clean up the the shoddy work on the schools with its payoffs, instead of investigating for bribe taking and other unlovely perquisites of power, the administration starting with Dr. Lennard with the board’s connivance tried to make the whistleblower’s life a living hell on campus and then attempted to fire him.
In assessing the board’s conduct, I learned that anyone who threatened its power hegemony--even a lowly gay speaking up for gays in the community as was his First Amendment rights--could expect the retaliatory punishment of threatened job loss.
The administration and board have determined to control their image to protect their power incumbency. Both euchre the community about their unlovely covert behavior through the Public Affairs Office to keep the public ignorant and ensure board-and-administration continued lock on power bankrolled by the state. Taxpayers pay to have the board and administration feed them happy talk about how well the board and administration runs the schools.
In Bart’s case, his public display of being gay messed up the board-administration need to disguise that gays work in the schools at all for fear that Paleozoic homophobes hunkered down in the fens and bogs at the edge of the county in the tenebrous badlands of Seffner and Turkey Creek would march on ROSSAC in battle formation with axe handles and pitchforks. If the fact of gays’ school employment got out, then these primitive citizens would catch on that the quidnuncs who run the schools don’t practice perfect discrimination against gays, just enough to keep gays cowed and silent and Yahoos propitiated.
I was eager to see how you, Ms. Edgecomb, the only black on the board, made sure that black children’s needs got attention, an enterprise not favored by the rest of the board. I wanted also to observe how you used your position to promote community blacks’ participation in the life of the schools.
In my two years’ observation, I never heard you mention black children. You didn’t sponsor a single program for them or bring up one statistic that showed them disenfranchised in any way. I also never heard you support an outstanding community black’s having a school named after him or her. The result of the latter assures that school after school gets the name of another mediocre white man--most often a coach who can’t make his subjects and verbs agree.
Your ignoring significant discrimination against black children cited in the NAACP’s 2003-2004 black-disparity study tells me that you have entered the woebegone ranks of Aunt Toms.
Aunt Toms want to distance themselves from their own black race to blend in with the dominant whiteys. I met that kind of betrayal in the Women’s Movement in my forty-five years in the ranks. A few women do the heavy lifting, and the Aunt Toms join sexist males in declaring that those struggling for women’s rights are unladylike, jackbooted lesbians. But when we jackbooted lesbians open a door for women, guess who rushes through first?
One salient piece of discrimination against black children that took place ignored and unchallenged by you is the recent savagery to Riverside High’s black student Renee Anderson. The board and administration railroaded her into expulsion without a fair hearing, including the obligatory hearing before the board.
The board and administration apparatchiks closed ranks to maul and kick out Renee without giving her the chance to tell her side of the story. The administration and board hierarchs expected Renee to go to the preliminary hearing and admit guilt to things she was not guilty of because students’ admitting guilt was board-administration routine bureaucratic shake-down of students in the preliminary hearing. Most children are scared enough to comply. They don’t have courageous, protective parents as has Renee.
In the preliminary hearing, Renee’s stepfather, Mr. Walton, protested that the school persecutors were stripping Renee of her Constitutional rights because they were shuffling through evidence not provided to Renee in the preliminary hearing and wouldn’t allow Renee to see it when he asked for it.
Mr. and Mrs. Walton along with Renee thus got kicked out of Renee‘s hearing by the board and administration overlord softening-up crew, including then-board-attorney Crosby Few.
The kick-out offense was Renee’s stepfather’s having presented a due-process request to the board biggies to see the papers withheld from Renee. Despite the lies in the Hillsborrough Student Handbook and Board Policy Manual, students don’t get Constitutional rights in the Hillsborough County school system any more than they get filet mignon in the lunch room.
After the Waltons’ and Renee’s kickout, the hearing overlords recorded Renee’s having pled guilty to an aggravated-assault charge against a behemoth assistant principal, one Kevin Massena, at Riverview High. The overlords lied for an official record.
When she had a chance to speak on the record in her deposition, Renee maintained her innocence in deposition for her court case, which her parents filed to protect her from the slander of expulsion that would contaminate her record and make it hard for her to get a job.
The NAACP study asserts “Students of color are being disciplined at higher rates compared to their peers in the Hillsborough schools. For example, in 2003-2004 black students were over three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended out of school, and black elementary school pupils over five times as likely to be suspended out of school.” Renee Anderson ranks as one of those racist statistics.
Moreover, says NAACP research, “Racial disparities in suspension are matched by other key educational indicators. In the school year, a black child is more likely to be retained in grade as a white child and more than three times as likely to be identified as retarded, whereas a white child is more than one and one-half times as likely to graduate from high school in four years and more than three times as likely to be identified for a gifted program.”
This NAACP study confirms disparity in such situations as the case of Renee Anderson at Riverview High. It and other cases result in these lopsided, discriminatory statistics, unquestioned by the board and surprisingly unquestioned by the one black on it: you, ma'am.
This Twilight Zone case shows Renee’s being expelled for “aggravated assault” on the 240-pound hulking vice principal Kevin Massena. Renee brushed past this administrative specimen to escape his blocking her from leaving his office after school when her mother told her to come home via cell phone.
My friend, a teacher of the county school says: “…maybe principals are allowed to block a student's path, b/c I do know that they are now telling teachers not to break up fights and to just call an administrator. Administrators are trained in special restraining techniques to help end a fight safely and pull the kids apart. So maybe principals are also taught how to block a student. I don't know. I just know that we peons [teachers] are told to never block a student’s path. If the student refuses to sit down or leaves the room, we simply call for administration and write the student up. We are told the school board will not support us if we block and then the student gets hostile and hits or pushes us. I think that puts the school board at legal risk if we block the student’s path. But maybe principals are different. I don't know.”
Yes, principals and administrators are different indeed. The Professional Standards Office statistics show teachers but never administrators get punished. And in cases of school contretemps, principals can run after the student and howl, “Get off my school grounds!” as Mr. Heilmann did at Riverview. This is the special training for such incidents that principals get but not teachers.
This information above came from a teacher of many years who would be fired on the spot if I revealed the name.
Jiu jetsu Menendez claims Renee Anderson performed aggravated battery upon his person by brushing past him to escape when he had her penned up in his office and blocked her exit.
Before we go any further, we must demand that Le Mendez present his scores on the Beery-Buketinic Developmental Test of Visual-Motor skills. These data will tell us whether he is normal in this area as anyone must be who is going to invoke aggravated battery for a student’s bumping into him when he blocks her path out of his office to escape him.
In fact, logic says that the administration’s claim that it knows how to handle fights while the faculty does not requires this test for all administrators: A Menendez-Beery Bukentinic score is pivotal in a fugitive claim of aggravated battery as the one Le Menedez cites. Mr. Heilmann must present the most recent Menendez-Berry-Bukentinc score of his battered subaltern.
Egged on by a call from Principal Heilmann, the police didn’t wait for Renee’s mother to arrive but crammed her into the patrol car in handcuffs and sped her to lock-up.
School officials such as board attorney Tom Gonzalez maintain in PR propaganda that students get solicitous treatment and are given their rights in such situations.
Hooey.
Renee’s case shows the overlords don’t treat the students like human beings. In answer to the question “Do principals get to monitor interrogations?” that a SPT reporter posed to board attorney Gonzales prompted the mouthpiece to reach into his legal sack of mendacity and respond that indeed principals do.
The reporter question should have been “Do principals attend all police interrogations of students?“ The answer is no. Principal Heilmann was in cahoots with the police to deprive Renee of fair treatment. His office phoned to police and said, “Come pick ‘er up, boys.” Heilmann didn't bother to see that Renee got an interrogation for him to attend. He just handed her over to the cops to be crammed into a patrol car and locked up.
Then the Board Mouthpiece Gonzales gilded the PR lie and enlarged it by averring that principals have the duty "if they ever get uncomfortable [with an interrogation]…to speak up and say, 'You know what, [sic] I think we should wait for that person's parent.'" Absolute hogwash as Renee‘s treatment demonstrates.
Renee’s case gilds reality for press preening. Called by the Principal Heilmann’s factotums or himself, the cops motored up to King High just as Renee was walking toward her home across the street from the school. The piney-woods gendarmes jumped out of the patrol car, clamped Renee in handcuffs, and arrested her with Principal Heillmann’s not only failing to monitor the police interrogation because none occurred but also by Heilmann’s running after Renee in the parking lot hollering after her to “get off my campus!“ and “You’ll never come back here again!”
Renee’s interrogation by the police probably consisted of the colloquy, “You Renee Anderson?” “Yes.” “Then hold out your hands for these cuffs, sister, and get in the back of the patrol car.”
What parent would want a child subjected to this terrorism?
The schools’ lawyer’s PR description of the way students facing expulsion get treated as depicted in school-board false policy statements and the way they get treated in reality are two different things. The board knows about this sort of cover-up and encourages the scam. The board counts such lies to the public about these and other matters as routine politics.
The board never heard Renee’s case as it was obligated to do according to board rules, and you, Ms. Edgecomb, didn’t bestir yourself to ascertain why Renee and her parents did not come before the board as such cases are supposed to.
The parents and Renee did not get notice of the board hearing due either to the incompetent hostility of Mr. Otero, vice superintendent, or to the board’s indifference. Instead, board members let this black student slide into expulsion by green-lighting her case on the board see-no-evil consent agenda. Nobody asked what had happened to her. Abused students--especially black ones--are so routine that they do not pique the board’s curiosity and especially not their concern.
All board members and involved administrators were culpable in ignoring this black student’s disenfranchisement by the Hillsborough schools’ racist system of lopsided punishment that the NAACP study documents. As the only black board member, you were doubly culpable.
The board apparatus misinformed Renee’s parents about the hearing. It never bothered to follow up to find out why they and Renee did not show up.
Mr. Otero’s office claimed the board couldn’t get in touch with the Walton parents because they had left no forwarding address when the family moved to take Renee to a more wholesome environment in which to attend school after the staged Riverview fracas in which she was accused of “aggravated assault” on the bloated 240-pound vice principal because she squeezed past him to escape his penning her in his office when her mother told her on the phone to come home.
The Walton family had, in fact, left a forwarding address at the post office.
This slovenly treatment of a black student’s rights shows a lackadaisical attitude toward black children by the board and administration. It confirms a blithe unconcern for their wellbeing. Had Renee been a white child from South Tampa, one can be sure that a sycophantic board would have hopped to it in ensuring that the South Tampa family’s engraved notification of the board hearing was delivered on a satin pillow.
I believe that vice-superintendent Otero consciously mishandled the notification ritual.
The narrative of this case shows that this extravagantly paid public employee showed ignorant of addresses’ being left by departing people at post offices. Yet he gets paid what I suspect is close to $200,000 a year since Ms. Elia pulls down $300,000 and rising because this sycophantic board has no mercy on taxpayers when loading on more and more dollars onto Elia’s already bloated salary, not earned by her training, her experience, or her leadership. If she were a leader, she would have responded to the damning NAACP study.
It is not as if Mr. Otero just got off the boat from the Old Country, Bulgaria, via the Black Sea and the Gallipoli and didn’t know the civil rituals of the United States; it is not as if he had no experience in the procedure of forwarding addresses. He has done a plethora in his job of vice superintendent, ensconced therein since the Pleistocene Age. He should have an advanced degree by now in forwarding letters when students’ families move. Like too many in this C-student administration, Mr. Otero is a slow learner.
I reason as well Le Otero’s slovenliness was due to Renee’s being a black child and that this dereliction betrayed insidious retaliation in sabotaging Renee’s case by the whole administrative system. Why? Because Renee Anderson’s parents fought back at the discriminatory behavior toward Renee and them by the board and administration. They questioned the punishment gauntlet Renee had to run. The board and administrative bigots expect that such black victims as Renee and her family will take the board and administration’s contempt lying down whilst groveling with “Yassir, Mahster.”
A prime example of discrimination in Renee’s case exists in the assault claim of vice principal Kevin Messena. Mr. Messena and the administration closed ranks, lied also about Renee’s involvement in a school-grounds fight, didn’t give her a chance to refute the charge of participation in the fight on school grounds or in an assault on Le Messena. Without valid data, the administration trapped this black student into an ersatz charge of aggravated battery against the 240-pound functionary when she slipped past him at the door of his office. They claimed as well without evidence or without giving her a chance to speak that she was participant in a school-yard fight.
The administrative punishers never allowed Ms. Anderson her Constitutional rights, and the local courts, some judges of which are steeped in complicit- punishment choreograph, approved this denial of Renee’s rights in adjudication of the charge up through the appeals court presided over by Athena member Judge Bucklew. This judge in the appeals case had some labyrinthine connection with Tom Gonzalez’s wife. I believe that the detective whom Mr. Walton has employed to track down issues in the case discovered these data.
The people excoriating Renee at every stage of her expulsion seemed to have a connection to each other honed over years of bureaucratic coffee-clatch relationships punctuated by behind-the-scenes irregular pupil expulsions that got the imprimatur of the courts, all part of the slowly accruing choreograph.
This situation dismays. The courts are supposed to administer justice in these forlorn regions. I suspect instead that the folks who handled Renee’s expulsion ritual worked together like bees in a beehive behind the pretense of due process. The judge who presided at the first trial insisted that Renee had pled guilty in the hearing--the one she and her family were kicked out of. It seems that the system allows only a guilty plea in that hearing. To which a logical question would be this: Then why have the hearing?
This first-trial judge said to Renee, “Everybody knows you’re guilty.” Is this judicial language, or is it biased, pile-on language? Renee’s attorney tried to determine Menendez’ degree of racism on the stand by asking him if it were true that he had been heard to use racist language. But the judge slapped the question down. I would have liked to hear the answer.
The Heilmann exhortation to Renee to “get off my school grounds!” represents a Freudian slip that lays bare the attitude of the administration and board toward black students. It's hostile. It's rejecting.
The folks in the ROSSAC big White House believe the schools rank as their property and that field-hand teachers and students--especially black ones--are interlopers on it--tolerated only because students’ and their teachers’ numbers dictate the tax loot the board and administration preside over--money that undergirds their status as power poseurs in the Bay Area. Scrutiny of the behavior behind the curtain shows that they are abusers of children--especially black ones--trapped in a contaminated expulsion pas de deux.
I think it’s significant in your case, Ms. Ethridge, that you do not belong to the NAACP but rather to the Athena Society. Besides this social club of ladies who lunch, you belong to the prosaic Florida School Boards Association Board (FSBA) of Directors and are an alternate on both themoribund FSBA Legislative Liaison Committee and the Hillsborough Education Foundation. You as well serve on the board of directors for ChairScholars, Keep Hillsborough County Beautiful, and the Florida Center for Survivors of Torture--for which Renee now qualifies after her mauling by the board, administration, and courts.
None of these prissy committees of which you are member has established a record for fighting for black students’ rights in the schools or a record of anything except supine collaboration. They fight for nothing but having taxpayers pay their dues in these ersatz organizations which gather in flossy hotels in cities around the state on frolics subsidized by tax loot so that the attendees can look important and engage in the exploration of tremendous trifles.
I am familiar with the ladies-who-lunch Athena club. I knew its founder, Nancy Ford, recently passed away. Forty years ago, Nancy came to my home in Beach Park a couple of weeks after our family, including our ancient cat Twink, who disappeared under the house for two weeks in a hissy because she had been forced to sojourn in the plane cargo instead of going first class. Nancy came as ambassador from the bank she worked for.
After Title VII nudged banks into hiring women to upper-level jobs, the local bank outback Machiavellies rigged up vp slots for prominent society women like Nancy. But sexism meant these to be for show, not regular-guy jobs. The ersatz female vice president society ladies passed out cook books to relocating families, a maneuver undergirding high finance to be sure.
Talk about undignified sexism: this cookbook job was it.
My living in South Tampa notwithstanding, forty years ago Bay Area feminists such as I did not represent restrained, ladylike mores, which is the reason that Nancy never had the nerve to join us in the National Organization of Women, which I convened, but set up the women’s-rights-lite club Athena.
While the Athena ladies lunched, NOW picketed; we sat in; we mounted verbal challenges; wrote sassy, abusive letters of protest to the town sexist biggies; ratted out discrimination against women to Washington compliance agencies; and offered instant resistance to any discrimination we spotted against women by the diehards of women’s oppression in Hillsborough County. If we saw any, we squawked, usually at the scene of the crime like any bona fide jackbooted lesbian would.
I opened the sheriff’s and the police departments to women by reporting to the feds these sexist policing agencies for refusing to hire women as officers. The EEOC and Justice Department rode down to the rescue. Sheriff Beard still refuses to occupy the same room with me. Boo hoo.
In NOW's first street agitprop, we jack-booted lesbians challenged the local papers’ sex-segregated job ads. Not content, we followed that up by picketing Wolfe Brothers department store on Franklin Street--since gone out of business--to challenge its policy of charging women, not men, for alterations. The manager’s defense: “Women sew.”
Meanwhile, dear Nancy, not able to join us bona fide feminists due to social timidity, nonetheless yearned to do something to augment women‘s equality. She dared not jeopardize her South Tampa social standing, so she walked on eggs and founded an attenuated form of feminism, the Athena Society. This moniker was ironic since Athena was the goddess of war and would have been president of the local chapter of hell-raising NOW feminists had she been around.
Athena’s feminist attitude ranked feeble then as now. It evolved as just another snoot club of women too insecure to speak out to assert their full citizenship and instead became a nicey-nicey organization such as the Junior League (junior to whom? one wonders. Men, of course). This part of the sisterhood occupies the pastel end slot.
Nancy asked me to speak at one of Athena’s luncheons on the ERA. I was to discourse on the grittier aspects of the ERA battle to this refined club of ladies engaged in flaccid feminism. Besides being called “jackbooted lesbos,“ we radical feminists had to contend with such issues as the opposition’s scare tactic that the ERA would force men and women to go to the toilet together. Foes of the ERA were dumb and not high minded. Their concerns about the ERA were not metaphysical; they were physical and often gross.
So to talk up the ERA among the luke warm, I sallied forth to an Athena elegant luncheon and got the impression that the Athena women weren’t listening to my ERA comments so much as assessing my wardrobe.
As a poor teacher, I couldn’t dress in posh Athena duds, and these recidivist fashion groupies immediately picked up on this fact. Clothes to them ranked a major tenet of life--much more important than the ERA. This obsession was and is a major symptom of women’s second-class status in a man’s world.
Women pro-feminism remain to this day interlopers in a man’s power keep-out area. Men consider feminists toxic. Women who believe in equality don’t get past the lock-out via competence but by appearance--enhanced by attire to make them look soigné so that they can trap one of the dominant y-chromosome high-earning critters into the financial security of marriage by the lures of posh attire and giddy behavior so that they can live in South Tampa and join the Junior League.
I fended off the sneers that quivered at the corners of Athena doyennes’ mouths at my poor attire. But shazam! I had unexpected protection: I had by chance grabbed one of my big, old Chanel bags that day to stack my notes in. I have about a dozen Chanels picked up over the years during times of prosperity hanging as decorations on my bedroom wall.
When I flopped my old Chanel on the table to extract my notes, there was a palpable change of atmosphere in the room.
That old Chanel was escutcheon against snobbery. Chanel stops the conversation. Nobody one-ups Chanel in the fashion marathon. My old Chanel acted my imprimatur of worthiness to make a speech to this soi-disant special group of insecure women who could not throw off old values of snobbery and vanity and slavery to men to fight in the streets and if necessary in the gutters to enter a new era of women’s equality. Such poseurs’ plan is to have us crazy radical feminists do the dirty work as storm troopers, and then Athena lady layabouts bestir themselves to move in and mop up the gains.
With my old Chanel protecting me like a cross brandished at vampires in old Bela Lugosi movies, I exited the luncheon feeling as if it were a fool-proof shield to be used when I met Athena vampires of snobbery and superannuated feminine behavior pretending to be committed to women‘s rights, noses in the air.
Forty years after my Athena speech and several years since Nancy’s death, Athena continues. Its feminist-lite program supports “a young Woman of Promise“; how is not clear. Probably it involves a luncheon fundraiser with double doilies for the young woman’s first-quarter tuition to some snoot-approved women’s college such as Radcliffe, at which she will major in art history.
Athena steers clear of gut-level feminist issues of abortion rights, sexual harassment, and employment discrimination. These are too messy and unladylike for Athena just as was the suffragists’ fighting for the right of women to vote too unladylike for the dingbat x-chomosomers then. Those traitors to their sex sneered at Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and joined men in calling them “hyenas in petticoats.” But the collaborators sped to the voting booth when suffragist Valkyries pushed through women‘s right to vote. The Virginia mother who did the trick that got the final vote told her legislator son she would not speak to him for the rest of her life if he did not vote for the passage of suffrage.
In the intervening forty years, Athena has continued its luncheons. Its membership is still by-invitation-only. It has run a campaign of capturing productive community women to adorn its membership marquee such as Betty Castor, Katherine Essrig, and Sandy Freedman.
The list includes as well your name, Ms. Edgecomb. You are the token innocuous prominent black woman. Also listed is the appelate judge that presided in one of Renee’s trials: Susan Bucklew. She ruled against Renee‘s appeal. Another school board member besides you adorns the list. Now we begin to see through a glass darkly the murky network of bureaucrats who undid Renee.
Renee’s hearing and trial record begins to resemble an unspoken conspiracy of Bay Area power bureaucrats sticking together on school expulsions behind the scenes from the school grounds through the courts. Their aim is not wellbeing of childen but keeping their records clean. The choreograph is “to hell with the kids, especially black ones with parents that, in Renee‘s case, fight for their daughter‘s rights; let’s keep our record unblemished with no messy concessions to justice.”
You belong to Athena, Ms. Edgecomb, not the NAACP. The value system this choice represents does not redound to your credit. Nor does it recommend your being a school board member responsible for the protection and equal treatment of black children in the schools. I understand blacks in the community are proud of your public office. But you don’t deserve their admiration and trust as the Renee Anderson case well shows.
The school board, which you now chair, does not protect black children but fosters the discriminatory statistics of more black than white children’s suffering from the ritual of expulsion, low graduation rates. and fewer gifted identifications. One would have thought that as the only black on the board, you would wade in and demand an in-house committee of board members, administrators, teachers, and parents to plumb the situation and insist on its correction.
You would have thenceforth monitored evidence of the committee’s progress or the lack of it, making a pest of yourself if necessary. I can testify that nothing beats making a pest of yourself. I excel at this skill. It’s much more effective than whining diplomacy. Women in Florida and elsewhere would do well to make pests of themselves. Being pests is how we jackbooted lesbians recently convinced the U.S. Weather Bureau to stop calling all hurricanes women’s names because “both are unpredictable and tempestuous.” To shut us up, the bureau buckled to equality and now names hurricanes men’s and women’s names alternately. One small step for womankind.
You have not made a pest of yourself or even let out a peep of protest about discrimination against black children in the schools. You remained serene in your seat on whitey’s board, trying to distract from the fact that you are black by being bland. You are, in fact, a black woman who ignores the punishment of black children in the school system over which you supposedly preside. That’s a fact the NAACP statistics undergird. The children suffer while you fantasize.
To give some idea of how unfair Renee Anderson’s punishment was, let’s scrutinize the charge of “aggravated assault” responsible for her arrest and incarceration and compare her case with the aggravated assault on students of a King High school administrator.
Renee had called her mother via cell phone and told her Le Messena was holding her against her will.
Her mother told her to come home, which was across the street from the school. But the hulking Messena penned Renee in his office on unproved charges of fighting in the schools and cried aggravated assault when she brushed past him to obey her mother. Every time I review this situation, I believe there’s something whacked out about it. A student brushes past a hefty administrator blocking her path, and that’s aggravated assualt.
Horse feathers.
Nobody listened to Ms. Anderson. She had no hearing. She had not been fighting but was trying to break up a fight between friends. But the administration did not want to hear a refutation of its prejudice. Its accusation was freeze-dried and ready for application. Principal Heilmann was not interested in anything but his conviction that another black child had been in a fight and merited punishment. Black children’s fighting and punishment was his engrained scenario. Without determining her participation in the fight, the principal screamed twice at Renee, “Get off my school grounds!”
Question: why did the upper ROSSACers take this man from his natural habitat of the athletic fields and sweat lodges and put him in a principal’s office? Look at his ill-written, badly punctuated resume above. Didn't the administration spot that deficiency of literacy? Heilmann belongs in a sports venue or on janitor duty: he should never take off his cleats or should always have a mop in his hands.
Let’s home in on the charge of unproven “aggravated assault” by student Renee Anderson on the delicate 240-pounder. Unproven “aggravated assault,” later changed to plain assault by the state’s attorney--“The quality of justice is not strained: it droppeth from heaven like the gentle rain”--required a mere call from the principal’s office to trigger the charge of aggravated assault with no investigation, no nothing but brutality to a student.
This administrative call resulted in Renee’s precipitate handcuffing arrest with no principal-attended interrogation. It was incarceration based on nothing but erroneous, bigoted assumptions by the administration and arrogant behavior of the cops.
5780 - STUDENT/PARENT RIGHTS Board Procedures
The Board recognizes that students possess not only the right to an education but the rights of citizenship as well.
The District shall attempt to offer nurture, counsel, and custodial care appropriate to the age and maturity of the student. The District will, at the same time, guarantee that no student is deprived of the basic right to equal treatment and equal access to the educational program, due process, a presumption of innocence, free expression and association, and the privacy of the student's own thoughts. Along with the rights guaranteed to each student, however, are certain responsibilities which include respect for the rights of others, obedience to properly constituted school authority, and compliance with the procedures and rules of the District.
The Board realizes that as students differ in age and maturity so they differ in ability to handle both the rights and responsibilities of citizens. The exercise of each right shall be granted, therefore, with due regard for the degree of responsibility possessed by the student and the student's need for the continuing guidance and control of those responsible for the student's education. F.S. 1002.20
I bet the hefty Menendez specimen makes at least $65,000 a year without being able to spell or punctuate in a school system dedicated to infusing these skills into its pupils. Somebody who spells “until” as “untill” as he does on his statement does not have the brain power to make the fine distinctions a vice principal must master. A meat plant hefting beef carcasses is the place for the likes of Mr. Messena.
Renee’s case represents insensitive, programmed, prejudiced behavior on the administration’s and board’s part toward a black student. It contrasts markedly with another instance of repeated, ignored assaults by an administrator on students. A King High School administrator committed these assaults.
An assistant principal at King ordered pubescent boys into his office, ordered them to close the door, ordered them to remove their shoes and socks, ordered them to present him their feet for him to manipulate and drool over. He especially liked to crack their toes.
Other administrators either pretended not to note this weird behavior or did not try to stop it. The principal, Carol Bruning, must be more than usually unaware of what is going on in her school.
This was the sicko scene of an administrator who produced the “Toecracker” caper, which the administration treated as a prank with an “Oh, isn’t he a card?!” when knowledge of it was forced upon them.
One of the boys’ mothers called the papers to reveal the outrage. The Toe Cracker saga appeared in the SPT.
The administration had filed no charges of undoubted aggravated assault against the administrative probable foot fetishist. Administrative minions had not called the cops to arrest him; no handcuffs; no lock-up. The oblivious principal Carla Bruning King went along with the administrator’s weird behavior if, indeed, she were ever aware of what the joker was doing. Such out-to-lunch principal conduct means she needed a regimen of No-Doze.
The questionable charge of “aggravated battery” against Renee got her arrested stat and incarcerated without the administration’s even determining if she were guilty of the charge. It didn’t let her speak. There was no interrogation of Renee with the principal present which school board attorney Tom Gonzalez airily tells the press any student is entitled to. In contrast, the King assistant principal’s repeated and blatant aggravated assault on multiple pubescent boys’ feet probably for psychosexual gratification got ignored or treated as a joke when forced to the administration‘s attention.
This case highlights another outrage perpetrated in the schools. Administrators never get fired for bad behavior or incompetence; only teachers do. The Professional Standards files will support this statement.
I pleaded at a board meeting with Ms. Elia to have the apparent foot fetishist administrator examined by a certified psychiatrist to see if he were mentally well or suffered some form of pathology. She didn’t even look up from her calculations of what whopping raise she should ask for next. None of the board moved that the foot fetishist be examined to see if he were a threat to the youngsters in his power. So much for the empty “safety of the children” chorus of the board. So much for courage and morals.
How does this lax treatment of a King High administrator’s repeated, overt aggravated-assault fetish go unchecked; how did he acquire the assumption that he was entitled to manipulate the feet of pubescent male students? How does the Toe Cracker outrage stack up against Renee’s unproven aggravated-assault charge on burly Vice Principal Messena?
Comparison produces the suspicion that invidious discrimination unfolded in the administrative rush to judgment with non-deliberative jocko Principal Heillmann’s anthem of “Get off my school grounds!” to Renee. This administrative big shot didn’t bother to question Student Renee Anderson or give her the benefit of a doubt before he chased her across the parking lot into the cops’ arms, screaming “Get off my grounds!”
Mr. Heillmann had early called the police to clamp handcuffs on the young woman, arrest her, and jail her for aggravated assault. Meanwhile, the bizarre King High footsy-tootsy administrator gets free rein to pursue his probably psychosexually based indulgence, dismissed as mere horseplay by the administration and board. The principal of King snoozed the whole time. The board avoided knowledge of the situation. “We knew nothing about it” is the board’s template fall-back mantra. The truth is the board knows everything about everything and sits on it.
Yet these elected public servants opine ad nauseum on the board dais that they are “concerned about the safety of the children.” Oh, sure. You betcha.
Instead of calling the cops to arrest the King High administrator for chronic aggravated assault on the school’s pubescent boys, the administration tolerated and even joked about it--“Ha! Ha! Ha” They pretended to never have taken Psychology 101. They stalled until a parent’s outcry against the whacky foot-fetish administrator finally forced the administration to call in a lackadaisical sheriff’s investigator who declared the administration, not the sheriff’s department, should deal with the King High toe cracker. Passing the buck among Hillsborough County community leaders represents template behavior.
When I emailed Sheriff Gee to review the situation, he emailed me back and grandly advised, “Consult my staff.” Sheriff Gee is yet another politician who gets elected to office and believes that he has assumed the purple.
However, when the King High principal got the threat of a lawsuit from an irate parent after the toe-cracker story appeared in SP Times and when the parent said he would sue the schools unless the toe cracker got a psychiatric examination, the torpid administration broke into attenuated action.
Showing their slick, practiced powers of evasion, the administration and board side-stepped this parent’s threat it appears by having an in-house factotum with some ersatz psychology background evaluate the man for pathology. Naturally, the in-house evaluator found the Toe Cracker a model of mental health. Not doing so would have meant the poor wretch’s job.
Anybody who knows the least thing about mental illness (I did psychiatric nursing for a time at Seton Institute in Baltimore and spent hours in the hospital library reading, reading, reading, reading case files) would know a state-certified psychologist or a psychiatrist specializing in sexual disorders should have done the evaluation. Surely school administrators are obliged to master such information.
This evasion of parental concern for the children to whom the board and administration act in loco parentis and such disinterest in multiple boys’ abuse refute the board’s claim to have paramount in their consideration the safety of the children. Its members show how lax and indifferent the board and administration are about Hillsborough County school children’s safety when it comes to making an administrator responsible for criminal battery on multiple boys unchecked over a period of time.
In contrast, adjudging a student guilty of criminal battery without an examination and locking her up as in Renee’s case gets a shoo-in “of course” from the board. But the abusive administrator gets a non-professional exam and a pass. Those acts display extant invidious ethics for the Hillsborough County board and administration.
Principal Heilmann and his administration distorted and evaded the Student Code of Conduct in its eagerness to strip student Renee Anderson of her rights. In contrast, the board and administration ignored and condoned the criminal battery a King High administrator forced on pubescent boys in his power.
The administration called the cops for Renee’s arrest, not giving her a chance to refute the charge. They ignored the foot fetishist’s activities until a parent called their bluff. This is what’s known in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics as whacko ethics.
Board Policies (mounted on school Web site). Zero tolerance policies should apply equally to all students, Redundant comma: splits a compound verb and are not intended to be rigorously applied to petty acts of misconduct and misdemeanors. This zero tolerance policy does not require the reporting of petty acts of misconduct and misdemeanors to a law enforcement agency, including, redundant comma but not limited to disorderly conduct, disrupting a school function, simple assault or battery (The State’s attorney’s office relabeled Renee’s putative bumping of Messena as simple battery.), affray, theft of less than $300, trespassing, and vandalism of less than $1,000. The District will seek to use alternatives to expulsion or referral to law enforcement agencies unless the use of such alternatives will pose a threat to school safety.
Oh, monkey vomit. Double monkey vomit.
This disingenuous statement represents sugared lies and the abuse of language in deliberate propaganda used by the board and administration to befuddle people and to disguise the schools’ real behavior.
Hitler and Goebbels did not lie any more flagrantly in selling fascism to the German people. Renee’s case refutes the board-policy lie of solicitude for students. This putative board solicitude for students’ wellbeing crumbles with Riverview Mr. Heilmann’s and Le Macena’s overkill justice on student Anderson for an unproven, petty act gets arrest and incarceration.
Why did these more humane, civil Board Policy standards not apply in Renee’s case? My hunch says racial discrimination.
I suspect that the latent racial sadism in the white double helix goes back to the hanging of innocent black men in the South for putative rapes of white women. This malignant prejudice pops up from the interstices of the administrators’ double helix and even from that of some teachers in such incidents as Renee’s. I think there was even one black school functionary who joined the pile-on of accusing Renee of being in the fight when she wasn't. There's a case of Yes-massah collaboration.
This almost unconscious behavior comes from years of accepted slurs against blacks from whites’ indoctrination in racial injustice. In Renee’s case, the conviction that no parent will come to the aid of a black son or daughter figured in the attitude of approved bigotry. The administrative-board bigots felt free to romp. A congeries of psychological causes lead them to slap on the toughest, most exaggerated, most vicious accusation possible on Renee. Read Faulkner’s That Evening Sun or any of his oeuvre to get an idea of how this prejudice emerged and flourished. Faulkner is our greatest writer: he is equal to the task of showing how racism began and since flourished and spread from the South.
Where is the Marquis de Sade when we need to consult him on the symtoms of racial sadism?
More twaddle promulgated by the board:
5611 - DUE PROCESS RIGHTS board handbook The Board recognizes the importance of safeguarding a student's constitutional rights particularly when subject to the District's disciplinary procedures.
5780 - STUDENT/PARENT RIGHTS The Board recognizes that students possess not only the right to an education but the rights of citizenship as well. The District shall attempt to offer nurture, counsel, and custodial care appropriate to the age and maturity of the student. The District will, at the same time, guarantee that no student is deprived of the basic right to equal treatment and equal access to the educational program, due process, a presumption of innocence, free expression and association, and the privacy of the student's own thoughts. Along with the rights guaranteed to each student, however, are certain responsibilities which include respect for the rights of others, obedience to properly constituted school authority, and compliance with the procedures and rules of the District. The Board realizes that as students differ in age and maturity so they differ in ability to handle both the rights and responsibilities of citizens. The exercise of each right shall be granted, therefore, with due regard for the degree of responsibility possessed by the student and the student's need for the continuing guidance and control of those responsible for the student's education. F.S. 1002.20
These people are shameless.
Here follow an email from me to Renee's appeals attorney and her response. Ms. Raskin's response summarizes what I suspect of this case.
----
I have read your appeals brief for Renee Anderson's case against the Hillsborough County schools not one but three times. The date says December 21, 2009.
You do an admirable job on the Renee Anderson brief. Take this from a college professor of 28 years who taught writing to freshman and sophomore students. Your strengths are vivid diction, paucity of passive verbs, and emphatic contrary assertions. These give your writing thrust and pace. Run-of-the-mill lawyers such as Tom Gonzalez lapse into the conditional mood, weasel circumlocution, and fusty legal diction. He doesn’t know basic grammar-punctuation. So bad is the Gonzalez writing that I wrote Floida State’s writing faculty to complain about its letting loose such as he on Florida citizens.
………
Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33709
Tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Leedrurydecesarescasting-room couch.blogspot.com
-Original Message-----From: Doris Landis Raskin [mailto:dlawraskin@bellsouth.net]
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 11:16 AM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.comSubject:
Renee's case is concluded unjustly and unfairly. The appellate court found a completely new fact, i.e., that the board had offered Renee an alternative placement. If that were true, we would never have filed a case. When a case is decided at the appellate level, the only thing left is an appeal to the Supreme Court. There is no jurisdictional issue for the Supreme Court. The appellate court tanked it by finding a fact not in evidence.
Thank you for your kind words. I am not proud of the writing, but I am proud of the content. Cases are not decided on how well the brief is written, but the legal issues, the application of the facts to the issues, and the rule of law. In Renee's case, I believe it was decided on personalities. Susan Bucklew, a favorite of the appellate court, and a former high school English teacher in the defendant school system who had to know all of the good old boys involved, should have recused herself, but didn't. I didn't know about her until I read her wild hair of a decision and did some research.
Doris Landis Raskin
dlawraskin@bellsouth.net
Ms. Raskin's assessment should haunt you, Ms. Edgecomb. It throws into relief your failure to help a black child in the Hillsborough County schools get justice in a system you are supposed to oversee. Your inaction and supine acceptance of Renee Anderson's abuse does not speak well for your vigilance about the treatment of a part of the school population--black children--whom one expects you protect and nurture against the negative, racist currents in which they try to swim upsteam in which they are a despised minority.
Shame, Ms. Edgecomb, shame for neglecting these children in general and Renee Anderson in particular.
Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com
Hillsborough County NAACP
Florida NAACP
National NAACP
Hillsborough County Children’s Board
Tampa Mayor’s Office and Members of the City Council
Principal Heilmann
Vice-principal Messena
All Members of School Board
Mr. Otero, vice superintendent
The Florida Sentinel
The St. Petersburg Times Bill Maxwell
Thomas Marshal, SPT
Jabel, SPT
Tampa Tribune
The Florida State Education Department
Hillsborough County’s Legislative delegation
Plant City Council
La Gaceta newspaper
Mbrown@tampatribune.com
Athena Luncheon Club
Postscript from the attorney who handled Renee’s appeal:
Hillsborough County NAACP
Florida NAACP
National NAACP
The governor’s office
Hillsborough County Children’s Board
Tampa Mayor’s Office and Members of the City Council
Principal Heilmann
Vice-principal Messena
All Members of School Board
Mr. Otero, vice superintendent
The Florida Sentinel
The St. Petersburg TimesBill Maxwell
Thomas Marshal, SPT
Jabel, SPT
Tampa Tribune
The Florida State Education Department
Hillsborough County’s Legislative delegation
Plant City Council
La Gaceta newspaper
Mbrown@tampatribune.com
Athena Luncheon Club
Renee Anderson, representative of the black children who are more likely to be punished by suspension than white children.
Principal Heilmann Riverview High School“Get off My School Grounds!” screamed Heilmann, principal-jock Riverview High School, to student Renee Anderson.
“I move that we approve the Consent Agenda without discussion so that I can get home in time for the Lawrence Welk reruns.”
It is betrayal of taxpayers that a principal of a high school can’t punctuate at a basic level. This balloon-head tax drain probably makes $70,000 a year. The board should be ashamed of rubberstamping the employment of such a ripoff on the public. Mr. Robert Heilmann Principal
Mr. Robert Heilmann became an educator in 1972, and has taught Elementary PE, Social Studies, and English. After earning a Masters’ Degree in Counselor Education and in Educational Leadership he served as a Guidance Counselor and was an Assistant Principal for Student Affairs at East Bay High School. When the opportunity to help launch a brand new high school arose, Mr. Heilmann was instrumental in opening our new Riverview High School as the Assistant Principal for Curriculum. After the retirement of Riverview’s first principal J. Vince Thompson, Mr. Heilmann became principal in January 2001. During his educational career, he has coached baseball, hockey, cross country, and track. He has also officiated high school and college soccer games for 34 years. Mr. Heilmann had the distinction of serving on the U.S. international panel of referees for the sport of soccer from 1991-1994 (each country having only seven officials).
After the retirement of Riverview’s first principal J. Vince Thompson, Mr. Heilmann became principal in January 2001.
During his educational career, he pronoun reference has coached baseball, hockey, cross country, and track. He has also officiated high school and college soccer games for 34 years. Mr. Heilmann had the distinction of serving on the U.S. international panel cap of referees cap for the sport of soccer from 1991-1994 (each country possessive before gerund having only seven officials).
Just what the schools need as principal: an illiterate jock and bigot making over $70,000 a year who--get this--at one time taught English! What administrative ninny hired him for that job? Don’t the people in ROSSAC have literacy tests for educators before they hire them, and isn’t there anyone in the building who can read them? I want to see Heilmann’s transcipts and Strong Aptitude Test profile.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Ms. Edgecomb, Board Chair Hillsborough County Schools:
After the Professional Standards office framed my friend Bart Birdsall on a cooked-up charge because he participated in the pro-gay community protest of County Commissioner Rhonda Storms’s shutdown of library privileges for gays, I spent over two years sitting in the back of the room observing the board’s behavior. I wanted to know what kind of people sanction such unethical punishment of a school employee.
I read the court files. The jury believed little the administration collaborators and board liars said. It found for Mr. Erwin. Tom Gonzalez, not a court-room Fred Astaire, lost the case. This telling jury response explains why the administration always asks for bench trials. Its polecat members know they can’t fool a jury or tap into the judicial collaborators as they did in Renee’s two trials with the cooked hearing set up and judicial sympathizers.
Mr. Erwin fled to Georgia but can’t get a job because he can’t get the board and administration to give him a recommendation. That’s the kind of petty retaliation at which the board and administration excel. If there were one board member with courage and ethics, that benign renegade would send Mr. Erwin a job recommendation.
Mr. Erwin was a principal in the schools for years and universally liked and respected. Earl the Pearl Lennard lured him into the administration and tried to gut him when he turned out to have courage and ethics. Among the petty crooks who run the schools, ethics and courage are bad politics.
When Erwin asked the board and administration to clean up the the shoddy work on the schools with its payoffs, instead of investigating for bribe taking and other unlovely perquisites of power, the administration, starting with Dr. Lennard with the board’s connivance, tried to make the whistleblower’s life a living hell on campus and then attempted to fire him. If you want further evidence of the irregular practices that won Mr. Erwin the case, check the donor lists of Carol Kurdell and Jack Lamb on the supervisor of elections site of the county. In the quirky politics of the state, then Governor Crist appointed Lennard supervisor of elections when Phyllis Bukanski, an honest politician, died in office.
In assessing the board’s conduct, I learned that anyone who threatened its power hegemony--even a lowly gay speaking up for gays in the community as was his First Amendment rights--could expect retaliatory punishment, prominently threatened job loss.
In Bart’s case, his public display of being gay messed up the board-administration need to disguise that gays work in the schools for fear that Paleozoic homophobes hunkered down in the fens and bogs at the edge of the county in the tenenebrous badlands of Seffner and Turkey Creek would march on ROSSAC in battle formation with axe handles and pitchforks. If gays’ school employment got out, then these citizens would understand that the quidnuncs who run the schools don’t practice perfect discrimination against gays, just enough to keep gays cowed and silent and the Yahoos propitiated.
I was eager to see how you, the only black on the board, made sure that black children’s needs got attention, an enterprise not favored by the rest of the board. I wanted also to observe how you used your position to promote community blacks’ participation in the life of the schools.
In my two years’ observation, I never heard you mention black children. You didn’t sponsor a single program for them or bring up one statistic that showed them disenfranchised in any way. I also never heard you support an outstanding community black’s having a school named after him or her. The result of the latter assured that school after school got the name of another mediocre white man--most often a coach who can’t make his subjects and verbs agree.
Your ignoring significant discrimination against black children as the NAACP’s 2003-2004 black-disparity study shows tells me that you have entered the woebegone ranks of Aunt Toms. They want to distance themselves from their own black race to blend in with the dominant whiteys. I see that kind of betrayal in the Women’s Movement. A few women do the heavy lifting, and the Aunt Toms join sexist males in declaring that those few struggling for women’s rights are jackbooted lesbians. But when we jackbooted lesbians open a door for women, guess who rushes through first?
One salient piece of discrimination against black children that took place unchallenged by you is the recent savagery to Riverside High’s black student Renee Anderson. The board and administration railroaded her into expulsion without a fair hearing, including an obligatory hearing before the board.
The board and administration apparatchiks closed ranks to maul and kick out Renee Anderson without giving her the chance to tell her side of the story. The administration and board hierarchs expected Renee to go to the preliminary hearing and admit guilt to things she was not guilty of because students’ admitting guilt was their routine bureaucratic shake-down of students in the preliminary hearing. Most children are scared enough to comply. They don’t have courageous, protective parents as has Renee.
In the preliminary hearing, Renee’s stepfather, Mr. Walton, protested that the school persecutors were stripping Renee of her Constitutional rights because they were shuffling through evidence not provided to Renee in the preliminary hearing and wouldn’t allow Renee to see it when he asked for it.
Mr. and Mrs. Walton along with Renee thus got kicked out of Renee‘s hearing by the board and administration overlord softening-up crew, including then-board-attorney Crosby Few. The kick-out offense was Renee’s stepfather’s presenting a due-process request to the board biggies to see the papers withheld from Renee. Directly came the kick-out. Students don’t get Constitutional rights in the Hillsborough County school system any more than they get filet mignon in the lunch room.
Despite the Waltons’ and Renee’s kickout, the hearing overlords recorded Renee’s having pled guilty to the aggravated assault charge in that hearing from which they ejected her and her parents. They lied for an official record.
Moreover, says NAACP research, “Racial disparities in suspension are matched by other key educational indicators. In the school year, a black child is more likely to be retained in grade as a white child and more than three times as likely to be identified as retarded, whereas a white child is more than one and one-half times as likely to graduate from high school in four years and more than three times as likely to be identified for a gifted program.”
This NAACP study confirms disparity in such situations as the case of Renee Anderson at Riverview High. It and other cases result in these lopsided, discriminatory statistics unquestioned by the board and surprisingly unquestioned by the one black on it: you.
This case shows Renee’s being expelled for “aggravated assault” on the 240-pound hulk vice principal Kevin Massena. Renee brushed past this administrative specimen to escape his blocking her from leaving his office after school when her mother told her to come home via cell phone.
My friend, a teacher of the county school says: “…maybe principals are allowed to block a student's path, b/c I do know that they are now telling teachers not to break up fights and to just call an administrator. Administrators are trained in special restraining techniques to help end a fight safely and pull the kids apart.: “So maybe principals are also taught how to block a student. I don't know. I just know that we peons [teachers] are told to never block a student’s path. If the student refuses to sit down or leaves the room, we simply call for administration and write the student up. We are told the school board will not support us if we block and then the student gets hostile and hits or pushes us. I think that puts the school board at legal risk if we block the student’s path. But maybe principals are different. I don't know.”
Yes, principals and administrators are different indeed. The Professional Standards office statistics show teachers but never administrators get punished in the Hillsborough County school system. For instance with Principal Smith of Alafia performed so badly that parents refused to have her supervise their children, Ms. Elia first tried to propitiate the parents by promising to send La Smith and her assistant principal to Eckerd's personality makeover course to get the kinks out of their personalities so that Smith would act like a human being. When te parents balked, former school board member Falliera, who committed adultery after stalking him with Mark Hart that resulted in his firing to put him out of her range and prevent the public's finding out about the outrage, Elia sent this paragon of board ethics along with GED-only fibber April Griffith, who lied to the press about her education, out to Alafia convince Smith to accept a manufactured empty job after she resigned as principal at the same salary and benefits but no duties to cover up the bad-press story unfolding about the situation. Smith now occupies this do-duties job at the taxpayers' expense to hold inviolate the administration and board's discriminatory custom of punishing teachers, never administrators, with Professional Standards charges.
This following information came from a teacher of many years who would be fired on the spot if I revealed the name.
Jiu jetsu Menendez claims Renee Anderson performed aggravated battery upon his person by brushing past him to escape when he had her penned up in his office and blocked her exit.
Before we go any further, we must demand that Le Mendez present his scores on the Beery-Buketinic Developmental Test of Visual-Motor skills. These data will tell us whether he is normal in this area as anyone must be who is going to invoke aggravated battery for a student’s bumping into him.
In fact, logic says that the administration’s claim that it knows how to handle fights while the faculty does not requires this test for all administrators: A Menendez-Beery Bukentinic score is pivotal in a claim of aggravated battery as the one Le Menedez cites. Mr. Heilmann must present the most recent Menendez-Berry-Bukentinc score of his battered subaltern.Mr. Menendez justifies his claim.in the tenenemous
Any administrator who can’t spell “until” must clean out his desk and exit hallowed school ground. Even if he has mopped up the floor with the Menendez-Beery Bukentinic test, he must skedaddle.
Egged on by a call from Principal Heilmann, the police didn’t wait for Renee’s mother to arrive but crammed her into the patrol car in handcuffs and sped her to lock-up.
School officials such as board attorney Tom Gonzalez maintain in PR propaganda that students get solicitous treatment and are given their rights in such situations.
Hooey.
Renee’s case shows the overlords don’t. In answer to the question “Do principals get to monitor interrogations?” that a SPT reporter posed to board attorney Gonzales prompts the mouthpiece to reach into his legal sack of mendacity and repond that the indeed principals do. The right reporter question should have been “Do principals attend all police interrogations of students?“ The answer is no. Principal Heilmann was in cahoots with the police to deprive Renee of fair treatment. His office phoned to police and said, “Come pick ‘er up, boys.”
Renee’s case gilds reality for and press preening. Called by the principal’s factotums or himself, the cops motored up to King High just as Renee was walking toward her home across the street from the school. The piney-woods gendarmes jumped out of the patrol car, clamped Renee in handcuffs, and arrested her with Principal Heillmann’s not only failing to monitor the police interrogation because none occurred but also by Heilmann’s running after Renee in the parking lot hollering after her to “get off my campus!“ and “You’ll never come back here again!”
Renee’s interrogation by the police probably consisted of the colloquy, “You Renee Anderson?” “Yes.” “Then hold out your hands for these cuffs, sister, and get in the back of the patrol car.”
What parent would want a child subjected to this terrorism?
The schools’ lawyer’s PR description of the way students facing expulsion get treated as depicted in school-board false policy statements and the way they get treated in reality are two different things. The board knows this and even encourages the scam. The board counts such lies to the public about these and other matters as routine politics.
The board never heard Renee’s case as it was obligated to do according to board rules, and you, Ms. Edgecomb, didn’t bestir yourself to ascertain why Renee and her parents did not come before the board as such cases are supposed to.
The parents and Renee did not get notice of the board hearing due either to the incompetent hostility of Mr. Otero, vice superintendent, or to the board’s indifference. Instead, board members let this black student slide into expulsion by green-lighting her case on the board see-no-evil consent agenda. Nobody asked what had happened to her. Abused students--especially black ones--are so routine that they do not pique the board’s curiosity and especially not their concern.
All board members and involved administrators were culpable in ignoring this black student’s disenfranchisement by the Hillsborough schools’ racist system of lopsided punishment that the NAACP study documents.
The board apparatus misinformed Renee’s parents about the hearing. It never bothered to follow up to find out why they and Renee did not show up.
Mr. Otero’s office claimed the board couldn’t get in touch with the Walton parents because they had left no forwarding address when the family moved to take Renee to a more wholesome environment in which to attend school after the staged Riverview fracas in which she was accused of “aggravated assault” on the bloated 240-pound vice principal because she squeezed past him to escape his incarceration of her when her mother told her on the phone to come home.
The Walton family had, in fact, left a forwarding address at the post office.
This slovenly treatment of a black student’s rights shows a lackadaisical attitude toward black children by the board and administration. It confirms a blithe unconcern for their wellbeing. Had the child Renee been a white child from South Tampa, one can be sure that a sycophantic board would have hopped to it in ensuring that the South Tampa family’s engraved notification of the board hearing was delivered on a satin pillow.
I believe that vice-superintendent Otero consciously mishandled the notification ritual. He did the deed unconsciously with impulses emanating from his psyche‘s revenge prompting.
It is not as if Mr. Otero just got off the boat from the Old Country, Bulgaria, via the Black Sea and the Dardnelles and didn’t know the civil rituals of the United States; it is not as if he had no experience in the procedure of forwarding addresses. He has done a plethora in his job of vice superintendent, ensconced therein since the Pleistocene Age. He should have an advanced degree by now in forwarding letters when students’ families move. Like too many in this C-student administration, Mr. Otero is a slow learner.
I reason as well Le Otero’s slovenliness was due to Renee’s being a black child and that this dereliction betrayed insidious retaliation in sabotaging Renee’s case by the whole administrative system. Why? Because Renee Anderson’s parents fought back at the discriminatory behavior toward Renee and them by the board and administration. The board and administrative bigots expect that such victims as Renee and her family will take the board and administration’s contemptuous behavior lying down whilst groveling with “Yassir, Mahster.”
A prime example of discrimination in Renee’s case exists in the assault claim of vice principal Kevin Messena. Mr. Messena and the administration closed ranks, lied also about Renee’s involvement in a school-grounds fight, didn’t give her a chance to refute the charge of participation in the fight on school grounds or in an assault on Le Messena. Without valid data, the administration trapped this black student into an ersatz charge of aggravated battery against the 240-pound functionary when she exited his office as well as participant in a school-yard fight.
The administrative punishers never allowed Ms. Anderson her Constitutional rights, and the local courts steeped in the byways of this complicit punishment choreograph, approved this denial of Renee’s rights in adjudication of the charge up through the appeals court presided over by Judge Bucklew, who was judge in the appeals case and who had some labyrinthine connection with Tom Gonzalez’s wife. I believe that the detective whom Mr. Walton has employed to track down issues in the casee discovered these data.
The people excoriating Renee at every stage of her expulsion seemed to have a connection to each other honed over years of relationships punctuated by behind-the-scenes irregular pupil expulsions that got the imprimatur of the courts, part of the slowly accrewing choreograph. This situation dismays. The courts are supposed to administer justice in these forlorn regions. I suspect that the folks who handled Renee’s expulsion ritual worked together like bees in a beehive. The judge who presided at the first trial insisted that Renee had pled guilty in the hearing--the one she and her family were kicked out of. It seems that the system allows only a guilty plea in that hearing. To which a logical question would be Then why have the hearing?
This first-trial judge said to Renee, “Everybody knows you’re guilty.” Is this judicial language, or is it biased, pile-on language? Renee’s attorney tried to determine Menendez’ degree of racism on the stand by asking him if it were true that he had been heard to use racist language. But the judges slapped the question down. I would have liked to hear the answer.
The Heilmann exhortation to Renee to “get off my school grounds!” represents a Freudian slip that lays bare the attitude of the administration and board toward black students.
The folks in the ROSSAC big White House believe the schools rank as their property and that field-hand teachers and students--especially black ones--are interlopers on it--tolerated only because students’ and their teachers’ numbers dictate the tax loot the board and administration preside over--loot that undergirds their status as power poseurs in the Bay Area. Scrutiny of the behavior behind the curtain shows that they are abusers of children--especially black ones--trapped in the expulsion pas de deux.
I think it’s significant in your case, Ms. Ethridge, that you do not belong to the NAACP but rather to the Athena Society. Besides this social club of ladies who lunch, you belong to the Florida School Boards Association Board (FSBA) of Directors and are an alternate on both the FSBA Legislative Liaison Committee and the Hillsborough Education Foundation. You as well serve on the board of directors for ChairScholars, Keep Hillsborough County Beautiful, and the Florida Center for Survivors of Torture--for which Renee now qualifies after her mauling by the board, administration, and courts. None of these prissy committees of which you are member has established a record for fighting for black students’ rights in the schools. They fight for nothing but having taxpayers pay their dues in these ersatz organizations which gather in cities around the state on holidays subsidezed by taxpayers so that the attendees can look important and engage in the exploration of tremendous trifles.
I am familiar with the ladies-who-lunch Athena club. I knew its founder, Nancy Ford, recently passed away. Forty years ago, Nancy came to my home in Beach Park a couple of weeks after our family, including our ancient cat Twink, who disappeared under the house for two weeks in a hissy when we moved from New York because she had been forced to sojourn in the luggage part of the plane instead of going first class. Nancy came as ambassador from the bank she worked for.
After Title VII nudged banks into hiring women to upper-level jobs, the local bank hillbilly Machiavellies rigged up vp slots for prominent society women like Nancy. But attenuated sexism meant these to be for show, not regular-guy jobs. The ersatz female vice presidents passed out cook books to relocating families, a maneuver suited to high finance.
My living in South Tampa notwithstanding, forty years ago Bay Area feminists such as I did not represent restrained, ladylike mores, which is the reason that Nancy never had the nerve to join us in the National Organization of Women, which I convened, but set up the women’s-rights-lite club Athena.
While the Athena ladies lunched, NOW picketed; we sat in; we mounted verbal challenges; wrote sassy, abusive letters of protest to the town sexist biggies; ratted out discrimination against women to Washington compliance agencies; and offered instant resistance to any discrimination we spotted against women by the diehards of women’s oppression in Hillsborough County. If we spotted any, we squawked, usually at the scene of the crime.
I recall our first street agitprop: NOW challenged the local papers’ sex-segregated job ads. Not content, we followed that up by picketing Wolfe Brothers department store on Franklin Street--since gone out of business--to challenge its policy of charging women, not men, for alterations. The manager’s defense: “Women sew.”
Meanwhile, dear Nancy, not able to join us bona fide feminists due to social timidity, nonetheless was bent on doing something to augment achieving women‘s equality. She dared not jeopardize her South Tampa social standing, so she walked on eggs and founded an attenuated form of feminism, the Athena Society. This moniker was ironic since Athena was the goddess of war and would have been president of the local chapter of hell-raising NOW feminists had she been around.
Athena’s feminist attitude ranked feeble then as now. It evolved as just another snoot club of women too insecure to speak out to assert their full citizenship and instead became a watered-down organizations such as the Junior League (junior to whom? one wonders. Men, of course) and Athena instead. These parts of the sisterhood occupied the pastel end slot.
Nancy asked me to speak at one of Athena’s luncheons on the ERA. I was to discourse on the grittier aspects of the ERA battle to this refined club of ladies engaged in flaccid feminism. Besides being called “jackbooted lesbos,“ we radical feminists had to contend with such issues as the opposition’s scare tactic that the ERA would force men and women to go to the toilet together. Foes of the ERA were dumb and not high minded. Their concerns about the ERA were not metaphysical; they were physical and often gross. So to talk up the ERA among the luke warm, I sallied forth to an Athena elegant luncheon and got the impression that the Athena women weren’t listening to my ERA comments so much as assessing my wardrobe.
As a poor teacher, I couldn’t dress in posh Athena duds, and these recidivist fashion groupies immediately picked up on this fact. Clothes to them ranked a major tenet of life--much more important than the ERA. This obsession was and is a major symptom of women’s second-class status in a man’s world.
Women pro-feminism remain to this day interlopers in a man’s power keep-out area. Men consider them toxic. Women don’t get past the lock-out by competence but by appearance--enhanced by attire to make them look soigné so that they can trap one of the dominant y-chromosome high-earning critters into the financial security of marriage by the lures of posh attire and giddy behavior so that they can live in South Tampa and join the Junior League.
I fended off the sneers that quivered at the corners of Athena doyennes’ mouths at my poor attire. But shazam! I had unexpected protection: I had by chance grabbed one of my big, old Chanel bags that day to stack my notes in. I have about a dozen old Chanels picked up over the years during times of prosperity hanging as decorations on my bedroom wall. The good thing is that Chanel bags never change. They styles stay the same ove the years.
When I flopped my old Chanel on the table to extract my notes, there was a palpable change of atmosphere in the room.
With my old Chanel protecting me like a cross brandished at vampires in old Bela Lugosi movies, I exited the luncheon feeling as if it were a fool-proof shield to be used when I met Athena vampires of snobbery and superannuated feminine behavior whilst they pretended to be committed to women‘s rights, noses in the air.
Forty years after my Athena speech and several years since Nancy’s death, Athena continues. It’s feminist-lite program supports “a young Woman of Promise“; how is not clear. Probably it involves a luncheon fundraiser with doilies for the young woman’s first-quarter tuition to some snoot-approved women’s college such as Radcliffe, at which she will major in art history.
Athena steers clear of gut-level feminist issues of abortion rights, sexual harassment, and employment discrimination. These are too messy and unladylike for Athena just as was the suffragists’ fighting for the right of women to vote too unladylike for the dingbat x-chomosomers then. These traitors to their sex sneered at Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and joined men in calling them “hyenas in petticoats.” But the collaborators sped to the voting booth when suffragist Valkyries pushed through women‘s right to vote. The Virginia mother who did the trick told her legislator son she would not speak to him for the rest of her life if he did not vote for the passage of suffrage.
In the intervening forty years, Athena has continued its luncheons. Its membership is still by-invitation-only. It has run a campaign of capturing productive community women to adorn its membership marquee such as Betty Castor, Katherine Essrig, and Sandy Freedman.
The list includes as well your name, Ms. Edgecomb. You are the token innocuous prominent black woman. Also listed is the judge that presided in one of Renee’s trials: Susan Bucklew, who ruled against Renee‘s appeal. Now we begin to see through a glass darkly the covert network of bureaucrats who undid Renee. Renee’s hearing and trial record begins to resemble an unspoken conspiracy of Bay Area power bureaucrats sticking together on school expulsions behind the scenes from the school grounds through the courts. The choreograph is “To hell with the kids, especially black ones with parents that, in Renee‘s case, fight for their daughter‘s rights; let’s keep our record unblemished with no messy concessions to justice.”
The school board, which you now chair, does not protest black children but fosters the discriminatory statistics of more black than white children’s suffering from the ritual of expulsion and low graduation rates as the NAACP study documents. One would have thought that as the only black on the board, you would have waded in and demanded an in-house committee of board members, administrators, teachers, and parents to plumb the situation and insist on its correction.
You would have thenceforth monitored progress of the committee’s suggestions or the lack of it, making a pest of yourself if necessary. I can testify that nothing beats making a pest of yourself. I excel at this skill. It’s much more effective than whining diplomacy. Women in Florida and elsewhere would do well to make pests of themselves. Being pests is how we got the U.S. Weather Bureau to stop callint all hurricanes women’s names because “both are unpredictable and tempestuous.” To shut us up, the bureau buckled to equality and now names hurricanes men’s and women’s names alternately.
To give some idea of how unfair Renee Anderson’s punishment was, let’s scrutinize the charge of “aggravated assault” responsible for her arrest and incarceration and compare her case with the aggravated assault on students of a King High school administrator. Renee brushed past Assistant Principal Macena, who tried to trap her in his office. This constituted the putative aggravated assault. One should have thought that cooping up a person in an office against a person’s will rings a bell somewhere in the justice system.
Renee had called her mother via cell phone and told her Le Messena was holding her against her will. Her mother told her to come home, which was across the street from the school. But the hulking Messena penned Renee in his office on unproved charges of fighting in the schools and cried aggravated assault when she brushed past him. Every time I review this situation, I believe there’s something whacked out about it. A student brushes past a hefty administrator, and that’s aggravated assualt. Aw, c’mon.
Question: why did the upper ROSSACers take this man from his natural habitat of the athletic fields and put him in a principal’s office? Look at his ill-written, badly punctuated resume above. He belongs in a sports venue or janitor duty: he should never take off his cleats.
I bet this hefty specimen makes at least $65,000 a year without being able to spell "until" or punctuate in a school system dedicated to infusing these skills into its pupils. Somebody who spells “until” as “untill” does not have the brain power to make the fine distinctions a vice principal must master. A meat plant hefting beef carcasses is the place for the likes of Mr. Messena.
An assistant principal at King ordered pubescent boys into his office, ordered them to close the door, ordered them to remove their shoes and socks, ordered them to present him their feet for him to manipulate and drool over. He especially liked to crack their toes.
Other administrators either pretended not to note this weird behavior; nor did they try to stop it. The principal, Carol Bruning, must be more than usually unaware of what is going on in her school.
This was the sicko scene of an administrator who produced the “Toecracker” caper, which the administration treated as a prank with an “Oh, isn’t he a card?!” when knowledge of it was forced upon them.
One of the boys’ mothers called the papers to reveal the outrage. The Toe Cracker saga appeared in the SPT.
The hypertrophie charge of “aggravated battery” against Renee got her arrested stat and incarcerated without the administration’s even determining if she were guilty of the charge. It didn’t let her speak. There was no interrogation of Renee with the principal present which school board attorney Tom Gonzalez airily tells the press any student is entitled to. In contrast, the King assistant principal’s repeated and blatant aggravated assault on multiple pubescent boys’ feet probably for psychosexual gratification got ignored or treated as a joke when forced to the administration‘s attention.
This case highlights another outrage perpetrated in the schools. Administrators never get fired for bad behavior or incompetence; only teachers do. The Professional Standards files will support this statement.
How does this lax treatment of a King High administrator’s repeated, overt aggravated-assault fetish caused his assumption that he was entitled to manipulate the feet of pubescent male students stack up against Renee’s unproven aggravated-assault charge on burly Vice Principal Messena?
Comparison produces the suspicion that invidious discrimination unfolded in the administrative rush to judgment with non-deliberative jocko Principal Heillmann’s anthem of “Get off my school grounds!” to Renee. This administrative big shot didn’t bother to question Student Renee Anderson or give her the benefit of a doubt before he chased her across the parking lot into the cops’ arms, screaming “Get off my grounds!”
Mr. Heillmann had early called the police to clamp handcuffs on the young woman, arrest her, and jail her for aggravated assault. Meanwhile, the bizarre King High footsy-tootsy administrator gets free rein to pursue his probably psychosexually based indulgence, dismissed as mere horseplay by the administration and board. The principal of King snoozed the whole time. The board avoided knowledge of the situation. “We knew nothing about it” is the board’s template fall-back mantra. The truth is they know everything about everything and sit on it.
Yet these elected public servants opine ad nauseum on the board dais that they are “concerned about the safety of the children.” Oh, sure. You betcha.
Instead of calling the cops to arrest the King High administrator for chronic aggravated assault on the school’s pubescent boys, the administration tolerated and even joked about it--“Ha! Ha! Ha” They pretended to never have taken Psychology 101. They stalled until a parent’s outcry against the whacky foot-fetish administrator finally forced the administration to call in a lackadaisical sheriff’s investigator who declared the administration, not the sheriff’s department, should deal with the King High toe cracker. Passing the buck among Hillsborough County community leaders represents template behavior.
Showing their slick, practiced powers of evasion, the administration and board side-stepped this parent’s threat it appears by having an in-house factotum with some ersatz psychology background evaluate the man for pathology. Naturally, the in-house evaluator found the Toe Cracker a model of mental health. Not doing so would have meant the poor wretch’s job.
This evasion of parental concern for the children to whom the board and administration act in loco parentis and such disinterest in multiple boys’ abuse refute the board’s claim to have paramount in their consideration the safety of the children. Its members show how lax and indifferent the board and administration are about Hillsborough County school children’s safety when it comes to making an administrator responsible for criminal battery on multiple boys unchecked over a period of time.
In contrast, adjudging a student guilty of criminal battery without an examination and locking her up as in Renee’s case gets a shoo-in “of course” from the board. But the abusive administrator gets a non-professional exam and a pass. Those acts display extant invidious ethics for the Hillsborough County board and administration.
Principal Heilmann and his administration distorted and evaded the Student Code of Conduct in its eagerness to strip student Renee Anderson of her rights. In contrast, the board and administration ignored and condoned the criminal battery a King High administrator forcded on pubescent boys in his power.
The administration called the cops for Renee’s arrest, not giving her a chance to refute the charge. They ignored the foot fetishist’s activities until a parent called their bluff. This is what’s known in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics as whacko ethics.
Board Policies (mounted on school Web site)
Zero tolerance policies should apply equally to all students, Redundant comma: splits a compound verb and are not intended to be rigorously applied to petty acts of misconduct and misdemeanors. This zero tolerance policy does not require the reporting of petty acts of misconduct and misdemeanors to a law enforcement agency, including, redundant comma but not limited to disorderly conduct, disrupting a school function, simple assault or battery (THE STATE’S ATTORNEY’S OFFICE RELABELED RENEE’S PUTATIVE BUMPING OF MESSENA AS SIMPLE BATTERY.), affray, theft of less than $300, trespassing, and vandalism of less than $1,000. The District will seek to use alternatives to expulsion or referral to law enforcement agencies unless the use of such alternatives will pose a threat to school safety.
Hitler and Goebbels did not lie any more disingenuously in selling fascism to the German people. Renee’s case refutes the board-policy lie of solicitude for students. This putative board solicitude for students’ wellbeing crumbles when Mr. Heilmann’s and Le Macena’s overkill justice on student Anderson for an unproven, petty act gets arrest and incarceration.
Why did these more humane, civil Board Policy standards not apply in Renee’s case? My hunch says racial discrimination.
More twaddle promulgated by the board:
To better ensure appropriate due-process is provided a student, the Board establishes the following regulations:
A. Students subject to suspension etc., etc., pure flapdoodle.
A student and a student's parent or legal guardian must be given written notice of the intention to expel and the reasons therefore, and an opportunity to appear with a representative before the Superintendent to answer the charges.
More twaddle: The student and/or parent or legal guardian shall also be provided a brief description of the student's rights and of the hearing procedure. The Board shall act on any appeal to an expulsion.
The Superintendent shall ensure that all members of the staff use the above regulations when dealing with students. In addition, this statement of due process rights is to be placed in all student handbooks in a manner that will facilitate understanding by students and their parents.F.S. 1006.07, 1006.09, 1001.51, 1002.20
This is all monkey pookey piled higher and deeper.
Comparing Renee’s treatment to these benign promises shows the board handbook represents deliberate, mendacious puffery. I think vice principal Goebbels wrote this folderol. Renee’s appeal attorney argued masterfully for Renee’s being denied due-process rights. Her step-father insisted that the school and administration denied them. But Athena member appeals judge Susan Bucklew found against Renee. She is the judge who has some connection with Tom Gonzalez’s wife.
Members of the board and administration not only punctuate badly, they abuse the English language, gutting words of their meaning. It’s criminal that school leaders distort language to disguise their chicanery and protect their power because they are supposed to teach children to use language exactly, not twist it to trap a student into expulsion.
I’m now reading how Hitler took over Germany. Hitler was a runaway liar. With propaganda minister Goebbels’ help, Hitler did the same thing the board does in these disingenuous student-handbook statements : the board guts language of its meaning, twisting it not to inform but to obfuscate what they are really doing behind the scenes.
This clumsy abuse of the English language is identifier for C-students who clog administration for undeserved bloated salaries. A-students go from college to the classroom and teach. C-students scamper to administration the minute they graduate with some marginal major because administration’s where the money is.
Pop Quiz for all administrators: The quiz will cover standard punctuation and composition of an essay on the implications of the word “affray” as used in the Hillsborough County administration handbook. See Ms. De Cesare in her office for analysis of your test results. Bring your grammar primer for remedial assignments.
More hooey from Board policies handbook:
Race/Color Harassment
Prohibited racial harassment occurs when unwelcome physical, verbal, or nonverbal conduct is based upon an individual's race or color and when the conduct has the purpose or effect of interfering with the individual's work or educational performance; of creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working, and/or learning environment; or of interfering with one's ability to participate in or benefit from a class or an educational program or activity. Such harassment may occur where conduct is directed at the characteristics of a person's race or color such as racial slurs, nicknames implying stereotypes, epithets, and/or negative references relative to racial customs.
The Gates Grant should have supported this investigation instead of the hooha search for the elements of the county’s classroom teachers’ pedagogy. Gut reaction suggests the study results will find use by administration in threatening teachers’ jobs if they are too inquisitive or too critical about how the overlords run the schools.
If you don’t have the stomach or social courage for this obligation, you should resign and make way for a black person from your district who does.
Ms. Raskin:
I have read your appeals brief for Renee Anderson's case against the Hillsborough County schools not one but three times. The date says December 21, 2009.
Postscript from the attorney who handled Renee’s appeal:
-----Original Message-----From: Doris Landis Raskin [mailto:dlawraskin@bellsouth.net] Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 11:16 AMTo: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.comSubject:
Thank you for your kind words. I am not proud of the writing, but I am proud of the content. Cases are not decided on how well the brief is written, but the legal issues, the application of the facts to the issues, and the rule of law.
Doris Landis Raskin
dlawraskin@bellsouth.net



Ms. Raskin:
I have read your appeals brief for Renee Anderson's case against the Hillsborough County schools not one but three times. The date says December 21, 2009.
Renee’s appeal:
Lee Drury De Cesare15316 Gulf Boulevard 802Madeira Beach, FL 33708Tdecesar@tampabay.rr.comLeedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com
c: Hillsborough County NAACPFlorida NAACPNational NAACPThe governor’s officeHillsborough County Children’s BoardTampa Mayor’s Office and Members of the City CouncilPrincipal HeilmannVice-principal MessenaAll Members of School BoardMr. Otero, vice superintendentThe Florida SentinelThe St. Petersburg TimesBill MaxwellThomas Marshal, SPTJabel, SPTTampa TribuneThe Florida State Education Department Hillsborough County’s Legislative delegationPlant City CouncilLa Gaceta ;fnewspaperMbrown@tampatribune.com;Athena Luncheon Club;Florida Department of Education;
Renee Anderson, representative of the black children who are more likely to be punished by suspension than white children.
-----Original Message-----From: Doris Landis Raskin [mailto:dlawraskin@bellsouth.net] Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 11:16 AMTo: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.comSubject:
Renee's Appeals Attorney says this:
Renee's case is concluded unjustly and unfairly. The appellate court found a completely new fact, i.e., that the board had offered Renee an alternative placement. If that were true, we would never have filed a case. When a case is decided at the appellate level, the only thing left is an appeal to the Supreme Court. There is no jurisdictional issue for the Supreme Court. The appellate court tanked it by finding a fact not in evidence.
Thank you for your kind words. I am not proud of the writing, but I am proud of the content. Cases are not decided on how well the brief is written, but the legal issues, the application of the facts to the issues, and the rule of law. In Renee's case, I believe it was decided on personalities. Susan Bucklew, a favorite of the appellate court, and a former high school English teacher in the defendant school system who had to know all of the good old boys involved, should have recused herself, but didn't. I didn't know about her until I read her wild hair of a decision and did some research.
Doris Landis Raskin
dlawraskin@bellsouth.net
Read "When students are suspects, lines blur
Police in Florida sometimes go beyond their legal authority when interrogating suspects while they are in school."
By TOM MARSHALL and JONATHAN ABEL, Times Staff WritersPublished January 20, 2008
