Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch

2011-02-26T17:11:00.000-08:00

My function to put these at the bottom off the blog is on the fritiz, so I'm putting them here. lee

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Egypt's Crooks in Government Are Not the Only Loo...":

It is good for these crooks on the school board to know that even some people are onto their shenanigans. In the end they could care less, because they are shameless. Already everything you have reported about Tom Gonzalez, the entire school board, and MaryEllen Elia shows that these people are absolutely shameless and have not ethical compass. They probably don't care what others know or don't know. Still it has to be good for the world that they know that a few people know about their bad behavior, and you can bet that God knows. The entire ROSSAC building is probably going to hell one day!

Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 10:51 AM

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Egypt's Crooks in Government Are Not the Only Loo...":

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2011 3:30 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Going up the Ladder for Help.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Going up the Ladder for Help":

To the poster above:
Let me start by saying I do not personally know April Griffin’s son, or any of the other individuals that were commenting on the forum in which his tirade was spewed. It was publicly posted and I stumbled upon it by accident. This “Zac” could be a serial killer for all I know or care. That wasn’t the purpose of sharing the posts. Chase either did not have enough common sense to know that posting on other people’s FB wall (not marked private) may result in other unintended people reading it, or he didn’t care. That was poor judgment on his part. I assure you that my intent for reposting his rants was not to highlight some immature feud which people could care less about, but to bring light to the type of individual April Griffin has raised. I consider myself very well qualified to assess the values and character of others, as my line of work gives me daily contact with both parents and their children. I have found over my many years of working with young people that their words and actions do most often reflect the character of their parents. (This barring the few with PTS, personality disorders, and organic/biological conditions.) The posts by Chase do reveal an arrogant and spoiled child, who feels entitled to put down and bully others. He also seems extremely desperate for attention, and most likely suffers from some major insecurity in which he feels the strong need to overcompensate by either attacking or acting superior to others. It's not a huge leap to assume this is a result of either poor accountablity at home or faulty modeling. Keep in mind that this forum is for shedding the light on the dark side of the school system. By being a public figure on the school board, April Griffin opens herself up for close examination. This includes family. If Chase is too ignorant to understand the responsibility that brings, then he is either excessively self-centered, or seriously misguided.
April would be wise to either cancel or closely monitor his account from this point on. He might not have the self-restraint needed to make the right choices, and she doesn't need another layer of hypocrisy revealed.

Publish

Egypt's Crooks in Government Are Not the Only Looters of Public Money

2011-02-07T17:46:00.000-08:00

The NYT story below on Cuomo's lowering superintendents' sky-high salaries reminds us of the situation in Hillsborough County.

Elia's salary is a bloated $300,000, The board lowered the Ph.D. to her master's to hire her; it turned down candidates with the requisite terminal PH.D. and plentiful, varied experience.

Elia's experience was in the only supervisory jobs she had in the Hillsborough County school system. This supervisory job revealed Elia's having overbuilt classrooms and letting a real-estate scam operate under her nose that a SPT reporter walked in off the street, spotted, and wrote about.

I have asked for Ms. Elia's hiring record and that of Tom Gonzalez. whose $275,000 salary is the highest among the state board attorneys. Gonzalez has no contract: he apparently submits billable hours, and the money comes pouring out of tax coffers with no question. It's like the $5o million a day pouring into Mubarak and his thugs' hands.

The SP School Board's attorney makes $175,000 a year, he has a definitive contract of duties, and works an 8-hour day. Gonzalez's having no contract means that he can and does contract other work such as South Florida business.

I requested the Elia-Gonzalez hiring information three times of the Public Affairs office. Absolute silence. Finally, I wrote to the attorney general of Florida to complain. The answer to the AG's inquiry from Ms Cobbe was that she had never received the requests for public information from me when they sit right now in my computer's files, showing I sent them to her.

Ms. Cobbe had sent me public information before--sometimes with a little snippiness on her part and nudging on mine. So this behavior puzzled.

My inference for this lie about the Public Information office's not receiving my requests is that Ms. Cobbe is scared to mess with the Elia and Gonzalez employment files because she might get fired for doing so. Firing for ticking off Elia is a regular ritual in ROSSAC. People walk on eggs.

I infer Ms. Cobbe was scared to mess with the Elia or Gonzalez files for fear of losing her job. The law said she should fulfill a citizen's request for information, but her ROSSAC experience told her she would be on dangerous ground when she delved into Elia's and Gonzalez's job files. That's how jobs are lost in ROSSAC: Ms. Elia throws a lightning bolt at the culprit, and it's curtains.

The board knows about this ongoing obscenity of vicious treatment of employees and does nothing to rein in Ms. Elia as the public believes the board members do. I further believe that the reason the board looks the other way at termination-of-employees times is that the quid pro quo that Elia and the board worked out at Elia's hiring said that Elia wouldn't mess with board perquisites or incumbency and that the board members wouldn't mess with how Elia ran the schools and treated its personnel. No Ph.D. from Columbia, having read and believing Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, would sign off on such thuggish exchange of favors. The ritual is a little like a Mafia practice except that Ms. Elia doesn't tell some ROSSAC thug to make the offender sleep with the fishes but instead tells the employee victim to see Mr. Otero for termination of employment. The Mafia's ritual is more elegant and venerable. Unfortunately, Florida state law makes the administration and board masters in the employment area.

This note reminds everybody that there are resources to ensure that you get public information requested. When you have done your best to cooperate with ROSSAC and if its minions dig in their heels, squawk. Tattle. Rat out. Go up the chain of command for help.

This is America. That is what public officials are for: to help us citizens see that bureaucrats obey the law.

Note the NYT article below about Cuomo's lowering superintendents' salaries. Elia's is $125,000 over Cuomo's limit. I bet the whole ROSSAC gang has bloated salaries. Yet the complicit board keeps upping these ROSSAC payoffs no matter if the economy is on its last legs, especially Elia's: she gets the "bonus" that Earl the Pearl Lennard set up for his greedy little self for teachers' upping students test scores. God forbid that teachers get a raise. Naturally, the board continued that bonus-for-teachers' work obscenity for La Elia.

The money has bought no elegance for Elia. There's a limit to what a St. John knit can do for you. Eliae continues to look like a squat, dumpy Russian peasant woman coming off a barley field after a hard day of shucking--or whatever peasants do to barley.

Let's see if one board member has the courage to call for a review of ROSSAC's across-the-board loot and make it harmonize with the crippled economy and also demand a review of the reputed order to bus drivers and other low-level employees that a reader wrote me about, which, she says, had their salaries lowered but their work load remained the same.

Information like that makes me want to have somebody sleep with the fishes.

lee

LEE OUTSIDE FLORENCE, WAITING TO GO COMMUNE WITH DAVID AND THEN TO GET MACHIAVELLI TO SIGN HER COPY OF THE PRINCE AND ASK HIM WHICH CHAPTER TO READ TO LEARN HOW TO DEAL WITH SCHOOL BOARD AND ADMINISTRATION THUGS.

GO TO LEEDRURYDECESARESCASTING-ROOM COUCH.BLOGSPOT.COM FOR MORE OF THE SCHOOL BOARD'S AND ROSSAC THUGS' SCANDALS. LEE

Advertise on NYTimes.com

Cuomo, Pushing School Cuts, Offers a Target: Superintendent Salaries

By THOMAS KAPLAN

Published: February 6, 2011

Carole G. Hankin, the schools superintendent in Syosset on Long Island, made an unexpected cameo appearance in Albany last week: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo cast her salary as a prime example of wasteful spending by school districts.

Enlarge This Image

Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo suggested that school superintendent salaries were too high.

Times Topic: Andrew M. Cuomo

Mr. Cuomo did not mention Dr. Hankin by name in his budget address, but he did offer her salary: $386,868, more than the pay of any other superintendent in the state. “I applied for that job,” the governor joked, adding that he had decided to run for governor, which pays $179,000, only after he had been rejected.

Mr. Cuomo’s remarks came as he presented a budget calling for a $2.85 billion reduction in local school aid, a proposal that has already drawn fierce criticism from educators. But the governor offered some criticism of his own for school officials.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said that school districts had enough means to withstand the decline in state financing, and pointedly suggested that they look at whether they are spending too much on their own bureaucracy.

More than 40 percent of New York State’s superintendents earn at least $200,000 each year in salary and benefits, Mr. Cuomo said.

“I understand that they sometimes have to manage budgets, and sometimes the budgets are difficult,” he said. “But why they get paid more than the governor of the state I really don’t understand.”

Mr. Cuomo repeated his joke about coveting Dr. Hankin’s job in encore presentations of his budget plan in Purchase, in Westchester County, and in Amherst, near Buffalo.

“We have $500,000 school superintendents,” he told reporters after his appearance in Purchase. “We can’t pay those kinds of salaries.”

Mr. Cuomo is not the only governor grappling with deep financial problems who has singled out school district leaders.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is imposing a cap of $175,000 on most superintendents’ salaries, depending on district enrollment, and Mr. Cuomo’s criticism raised the specter that he might pursue a similar path.

A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, John Milgrim, declined to discuss whether the governor was considering a cap of his own. Mr. Milgrim would say only that despite the proposed school-aid cut, Mr. Cuomo believed that layoffs “are not inevitable and that school districts have numerous ways they can bring down costs and be more efficient, including a reining in of salaries of superintendents and other administrative personnel.”

As attorney general, Mr. Cuomo investigated cases of school administrators who earned salaries and pensions simultaneously, a practice known as double dipping. Aides to Mr. Cuomo suggested that the governor viewed superintendent salaries as another example of government spending that is far beyond the state’s means given the fiscal conditions.

But the issue of school administrators’ salaries also offers an alternate villain to parents angry about the governor’s proposed cuts to school aid.

Whatever Mr. Cuomo’s motivation, his comments upset some school superintendents.

“The state and the schools are facing difficult times that ultimately require strong leadership,” said Robert N. Lowry Jr., the deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents. “Superintendents are trying to provide that leadership, and in many districts, they have passed up raises or made other concessions to save money for their districts and also to set an example.”

Mr. Lowry noted that the average salary for a superintendent — about $163,000 last year — was far from the figures Mr. Cuomo has been citing. (The national average is about $160,000, according to the Educational Research Service.)

Mr. Lowry added that the dollar savings from reducing superintendent pay would amount to an insignificant sum in comparison with Mr. Cuomo’s cut to local school aid. Billy Easton, the executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, which opposes the school-aid cut, sounded a similar note.

“There is a huge disconnect,” Mr. Easton said, “between the governor focusing on the top 1 percent of superintendent salaries and offering a fiscally irrational tax cut to people making the same amount of money, or 10 times that.”

Going up the Ladder for Help

2011-01-24T10:35:00.000-08:00

Office of Attorney General
State of Florida
the Capitol PL-01
Tallahassee, FL 32399-1050
1/24/11

Dear General Bondi:

I enclose an open-records request to the Hillsborough county school board’ public affairs director, Linda Cobbe, who is supposed to fulfill these requests.

I asked for this information first three months ago and have asked for it three times subsequently. Ms. Cobbe has not acknowledged my requests.

Could your office intervene and get the Hillsborough County schools to render the material I have requested?

Thank you.

Respectfully,

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708

January 12, 2011

Ms. Cobbe:

Please provide me with the following public information. This is my 3rd request for these data according to my records:

The hiring history of Ms. Elia, including the applications of her competitors as well as the application of Ms. Elia; copies of the advertising done and in what national organs and at what cost to the taxpayers; a copy of the stenographic notes of the board’s exhanges on the hiring of Ms. Elia, especially the conversation about lowering the Ph.D. requirement to a master’s, Ms. Elia’s terminal degree;

The hiring history of Mr. Tom Gonzalez, including the advertising of the job and the cost to taxpayers of that required advertising; the applications of Mr. Gonzalez and of other attorneys for the job; any discussion recorded stenographically of the board’s remarks during the attorney’s hiring conference(s); This is my second request for this material;

The school’s court records of the Renee Anderson case;
this is my second request for these data.

Thank you. When you have assembled these documents, please email me, and I will come in from the beach to review them.

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom De Cesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 6:39 PM
To: 'foy333@aol.com'
Subject: FW:

Behind Closed Doors

2011-01-19T06:59:00.000-08:00

Student Renee Anderson, victim of vicious board expulsion process

Deadly triplets of sadism: Doretha Edgcomb, board chair; Robert Heilman, Riverview principal; Kenvin Massena, Riverview vice principal

Administration Literacy on Web Display

Heilmann's resume on the school Web site:

Mr. Robert Heilmann: Remedial Englilsh Candidate (from his Web blurb)

Mr. Robert Heilmann became an educator in 1972, no comma: splits compound verb and has taught Elementary no cap PE, Social Studies, No caps and English. After earning a Masters’ lowercase; singular possessive: apostrophe “s” Degree lower case in Counselor Education lower case and in Educational Leadership lower case; double introductory prepositional phrases- comma: he served as a Guidance Counselor lower case and was an Assistant Principal lower case for Student Affairs lower case at East Bay High School.

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 panel's name for the sport of soccer from 1991-1994 (each country possessive before gerund having only seven officials).

Guess what subject Heilmann taught once? Would you believe English? Presently, there is a somber ongoing study {courtesy of a misuse of the million-dollar Gates Grant} to examine and codify teachers' pedalogical maneuvers to diagnose good teachers and bad teachers. The administrators conducting the study are the same ones who hired Heilmann to teach English.

Heilmann should never teach English. He should take English. He should enroll at once in one of Riverview's 9th-grade English classes. The English faculty must take him in hand and teach him basic literacy.

My hope is that the Riverview English faculty will trap Mr. Heilmann in study hall and teach him basic grammar and punctuation.

The Riverview physical ed scholars with an assist from the ROTC specialists should cuff Massena around a bit and tell him to stop whining when a female student brushes past him to go home from school.

These teachers must not leave any petechiae or purpura on Le Massena's extensive person, however. If purpura or petechiae turn up, Tom Gonzalez will run, not walk, to the court house to file charges against the inflicters of these harmless lesions.

The charge will be aggravated assault meriting, Tom wil aver, triple damages. Taxpayers will pony up for these suits and any pain-and-suffering extra-goodies charges that Gonzalez can get a jury to buy. Luckily, his court record shows that jurors don't like Le Gonzalez. Only when he has a complicit judge as in the Renee Anderson appeal does he win.

I do not discourage homilies to both of these two reluctant scholars, Heilmann and Massena, in Standard English. Latin adepts may employ the classical tongue to deliver their homilies while the rest of us stand around and look proud that we have such giants of scholarship in our ranks. If somebody could deliver a lecture in classical Greek, I would faint with pleasure.

No brothel locutions are allowed, no exceptions. One knows that the brothel clients were mostly aristocrats, but that doesn't matter. Stick to the rule.

We teachers have a tradition of erudition to maintain. And there'll be . So I want to hear of no language stronger than that employed in the alleys and docks of Elizabethan England; one does not have to be prissy but does not indulge in crude locutions, period. Offenders against these rules will see me in my office after class, bringing their linguistics textbooks. We will cover the chapter on correct use of the demotic as punishment for defections from scholarly English.

Lee, Professor at HCC for 28 years, a long time to serve in the hills and dales of the comma splice, the run-on sentence, and the dreaded dangling modifier. And, oh, the terror of the nominative absolute.

We teachers must never forget that John Adams said that "a teacher affects eternity. Adams didn't say an administrator affects eternity or that a board member affects eternity. He said that teachers affect eternity. He also said, "One never knows when a teacher's influence stops." Not recorded but Adams as well said, "Don't let Heilmann get away with trashing language and abusing students black or white. Don let Massena get away with crybaby charges against a female student whom he was trying to pen up in his office" with his 240 pounds of administrative authority.

VILLAINS

Doretha Edgecomb, Principal Robert Heilmann, and Kenneth Massena all played roles in the savage suspension of student Renee Anderson, ignoring the handbook suspension rules. I believe that all students suffer in the expulsion gauntlet. But black children suffer expulsion one and one-half times as frequently as do white children. That's racism.

Sadistic, Unthinking Student
Expulsion

Ponder student Renee Anderson’s mistreatment during her expulsion. Here follow highlights of her ordeal

--Renee saw a fight between two friends and tried to break it up; she was assumed engaged in the fight without checking with her. Vice Principal Massena took her to his office, where he kept her. He barred her exit by standing in the door. Mr. Heilmann had told him to “keep her there so that I can come and suspend her”
--The ovrlords gave Renee no chance to defend herself.

--Principal Hellmann instead chased Renee across the parking lot of Riverview High School, yelling at her, “Get off my school grounds! Get off my school grounds!’

--The 240=pound Vice Principal Massena immured Renee in his office, barring the door by standing in it, and told the cops that Renee had committed “aggravated assault” on him when she brushed past to go home as her mother had told her to do in a cell-phone call; The claim is ridiculous.;

--Hellmann had called the cops before he left his office, presupposing Renee’s guilt;

--That Principal Heilmann, supposed to monitor arrests so that the police don’t abuse the student, stood by while the cops arrested Renee and cuffed her;

---Renee spent the night in lock-up without anybody’s bothering to hear her side of the story still;

--- Mr. Kenneth Otero claimed he was unable to deliver a notice of the board hearing of Renee’s case to Renee’s parents because it did not occur to him that the Waltons had left their forwarding address at the post office when they moved to another city so that Renee could have a more wholesome environment in which to finish her high school degree;

--The board did not bother to ensure that the Waltons and Renee would appear at a hearing that expulsion procedure guarantees a student and did not do a follow-up inquiry on their absence;

-- Ms. Edgecomb, the board’s only black member and resident Aunt Tom, is especially guilty of the abuse of a black child whom she especially should ensure gets fair treatment because she knew that black children are one and one-half times more likely to be suspended than white children.

--The board treated Renee’s tragedy as just one more ho-hum consent-agenda item for which to punch the green button during the board meeting with no board member’s--especially Ms. Edgecomb‘s--bothering to ask where Renee and her parents were for the hearing and instructing Mr. Otero to renew his efforts to get a notice to them.

Overheard Patter of Who’s Minding the Store

DORETHA EDGECOMB, BOARD CHAIR: “LET’S MOVE THE CONSENT AGENDA WITHOUT EXAMINING IT SO THAT I CAN GET HOME IN TIME TO WATCH THE LAURENCE WELK RE-RUN”; RIVERVIEW PRINCIPAL ROBERT HEILMAN: “GET OFF MY SCHOOL GROUNDS!” TO RENEE ANDERSON: MY TIME IS VALUABLE. I’VE GOT TO GO AND REF A GAME.” CRYBABY KENNETH MASSENA: “WHERE’S THE FOOD?’

Author lee outside Florence on her way to see David and get Machiavelli’s autograph on her copy of The Prince. She will also to ask Machiavelli which chapter in The Prince covers abuse of students and denial their Constitutional Rights by school boards.

Hillsborough County School Board Jobs Racket

The below comment by a Casting-room Couch reader adds another dimension to the discussion of board performance.

Edgecomb has one goal and that is to not make trouble for her daughter who is an Assistant Principal or maybe now a Principal. Whenever someone does or doesn't do something it is usually for personal gain. In this case she is protecting her daughter. Supposedly, her daughter worked under a principal who got arrested for drugs on campus. Word on the street is that Edgecomb's daughter knew about this and should have reported it but didn't. Corruption lives on!

This information suggests that the major reason Ms. Edgecomb ran for the board was to protect her daughter’s career. It certainly wasn’t her goal to help black children as the Renee Anderson case and Ms. Edgecomb‘s record of silence on the protection of black children in the schools well demonstrate.

Edgecomb should have protested the Gates grant‘s use for scrutiny of teachers’ classroom performance as if pedagogical style were quantifiable. The data from this exercise will find use as another of the administration’s weapons against teachers--as another way to threaten their jobs if they don’t shut up and never criticize the administration and board. It will not help teachers be better in the classroom but will assist the board and administration’s joint efforts to shut them up and make them ciphers in the system.

Had Edgecomb cared that black children in the schools are suspended at higher rates than white children, are more likely to be labelled retarded, are less likely to earn honors, and less likely to graduate on time
one and one half times less likely than white students, she would have insisted that the Gates grant go to investigating this pathology. But Ms. Edgecomb is content to be the board resident Aunt Tom, never mentioning that minority children need her attention and sponsorship.

Jack Lamb also has a daughter in the school system administration whom he hedges round with his board status, I believe. Candy Olson is reputed to arrange jobs for people. I heard that one job Candy engineered was for an exotic dancer who intervened with the police (one dares not speculate why an exotic dancer would have clout with police) in a DUI of one of Olson’s children. Olson was supposed to have gotten this exotic dancer a job as teacher in the system thereafter. If this story is in error, I would like to hear Olson deny it. The board and administration hides and doctors information so assiduously that you have to listen to scuttlebutt to get an idea of what is really going on.

Mr. Lamb sits in morose composure on the board dais. The only time he came alive in my memory was when I spoke against his using school board secretarial help and board stationery to ask the mayor to lower his condo‘s water bill. He came off his seat and would have vaulted the desk to throttle me had he not been too fat for the maneuver. He had to content himself with telling me to “Stay across the bay [my husband and I live on Madeira Beach] and don’t come over here any more.” Le Jack made it sound as if as if I were a wet back swimming to the US from South America.

Hiring scams rank a major perquisite of the board and superintendent job: it consists of hiring no-talent relatives, buddies, and assorted dindongs usually for pricey administrative perches for which they they have not a scintilla of preparation or education.

A reader points out how the money bled to hire people as a favor, not as an employment necessity hurts the marginal workers in the system. They are too frightened and too unsophisticated to protect themselves:

Governor Scott has invited Supt. Elia from Hillsborough County to be his advisor so to speak about education as the SDHC has been so succcessful! What has been kept quiet is that all support personnel such as paraprofessionals, bus drivers, etc. must take a mandatory 3 day pay cut and still work them because the coffers have run dry. Talk about mismanagement! The union is doing nothing about it of course. Because of the economy, no one dares stand up! They always go after the weakest.

And then there is the scam of creating jobs at taxpayer expense. Elia hired the former assistant superintendent Jim Hamilton after he retired to rev up his consulting firm to milk schools he had been in contact with in his years of mooching off the taxpayers as a high-level administrator despite never having learned the difference between “your” and “you’re.”

The marginally literate Hamilton got his Hillsborough County schools lobbying slot without Elia’s justifying it with a needs study. God forbid that the board cared enough to demand a needs study for one of these superfluous buddy jobs that soak taxpayers. But a few respirations past their coming into office, they roll over and assume board group think. Elia’s word is law to these board layabouts.

I heard “you’re” “your” Hamilton’s pay clocked in at between $64,000 and $94,000 a year. That’s buddy pay. It didn’t come out of Ms. Elia’s pocket but the pockets of the taxpayers. So why should she care?

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 then-doxie Connie Mileto’s candidacy for the Tallahassee position despite her being a kindergarten teacher. This was one of those baleful There’s-no-fool-like-an-old-fool sagas, with Ms. Mileto having in addition to her kindergarten certificate a PH.D. in fooling an old fool to climb the ladder to a job for which she lacked credentials.

A candidate with a political degree or a history degree should have gotten that job. Now, thanks to Ms. Elia’s hiring him with no competition for the unneeded extra lobbying job which Mileto’s job is supposed to encompass, Hamilton and Mileto are back in Tallahassee as lobbying pas de deux. I guess this means his poor wife, who had remarried the old goat incredibly enough, will now have to divorce him again.

Ms. Elia’s job-creation 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 Alafia publicity’s being printed by the usually somnolent press, Elia sent Lie-about-educational credentials GED 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.

GED Griffin suffers the delusion that she is a superior diplomat and that this diplomatic mission to Smith was just one more illustration of how Bismarck should roll over in his grave in envy of her diplomatic acumen. What Griffin engaged in was sneaking, lying, and sticking the taxpayers whom she is supposed to serve with another manufactured, empty job to solve a political problem.

The SPT interviewed La Griffin over the Christmas holiday. Not only did it report that she lied to the SPT but also had cheated the state out of the fees she left on the books when she exited several years ago.
Stealing money from the taxpayers that pay her a bloated salary for sitting on the dais during monthly meetings is bad enough. But stiffing a community college that runs on tax funds is out-and-out theft. So if GED Griffin does not want to have “thief” added to her resume “liar,” she must pay this tax money to HCC.

Griffin should get her degree. With two universities and a community college available, she could do it if she buckled down and stopped blaming her mother’s multiple marriages for her failure to have to have the get up and go to earn her degree. When you are over 40, you must stop blaming your parents for your adult failures. Grown-ups don’t blame their parent for not getting a degree or anything else the person is responsible for.

Harsh reader comments on the SPT article in Tampa Bay Online blog on Griffin’s lying about her meager education show this scam did not please the public. Some wrote to say they it shocked them that a school board member lacked a college degree. There are many things one without a college education can do, but board member of a school system is not one of them. Griffin’s true history shows she should not be on a school board because if she does not value her own education, she doesn’t value that of the county’s students.

April’s case is worse than not having a college degree. She dropped out of high school and took a GED. Is it good for students that Griffin, who should be a role model for them, dropped out of high school, that she did not bestir herself to go parttime and get her degree, that she lied to the press about her education when she ran for office, and that she stiffed a state-supported junior college at which she attended briefly? No and no and no and no.

Then when Griffin lies her way onto the board, she pitches in to help Elia pull off a covert scam that soaks taxpayers and diminishes bad publicity for Elia and board members so that they can keep the public in the dark and retain their power over tax money that pours into ROSSAC and retain such perks as handing out jobs to unqualified relatives, best buds, and peripatetic n’er do wells so that unqualified, lackadaisical people bestrew ROSSAC who, when they can’t do their jobs (recall bus crisis) because of lack of smarts and/or lack of education, must have pricey consultants fly in and teach them their jobs with flash cards. Taxpayers fund this on-the-job training for the unfit in positions with bloated pay without the skills to justify it.

The false job offer that GED Griffin and Motel Breath Falliero peddled to Alafia Smith worked. Smith got the pretend job that Elia pulled out of the dirty-tricks hat and is probably sitting somewhere in the book depository now paring her nails.

I asked for the job’s description as public information. After about two weeks had given personnel honcho Valdez the time to fake one, I got a copy of the job description; then I asked 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 Elia with this create-jobs perquisite as part of the superintendent’s benefits. Board members don’t care enough about taxpayers to stop the Board Consent Agenda rolling belt, lift off the job, and ask for a needs study and other justification for the job. Any board member who did would get the pounding that GED Griffin got from Carol Kurdell and Candy Olson when Griffin, in the first throes of idealism after she joined the board, asked that a non-bid contract come off the Consent Agenda for scrutiny. This request raised he hackles of the board’s two ancient crones who guard the ancient methods of wrongdoing that comprises what Ms. Edgecomb in a rhetorical flight into the nut region of the stratosphere calls “institutional memory.” They gave Griffin a tongue lashing, accusing her of “being disloyal to the staff.” Griffin, not the brightest crayon in the box, lacked the wit and spunk to tell Olson and Kurdell that she served the public, not the staff. So distressed did this Kurdell-Olson make Griffin that she curled up into a protective ball and has never emerged except to do Ms. Elia’s bidding. This roll over apparently occurs in every new board member and the public bedamned.

We’re talking about what those in charge of taxpayer money considering it play money that the board and administration use to make up jobs and pass them out to relatives, hangers-on, and sycophants to preen their power by abusing their control of tax monies. For them, tax money is play money.

One would say this behavior is unethical and perhaps criminal. But 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 as was the case alleged about Ms. Etherege’s daughter and if a teacher had 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 and would be out the door on unemployment compensation before you could say “administrative perks.”

The Edgecomb offspring had not only the tradition of never punishing administrators to rely on in the drug situation but also enjoyed the protection of being a child of a board member. Board attorney Tom Gonzalez would have temporarily ceased slurping soda and chomping chips on the podium and rushed to dip into his mouthpiece bag of tricks to construct a footnote to a footnote to make Elia’s daughter not only guiltless for covering up a dangerous drug situation but also being beatified to boot along with a first Nobel recommendation signed by all the board and administration who have only recently learned what a Nobel

One significant way that the board and administration keep teachers oppressed is this 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 with a targeted program of Professional Standards charges making them fear 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 heads of Professional Standards is Linda Kipley, whom I have observed wearing see-through plastic baby dolls on the job. She was principal at Hillsborough High, but she was so bad that teachers refused to go into a conference with her unless equipped with a recorder so likely is Kiplely to lie and manufacture things that have 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 sunsetted in the Pleistocene Age in the academic world yet Kipley occupies a vital, extravagantly paid position that should require a psychology or criminal justice degree or at least some degree with more academic heft that a home ec certificate. The job description did say it requires a master’s-degree job, but Ms. Elia ignored the formula for a creature she could manipulate to file empty charges against teachers to keep them mum. That was the maneuver Kipley pulled off in my friend Bart Birdsall’s case. He spoke out in the community against the strictures put on gays’ use of the county libraries passed by the Hillsborough County Commission under the urging of Rhonda Storms. Besides, Ms. Elia can overrule any education prerequisite. People crawl out on all fours when leaving her office so powerful is the position she has of not only telling the school employees what to do but also telling her putative pusillanimous board bosses where to get off. So shallow is the board’s mental capacity that it does not know what degrees signify and thus avoid the subject at all costs, going by the instructions of a Ouija board behind the board dais.

The Professional Standards head job got no advertising despite the ubiquitous assurance from the board that it is “an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” This lack of competition for job hires 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 burgeon a side affliction that the board and administration rapidly acquire. We are talking about little people who acquire a little power and don’t know how to handle it.

It’s Alice in Wonderland big time in the ROSSAC country on the other side of the looking glass. The superintendent creates buddy jobs ad lib. Not one board member has ever asked for a needs study to prove these empty jobs are needed. Not one has ever suggested that the superintendent can one of these unneeded buddy jobs. Not one board member has ever rebuked Ms. Elia for this money-eating practice either publicly on the board podium or in her yearly evaluation. So the board is complicit in funding bogus jobs that strain the budget and could find use in not reducing the pay of bus drivers and other marginal workers; or it cound find use in supplying student needs.

Ldd

Email from Doris Raskin, appeal attorney for Renee Anderson:

From: Doris Landis Raskin [mailto:dlawraskin@bellsouth.net]
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 11:16 AM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject:

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

January 12, 2011

Ms. Cobbe:

Please provide me with the following public information. This is my 3rd request for these data according to my records:

The hiring history of Ms. Elia, including the applications of her competitors as well as the application of Ms. Elia; copies of the advertising done and in what national organs and at what cost to the taxpayers; a copy of the stenographic notes of the board’s exhanges on the hiring of Ms. Elia, especially the conversation about lowering the Ph.D. requirement to a master’s, Ms. Elia’s terminal degree;

The hiring history of Mr. Tom Gonzalez, including the advertising of the job and the cost to taxpayers of that required advertising; the applications of Mr. Gonzalez and of other attorneys for the job; any discussion recorded stenographically of the board’s remarks during the attorney’s hiring conference(s); This is my second request for this material;

The school’s court records of the Renee Anderson case;
this is my second request for these data.

Thank you. When you have assembled these documents, please email me, and I will come in from the beach to review them.

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom De Cesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 6:39 PM
To: 'foy333@aol.com'
Subject: FW:

Behind Closed Doors

2011-01-19T06:42:00.001-08:00

DORETHA EDGECOMB, BOARD CHAIR: “LET’S MOVE THE CONSENT AGENDA WITHOUT EXAMINING IT SO THAT I CAN GET HOME TO WATCH A LAWRENCE Welk RERUN”; ROBERT HEILMAN: RIVERVIEW TO RENEE ANDERSON: “GET OFF MY SCHOOL GROUNDS!” PRINCIPAL; CRYBABY KENNETH MASSENA, “OFFICER THAT BAD GIRL AGGRAVATEDLY ASSAULTED MY DELICATE 240-POUNF BODY.”

Lee De Cesare, CRC author, stands outside Florence waiting go go commune with David and then to see Machiavelli, another, Florentine, to have him sign her copy of The Prince and to advise her how to stymie the Hillsborough County School Board administrative and board thugs in their quest to destroy black student Renee Anderson in the tangled web of pupil expuslion that discriminates against black students.

BOARD JOBS RACKET

The below comment by the reader adds another dimension to the discussion of board performance. This information suggests that on 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.

Edgecomb has one goal, and that is to not make trouble for her daughter who is an Assistant Principal or maybe now a Principal. Whenever someone does or doesn't do something it is usually for personal gain. In this case she is protecting her daughter. Supposedly, her daughter worked under a principal who got arrested for drugs on campus. Word on the street is that Edgecomb's daughter knew about this and should have reported it but didn't. Corruption lives on!

Jack Lamb also has a daughter in the school system administration I believe. Candy Olson is reputed to arrange jobs for people. Mr. Lamb sits in morose inertia on the board dais. The only time he came alive in my memory was when I spoke against his using school board secretarial help and mailing procedures; he came off his seat and would have vaulted the desk to throttle me if he had not been too fat for the maneuver. He had to content himself with telling me to “Stay across the bay [my husband and I live in our condo on Madeira Beach] and don’t come over here any more as if I were a wet back swimming to the US from Mexico or some other Latin outpost.

The board-and-superintendent hiring scam ranks one of the perquisites of the board and superintendent job: it consists of hiring buddies and hangers on and creating jobs at taxpayer expense. Elia hired the former assistant superintendent Jim Hamilton after he retired, never having learned the difference between “your” and “you’re.” The marginally literate Hamilton got a lobbying slot without justifying Elia’s justifying it with a needs study.

God forbid that the board cared enough to demand a needs study for a superfluous buddy job that soaks the taxpayers. I heard the pay was between $64,000 and $94,000 a year. That’s buddy pay. 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 candidate with a political degree or a history degree should have gotten that job.

At its zenith, this irregular personnel venture was the talk of the schools. Janitors vetted the latest data in mop closets. Grounds keepers traded the latest gossip while tamping down divots. Cafeteria workers explored the most recent post while mopping up the tables.

My overview of this saga is incredulity that any woman could think "Your" "Your" Hamilton a suitable swain no matter how many jobs he can hand her. One supposes his hygiene is hit or miss. He schleps around looking like an unmade bed in suits the pants of which bag low and contain nothing. I never saw him pick his nose. But I wouldn't put it past him.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Now Hamilton and Mileto are back in Tallahassee as a lobbying pas de deux. I guess this means his poor wife, who had remarried the old goat, will now have to divorce him again. Ms. Elia’s job-creation lockdown recently resulted in a job created for the dumped principal Smith in the Alafia brouhaha.

The Alafia 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 lobotomy o because the administration and board couldn’t stand the bad Alafia publicity’s being printed by the usually somnolent press,

Elia sent Lie-about-educational credentials GED 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.

I asked for the job’s description as public information. After about two weeks had given personnel honcho Valdez the time to fake one, I got a copy of the job description; then I asked 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 Elia with 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. For them, tax money is play money. 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 as was the case with Ms. Edgcomb’s daughter and if a teacher had 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 and out the door on unemployment compensation before you could say “administrative perks.”

The Edgecomb offspring had not only the tradition of never punishing administrators to rely on but also enjoyed the protection of being the a child of a board member. Board attorney Tom Gonzalez would have temporarily ceased drinking soda and eating chips on the podium and rushed in his mouthpiece bag of tricks to construct a footnote to a footnote to make Elia’s daughter not only guiltless for covering up a drug danger but also being beatified to boot along with a Nobel recommendation signed by all the board and administration that have only recently learned what a Nobel is.

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 with a targeted program for fear of losing their jobs. This coercion cancels teachers' free speech rights.

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 plastic 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 have not occurred in an interview.

So bad the situation got at Hillsborough that the superintendent and his--this was during Earl the Pearl Lennard's hegemony-- 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 yet occupies a vital, extravagantly paid position that should require a psychology or criminal justice degree. The job description did say it is a master’s-degree job, but Ms. Elia ignored the formula.

Ms. Elia can overrule any education prerequisite. Ms. Elia's puissance is such that she can negate Newton's laws of gravity. She can change Einstein's E equal MC squared to E equal MC quadrupled. She can leap tall buildings in a single bounds. She can deflect bullets with her impervious bullet-beating bracelets. You name it. Ms. Elia can do it.

One reason the board members do not challenge Ms. Elia on playing with degrees in such cases as La Kipley's is that they are not sophisticated enough to know what degrees mean in terms of academic heft and suitability ; they don't know the their relative place in the academic scale of gravity. They suspect they are out of their depth and thus avoid degree suitability at all costs, going by the instuctions of a Ouji board behind the board dais in a pinch.

The Professional Standards head job got no advertising despite the ubiquitous assurance from the board that it is “an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” This lack of competition for job hires 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 burgeon, a side affliction that the board and administration rapidly acquire.

The rule is that when little people get a little power, they act, well, little.

Meanwhile, this jobs-racket abuse is not only hurting taxpayers; it is hurting as well the marginal employees in the school system too timid or too unsophisticated to protect themselves. A reader sends this comment:

lee

E-mail from Renee's appeals attorney:

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom De Cesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 6:39 PM
To: 'foy333@aol.com'
Subject: FW:

This email below came from the attorney who argued the appellate case for student Renee Anderson.

-----Original Message-----

From: Doris Landis Raskin [mailto:dlawraskin@bellsouth.net]

Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 11:16 AM

To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Subject:

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

Students as Board and Administration Punching Bags

2011-01-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

Board and administration Villains:

Board Chair Doretha Edgcomb; Riverview Principal Robert Heilmann;
Riverview Vice Principal Kevin Massena
_____________________________

Overheard patter by an under- the-podium free-lance elf of those supposed to
be minding the store:

DORETHA EDGECOMB, BOARD CHAIR: “LET’S MOVE THE CONSENT AGENDA WITHOUT EXAMINING IT SO THAT I CAN GET HOME IN TIME TO WATCH THE LAWRENCE WELK RE-RUN”; RIVERVIEW PRINCIPAL ROBERT HEILMAN: “GET OFF MY SCHOOL GROUNDS!” TO RENEE ANDERSON: I’VE GOT TO GO AS REF A GAME.” KENNETH MASSENA: "WHERE'S THE GRUB?"

Renee Anderson, student victim of the Hillsborough County School Board and especially victim of Aunt Tom Doretha Edgcomb

Author Lee on he outskirts of Florence, going to commune with David, then visiting another Florentine, Machiavelli, to get his autograph on her copy of The Prince and to pick his brains about how to stop the Hillsborough County board and administration from savaging suspension victims such as Renee Anderson.

Doretha Edgecomb, Principal Robert Heilmann, and Kenneth Massena and other school leaders cooperated in the suspension of student Renee Anderson. They ignored the suspension rules in the policy handbook.

Never forget the details of Renee Anderson’s crucifixion during her expulsion. They are these:

--Principal Heilmann chased her across the parking lot of Riverview School, yelling at her, “Get off my school grounds! Get off my school grounds!’ --Renee got no chance to tell her side of the story: that she was trying to break up a fight between two friends.

--The 240 pound vice principal Massena immured Renee in his office, barring the door with his bulk. He prattled to the cops that Renee had committed “aggravated assault” on him as she brushed past to go home as her mother had told her to do in a cell-phone call;

--That Heilmann had called the cops before he left his office, presupposing Renee’s guilt and alerting them to arrest Renee;

--That Principal Heilmann stood by while the cops arrested Renee and cuffed her. forgetting his principal's duty to protect a student and see that she gets due process;

---That Renee spent the night in lock-up without anybody’s bothering to hear her side of the story;

---That Mr. Kenneth Otero, assistant superintendent, claimed he was unable to deliver a notice of the board hearing of Renee’s case because it did not occur to this highly paid, long-serving vice superintendent that the Waltons had left their forwarding address at the post office when they moved to another city so that Renee could have a more wholesome environment in which to finish her high school degree;

--That the board did not bother to ensure that the Waltons and Renee would appear at a hearing that the protocol expulsion procedure guarantees a student; nor did the board do a follow-up when the Waltons and Renee did not appear at the board hearing.

--That Ms. Edgecomb, the board’s only black member, is especially guilty of the abuse of a black child whom she should have insured got fair treatment because she knew that black children are one and one-half times more likely to be suspended than white children;

--that the board treated Renee’s tragedy as just one more consent-agenda item to punch the green button for during the board meeting with no board member’s--especially Ms. Edgecomb--bothering to ask where Renee and her parents were for the hearing because board printed board protocols says they are to be at the hearing;
--that when Renee returned to school after her ordeal, having done community service, the board and administration offered no follow-up counseling to Renee but instead told her that she would go to an alternative school and could not apply for scholarships for college.

Hillsborough County School Board Jobs Racket

The below comment by a Casting-room Couch reader adds another dimension to the discussion of board louche performance.

Edgecomb has one goal and that is to not make trouble for her daughter who is an Assistant Principal or maybe now a Principal. Whenever someone does or doesn't do something, it is usually for personal gain. In this case, she is protecting her daughter. Supposedly, her daughter worked under a principal who got arrested for drugs on campus. Word on the street is that Edgecomb's daughter knew about this and should have reported it but didn't. Corruption lives on!

This information suggests that the major reason Ms. Edgecomb ran for the board was to protect her daughter’s career. It certainly wasn’t her goal to help black children as the Renee Anderson case and Ms. Edgecombe’s record of silence on the protection of this black child’s rights demonstrates.

Edgecomb should have protested the Gates grant‘s use for scrutiny of teachers’ classroom performance as if pedagogical style were quantifiable. The data from this Gates exercise will find use as another of the administration’s weapons against teachers--another way to threaten their jobs if they don’t shut up and never criticize the administration and board. The board has stripped teachers of their free-speech rights by threatening their jobs if they exercise these rights.

The Gates exercise will not help teachers be better in the classroom but will assist the board and administration’s joint efforts to shut them up and make them ciphers in the system. The Gates grant should have addressed the pathology of ubiquitous discrimination against black children and its solution. Or it should have concentrated on the status of free speech in the schools.

Nor only does Edgecomb ignore black children's needs in her board position but also ignores making her community a factor in the school system. I have never heard Edgecomb in the over two years that I monitored the board suggest a school be named for a black person, which means that the schools get the names of mediocre white guys who can't make their subjects and verbs agree--usually coaches.

Had Edgecomb cared that black children in the schools get suspended at higher rates than white children, are more likely to be labeled retarded, are less likely to earn honors, and less likely to graduate on time than white students, she would have insisted that the Gates grant go to investigating and curing this pathology. But Ms. Edgecomb is content to be the board resident Aunt Tom, never acknowledging that minority children need her attention and support.

Jack Lamb also has a daughter in the school system administration that he hedges round with his board status and considerable bulk. Candy Olson is reputed to arrange jobs for people.

Mr. Lamb sits in morose composure on the board dais. The only time he came alive in my memory was when I spoke against his using school board secretarial help and board stationery to ask the mayor to lower his condo‘s water bill. He came off his seat and would have vaulted the desk to throttle me had he not been too fat for the maneuver. He had to content himself with telling me to “Stay across the bay [I live on the Gulf of Mexico] and don’t come over here any more.”

Le Jack made it sound as if I were a wet back swimming to the US from South America.

I should have asked “Dr.” Lamb for a copy of his doctoral dissertation. I suspect that a poor graduate student ghosted it. It I want to do a forensics examination on this soi-disant dissertation to prove he did not write it but bought and paid for it.

An incredible hiring scam ranks one of the perquisites of the board and superintendent job: it consists of hiring no-talent relatives, buddies, and assorted empty-headed ding dongs usually for pricey administrative sinecures for which they have not a scintilla of preparation or relevant education.

And then there is the scam of creating jobs at taxpayer expense. Prime example: Elia hired the former assistant superintendent Jim Hamilton after he retired to rev up his consulting firm to milk schools with which he had been in contact in his years of mooching off taxpayers as a high-level administrator despite never having learned the difference between “your” and “you’re.” The marginally literate Hamilton got his recent Hillsborough County schools lobbying slot without Elia’s justifying it with a needs study.

God forbid that the board cared enough to demand a needs study for one of these superfluous buddy jobs that soak taxpayers. But a few respirations past entering ROSSAC, board members’ coming into office roll over and assume board automaton group think.

Elia’s word is law to these board androids. I heard that “you’re”-“your” Hamilton’s lobby-lord pay clocks in at between $64,000 and $94,000 a year. That’s buddy pay. It doesn’t come out of Ms. Elia’s or the board’s pockets but the pockets of taxpayers. So why should they care? The board never thinks to ask for a needs study for any of Ms. Elia’s jobs-program positions. They just press the green button and let the good times roll.

Hamilton’s wife divorced him several years ago because he pushed past qualified candidates then-doxie Connie Mileto’s ascension to the Tallahassee position of Chief Government Relations Officer' Her credentials: kindergarten teacher. This romance got attention school wide. Everybody knew about it. Janitors vetted its status by swapping latest tidbits in mop closets; groundskeepers traded data whilst leveling clods; lunchroom workers explored the fine points during lunch preparations.

The Hamilton-Mileto tale was one of those baleful There’s-no-fool-like-an-old-fool sagas, with Ms. Mileto's triumphing by having in addition to her kindergarten certificate a PH.D. in bamboozling an old fool to climb the ladder to a job for which she lacked credentials.

A candidate with a political degree or a history degree should have gotten that job. Now, thanks to Ms. Elia’s hiring You’re-Your Hamilton with no competition for the unneeded extra lobbying job, which Mileto’s job should encompass anyway, Hamilton and Mileto are back in Tallahassee as lobbying pas de deux.

I guess this meet-up in Tallahassee means his poor wife, who had remarried the old goat incredibly enough when Mileto espied younger swains in Tallahassee and dumped him. Now the put-upon wife will have to divorce this Your-you're swain again.

Did the board intervene in this quaint tale of concupiscence and ambition? Not on your life. They liked trading the latest hot tidbits on the story on the board dais instead of attending to the the dull business of the schools. As a matter of record, at one meeting I went to, the board chorused "ta ta to somebody going to Tallahassee. Several even sang out, "Be sure to tell Jim and Connie 'hello.'"

The mystery of this bizarre tale that remains for me is how Hamilton was able to attract any woman, even given his aphrodisac of power in inserting a candidate into a job that she was not qualified for. Hamilton shuffles around looking like an unmade bed; his clothes are rumpled; his pants are rump-sprung, bag low, and contain nothing, and one intuits that Your-you're Hamilton's hygiene is woefully deficient. Go figure.

This delectation of on-site concupiscence explains why the board and administration tolerated the affair that Motel Breath Falliero carried on with Community Affairs head Marc Hart for two administrations. When it finally seeped out, Ms. Elia directed Buchenwald alumnus Ken Otero to fire Hart for drinking on the job. Fornicating on the job: no problem. Drinking on the job: hideous immorality and out the door.

Mata Hari Motel Breath Falliero lost her seat in the recent election. I hope I contributed to that outcome by writing fundamentalist churches in Falliero's district and apprising them of the board Jezebel's activities in vivid language.

Exposure is always the answer to these situations. I come from a small Georgia town whose church populations in the ladies guilds who make all the potato salad for the church hoedowns do not brook fornication especially when it injures four children as was the case in the Falliero-Hart situation.

Falliero once had me kicked out of the board room in payback for my exposing her adultery after Marc Hart came to my home and showed me relevant depositions. She had cooked up a scene with the hulking head of Security to evict me. This gallant law officer snarled at me in the lobby that he was going to have the police come and arrest me. I said, "Go ahead, buster." I would have loved to have sat in jail in the cause of public-office decency. My ten grandchildren would have gone wild with delight if their granny went to jail; my husband of 55 years would have brought me my medications whilst complaining that he was starving to death because he can't boil water. My adventure would have been ritually recited for the next hundred years at all family Thanksgiving summits.

Ms. Elia’s job-creation lock down recently resulted in a job created for the principal Smith featured in the Alafia brouhaha. The Alafia 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 lobotomy at $4500 a pop of tax money if they would keep Smith did not propitiate them. Hence, because the administration and board couldn’t stand the bad Alafia publicity’s being printed by the usually somnolent press.

Elia sent Lie-about-educational-credentials GED Griffin and former board member Motel-breath Jennifer Falliero skulking 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.

GED Griffin suffers the delusion that she is a superior diplomat and that this diplomatic mission to Smith was just one more illustration of how Bismarck should roll over in his grave in envy of her diplomatic acumen. She would also impugn the political skills of Disraeli and Gladstone if she knew who they were.

What Griffin engaged in was not diplomacy. It was sneaking, lying, and sticking the taxpayers whom she is supposed to serve with another manufactured, empty job to solve a political problem for the board and Elia. The SPT interviewed La Griffin over the Christmas holiday. Not only did it report that she lied to the SPT about her education but also had cheated the state out of the fees she left on the HCC books when she exited several years ago. This latter contrtemps ticked me off because I had been a professor at HCC for twenty-eight years before retiring and felt some concern for its financial status.

Stealing money from the taxpayers who pay La Motel Breath a bloated salary for sitting on the dais during monthly meetings is bad enough. But stiffing a community college that runs on tax funds is out-and-out theft. Therefore, if GED Griffin does not want to have “thief” added to her resume of “liar,” she must pay this tax money to HCC, or some future intrepid opponent will sock the thief-liar sobriquet on her in a future campaign. Stacy White, the guy who unseated Falliero in the immediately preceding campaign, was not forceful enough to level those accurate charges. But we forgive Stacy because he has an adorable dimple, something sorely needed on a board not noted for its beauty.

Griffin should get her degree. My laid-back grandson just got his. If he can, she can. Thousands of working people tuck in classes around their schedules and finally make it. I used to have these turn up constantly when I taught. These go-getters were inevitably among my best students. With two universities and a community college available, GED Griffin could earn a degree if she buckled down and stopped blaming her mother’s multiple marriages for her failure to have the get up and go to earn her degree. Past 40 as is April, you must stop blaming your parents for your adult failures.

Grown-ups don’t blame their parent for not getting a degree or anything else the person is responsible for.

Harsh reader comments on the SPT article in Tampa Bay Online blog on Griffin’s lying about her meager education show this scam did not please the public. Some wrote to say they it shocked them that a school board member lacked a college degree.

There are many things one without a college education can do, but board member of a school system is not one of them. Griffin’s unedited history shows she should not be on a school board because if she does not value her own education, she doesn’t value that of the county’s students. Griffin dropped out of high school and later got a GED. A GED is better than nothing. But is it good for students that Griffin, who should be a role model for them, dropped out of high school, that she did not bestir herself to go part-time and get her degree, that she lied to the press about her education when she ran for office, and that she stiffed a state-supported community college which she attended briefly? No and no and no and no.

Then when Griffin lies her way onto the board, she showed her ethics to be lacking when she pitched in to help Elia pull off a covert scam that soaks taxpayers to diminish bad publicity for Elia and board members so that they can keep the public in the dark and retain their power over the tax money that pours into ROSSAC and retain such perks as handing out jobs to unqualified relatives, best buds, and peripatetic n’er do wells so that unqualified, lackadaisical people bestrew ROSSAC. When these deficient souls can’t do their tasks (recall the bus crisis) because of lack of smarts and/or lack of relevant education, they must have pricey tax-paid consultants fly in and teach them their jobs with flash cards.

You will recall that in the bus saga after the situation forced Elia to hire an outside manager, the two replaced incompetents didn't face firing. Elia moved them to another office and continued their pay and benefits at the same rate. Such was the behavior of the financial whiz that Governor Edwards recently invited to help him review such things as school budgets.

Taxpayers unknowingly fund this on-the-job training for the unfit in positions with bloated pay without the skills to justify it. The Public Affairs Laundromat sanitizes all information going out on the schools, and Elia and the board fire anybody--especially teachers--who out the dark deeds behind the ROSSAC moat.

When the administration hires a person, that person should be qualified. The false job offer that GED Griffin and Motel Breath Falliero peddled to Alafia Smith worked. Smith got the pretend job that Elia pulled out of the dirty-tricks hat and is probably sitting somewhere in the book depository now paring her nails.

I asked for the job’s description as public information. After about two weeks had given personnel honcho Valdez the time to fake one, I got a copy of the job description. Then I asked who inhabited the job before Smith: no answer.

QED: it is an out-of-thin-air job devised by Elia at taxpayer expense to solve a bad-publicity problem. The board has endowed Elia with this create-jobs perquisite as part of the superintendent’s under-the-table benefits. Board members don’t care enough about taxpayers to stop the Board Consent Agenda's rolling belt, lift off a new job, and ask for a needs study and other justification for it.

Any board member who did ask for a job's justificationwould need the moxie to withstand the pounding that GED Griffin got from Carol Kurdell and Candy Olson when Griffin, in the throes of idealism after she first joined the board, asked that a non-bid contract come off the Consent Agenda for scrutiny.

This request raised the hackles of the board’s two wild-heath Macbeth cronettes, who guard the venerable methods of wrongdoing that comprises what Ms. Edgecomb in a rhetorical flight into the nut region of the stratosphere calls “institutional memory.” They gave Griffin a tongue-lashing, accusing her of “being disloyal to the staff.”

Griffin, not the brightest crayon in the GED box, lacked the wit and spunk to tell Olson and Kurdell that she served the public, not the staff. So distressed did this Kurdell-Olson onslaught make Griffin that she curled up into a fetal ball and has never unwound since except to do Ms. Elia’s bidding.

This contemptible rollover occurs in every new board member and the public bedamned. We’re talking among other things about what the board and administration consider taxpayer play money that the board and administration use to make up jobs and pass them out to relatives, hangers-on, and sycophants to preen their power by abusing their control of tax monies.

One would say this behavior is unethical and perhaps criminal. But 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 as was the case alleged about Ms. Edgcomb’s daughter and if a teacher had failed to report the situation, that teacher would be the object of a lightening-fast Professional Standards Gestapo shake down and would be out the door on unemployment compensation before you could say “administrative perks.”

The Edgecomb offspring had not only the tradition of never punishing administrators to rely on in the not-reporting drug situation but also enjoyed the protection of being a child of a board member.

Board attorney Tom Gonzalez would have temporarily ceased slurping soda and chomping chips on the podium under the "No food or beverages in this area" and hied to dip into his mouthpiece bag of tricks to construct a footnote to a footnote to make Elia’s daughter not only guiltless for covering up a dangerous drug situation but also worthy of being beatified to boot, not to mention a first Nobel recommendation signed by all the board and administration, who have only recently learned what a Nobel is.

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 with a targeted program of Professional Standards charges making them fear 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 silent.

The heads of Professional Standards is Linda Kipley, whom I have observed wearing see-through plastic baby dolls on the job. These babydolls are for sure an objective correlative. Ask T.S. Elliot about the metaphysical aura of plastic see-through babydolls.

Kiply was principal at Hillsborough High, but she was so unprofessional that teachers refused to go into a conference with her unless equipped with a recorder so likely is Kiplely to lie and manufacture things that have not occurred in an interview. So bad the situation got at Hillsborough that the superintendent and his thugs switched Kipley into the head of Professional Standards slot, a move that validates teachers‘ motto of “If you mess up, you move up.”

The superintendent then was Earl the Pearl Lennard. He had emerged from the dungeons where he was vo-tec head to lead the schools. His competitors greatly outranked him in degrees and experience as did Elia's, but Earl the Pearl was the choice because he was on-site and had made venerable stair-well arrangements to mop up the floor with the qualified candidates. There's another thesis I want to do a forensics assessment of. If Lennard wrote his thesis, it would be a bigger miracle than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Linda Kipley has a home-ec degree. Such sexist diplomas sunsetted in the Pleistocene Era in the legitimate academic world. Yet Kipley occupies a vital, extravagantly paid position that should require a psychology or criminal justice degree or at least some degree with more academic heft than a home ec certificate. The job description says head of professional standards indeed ranks a master’s-degree job, but Ms. Elia ignored the standard for a creature she could manipulate to file empty charges against teachers to keep them mum. Elia later rewarded Kipley for her serivtude by gifting Kipley's husband with an accounting slot for which he had no credentials beyond a high school degree. I reviewed the applicants' application files. At least four had accounting degrees and the cited experience. What they did not have was Linda Kiple as spouse and resident cooker-upper of fake charges against teachers to keep the terrified and mute.

That was the genus of the maneuver Kipley pulled off on my friend Bart Birdsall. He spoke out in the community against the strictures put on gays’ use of the county libraries passed by the Hillsborough County Commission under the urging of homophobic Rhonda Storms.

The board and administration aim to keep hush-hush the schools’ employing gays to keep pacified the legions of restive fringe folk at the edge of the civilized world hunkered down in the fens and bogs that ring rural fastnesses such as Seffner and Turkey Creek.

Besides, Ms. Elia can overrule any education prerequisite. If she really puts her mind to it, Ms. Elia can rewrite basic scientific formulae or cancel the laws of gravity. What’s Newton’s heft compared to that of the superintendent of the Hillsborough County public schools? Zeus is a pantywaist in comparison. People crawl out on all fours when leaving La Elia’s office so potent is the position she owns and so unfailingly does she use its power in not only telling school employees what to do but also in telling her pusillanimous board bosses where to get off that one shrinks back in terror.

It’s a stirring spectacle. Cecil B. Deville needs to record it.

Well known is that board members all have the guts of a butterfly and don‘t let out a peep of rebuke to Ms. Elia. If one did, the other six would flay the wretch alive and make the skin strips into lamp shades as the Nazis used to do at their more than a hundred death camps during WW II. I would not be a bit surprised if Elia did not propose a school-board death camp for any teacher blabbermouths who turned up. The board go-alongs would green-light the proposal stat.

The Professional Standards head job got no advertising despite the board mantra stamped on any surface whatever that blazons, “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” This lack of competition for job hiring 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 Tom Gonzalez, against whom I have filed two ethics charges so far with no penalty from the legal priesthood that occupy the office and protect its own, pulls down $275,000 per annum for such services as assuring the board that the federal laws on nondiscrimination in employment do not apply to the Hillsborough County school board. They didn’t apply to his getting a job that violated federal statute to be sure. So that explains his no-application advocy. He even left out teachers of the bullying law's protection to shield the board from law suits that involved its turning back complaints by teachers because they could use bullying lawsuits to vitiate the Professional Standards cooked-up charges against teachers. So there’s no use to tell the board that the federal statutes on discrimination do indeed apply to the schools because Gonzalez has given the answer they want, and they are sticking by it.

But what are puny federal laws when pitted against the gigantic powers and hypertrophied egos of the Hillsborough County School Board and administration quidnuncs? Laws are mere thistles in the wind before the gigantic tornado of amour proper that surrounds ROSSAC denizens. Indeed, delusions of grandeur burgeon in the ROSSAC office suites, a side affliction to which the board and administration inevitably succumb, exacerbated by their occupation of the nether regions of the Stanford Binet.

We are talking here about a well-known phenomenon: little people who acquire a little power don’t know how to handle it and go gaga. It’s Alice in Wonderland big time all the time in ROSSAC country on the other side of the looking glass, east of the sun and west of the moon. ldd
____________________________________________________________________

The following email came in response to mine to her in which I praised the power of her appeals brief:

Law Offices of Doris Landis Raskin, P.A.

Legal Experience: 23 years

Jurisdictions: Florida

9957 Moorings Drive, Suite 502
JACKSONVILLE, FL 32257
(904) 287-2295

Overview

From: Doris Landis Raskin [mailto:dlawraskin@bellsouth.net]
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 11:16 AM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject:

Appellate attorney Doris Raskin writes the following in response to my email to her praising her appellate appeal’s strength:

Appeallate Attorney Raskin says:

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

About Doris Landis Raskin

B. A. in English and Political Science, University of Tennessee, 1964
M.S. in Diagnostic/Prescriptive Teaching, Special Education, Florida International University, 1977.
J.D. Nova Center for the Study of Law, k.n.a. Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 1987.
Practice concentrated in Education Law and Civil Rights. Extensive Experience in Criminal Defense.
Licensed to practice in Florida and Southern District of Florida, Middle District of Florida and 11th Circuit Federal Courts.

Practice Areas

Civil Rights

Education Law

Juvenile Law

Professional Experience

Experience	Years
Sole Practitioner, Law Offices of Doris Landis Raskin, P.A.	2001-Current
Sole practitioner in Jacksonville, FL
Sole Practitioner, Law Offices of Doris Landis Raskin, P.A.	1991-2001
Sole practitioner in Stuart, Florida
Staff Attorney, Office of Public Defender Martin County, Florida	1989-1990
Staff Attorney, Office of Public Defender Brevard County	1987-1989

Legal Profiles

Justia Profile

Jurisdictions

Location	Years
Florida	Since 1987

Professional Activities

Activity	Organization	Start Year	End Year
Board Member	Jessica Green Foundation	2009
Member	Florida Bar Education Law Committee	2008
Board Member	ARC of Martin County	1991	2000

Professional Affiliations

Position	Years
Member, Florida State Bar	1987-Current

· Atlantic Beach Civil Rights Lawyers

· Callahan Civil Rights Lawyers

· Fernandina Beach Civil Rights Lawyers

· Green Cove Springs Civil Rights Lawyers

· Jacksonville Beach Civil Rights Lawyers

· Middleburg Civil Rights Lawyers

· Orange Park Civil Rights Lawyers

· Palatka Civil Rights Lawyers

· Ponte Vedra Beach Civil Rights Lawyers

· Saint Augustine Civil Rights Lawyers

· Saint Johns Civil Rights Lawyers

· Starke Civil Rights Lawyers

· Clay County Civil Rights Attorneys

· Duval County Civil Rights Attorneys

· Nassau County Civil Rights

Postscript

The scary thing about the Raskin comments is that they suggest that even the local judiciary harbous elements of corruption and that Tom Gonzalez's $275,000 highest- pay-in-the-state board job rests in part on his participation in that corrupt system, which circumstance impacts some board-and-administration court decisions such as
Renee's. Ms. Raskin's comments suggest that such as Tom Gonzalez and corhorts benefit from partaking of this behind-the-scenes-buddy situation by winning cases such as Renee's appeal that they would have lost in a fair system. People have a strong belirf in the probity of the courts so that these indications of corruption articulated by Raskin, a lawyer with a more priviledged vantage than those of us on the outside ot the legal apparatus, say this citizen faith is misplaced. For the average person, the specter of the public schools' leadership's particpating in a corruption of democracy frightens and dismays. Doing the research on this blog entry that resulted in this information dismays me.

Job Scams Run by the Hillsborough County School Board and Crucifixion of Student Renee Anderson

2010-12-17T07:13:00.000-08:00

Board-and-Administration Job Ripoffs

BELOW WE SEE THREE BOARD-AND-ADMINISTRATION FIENDS OF THE ROSSAC WHERMACHT: EDGECOMB, HEILMANN, AND MESSENA. THEY TORTURED STUDENT
RENEE ANDERSON AND THREW HER OVER THE SIDE IN A SADISTIC SUSPENSION ORDEAL

(Renee's ordeal detailed in the previous post)

RENEE

Renee Anderson, Student Victim of Board and Administration SADISM
(Renee's story appears in the previous post.)

Below, Casting Room Couch blog's modest, retiring, persistent author, lee, outside Florence, going to see David and then Machiavelli, who comes from Florence as well as Michaelangelo and will give lee his autograph on her copy of The Prince

DORETHA EDGECOMB, BOARD CHAIR: “LET’S MOVE THE CONSENT AGENDA WITHOUT EXAMINING IT SO THAT I CAN GET HOME IN TIME TO WATCH THE LAWRENCE WELK RE-RUN”; RIVERVIEW PRINCIPAL ROBERT HEILMAN: “GET OFF MY SCHOOL GROUNDS!” SHOUTED AT THE BACK OF STUDENT RENEE ANDERSON AS SHE FLED WHEN HE CHASED HER ACROSS THE RIVERVIEW PARKING LOT; CRYBABY KINNETH MASSENA: “OFFICER, THAT NAUGHTY STUDENT AGGRAVATEDLY ASSAULTED MY DELICATE 240-POUND BODY. HANDCUFF HER AND TAKE 'ER TO THE SLAMMER.”

IF VOTERS KNEW HOW BAD THE PEOPLE ARE WHO RUN THE HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY SCHOOLS--HOW DUMB, HOW STUDENT AVERSE, HOW UNETHICAL, THEY WOULD KICK THEM ALL OUT--STARTING WITH THE BOARD AND ESPECIALLY SUCH VILE SPECIMENS OF STUDENT ANTIPATHY AS RIVERVIEW HEILMANN, EDGCOMB.

HILLSBOROOUGH COUNTY JOBS RACKET BLEEDS TAXPAYERS AND RIPS-OFF LOW-LEVEL WORKERS

The below comment by a reader adds another dimension to the discussion of board performance. This reader information suggests that the reason that Ms. Edgecomb ran for the board was to protect her daughter’s career.

Edgecomb has one goal and that is to not make trouble for her daughter who is an Assistant Principal or maybe now a Principal. Whenever someone does or doesn't do something it is usually for personal gain. In this case she is protecting her daughter. Supposedly, her daughter worked under a principal who got arrested for drugs on campus. Word on the street is that Edgecomb's daughter knew about this and should have reported it but didn't. Corruption lives on!

It certainly wasn’t the Edgecomb goal to help black children.

Jack Lamb also has a daughter in the school administration, I believe. Candy Olson is reputed to arrange jobs for people to make herself feel important and to collect chits she can later redeem for favors.

Jack Lamb usually sits on the board dais in oblivious torpor. The only time I saw him wake up was when I criticized him for using school stationary and clerical help to write a letter to the mayor to lower his condo's water bill. He rose from his seat and would have vaulted the desk to pummel me had he not been too fat for the project. He yelled at me to stay on my side of the bay (I live on the beach) as if I were a wetback swimming in from Mexico.

While Ms. Edgecomb guards her daughter's job, Elia invents jobs to solve personnel problems. She created a job for Alafia principal Smith to get her to resign because Alafia parents would no longer allow her to be in charge of their children. The usually somnolent newspapers were covering the fracas 24-7. The board and administration can't stand bad publicity. It threatens their lockdown of the power of running the schools with the huge state budget entailed.

So Elia sent as diplomatic team GED Griffin and Motel Breath Falliero out to Alafia to convince Smith to resign in swap for a manufactured job paying her the same principal's salary and benefits with no duties.

GED Griffin suffers the delusion that she is a superior diplomat, so she undertook this under-the-radar mission to Smith with, since election, ousted board member Jennifer Motel Breath Falliero to convince Smith to quit her job and take a ghost job Elia would create for her.

What Griffin engaged in was not diplomacy; it was sneaking, lying, and sticking the taxpayers with paying for a ghost job while violating the Sunshine Law. That's undermining taxpayers, not working for them.

Bismark's reputation is safe.

The board and administration routinely give no-bid contracts to former administrators. Tom Gonzalez manufactured a new law that says this no-bid scam is legitimate. Pulling laws out of hats or twisting them to fit the board's skulduggery explains why Gonzalez gets the highest pay of any board lawyer in the state--$275,000 a year despite his not being to write literate prose. He is also uncivilized: He chomps chips and slurps cola on the dais during business proceedings despite a sign that says "No food and drink in board room." He thinks he is immune to the law just like members of the Gestapo did. My Southern mother would say Gonzalez was raised in a barn.

Griffin is not the brightest crayon in the GED box, but she was idealistic when she first arrived on the board. Alas, she lacked wit and spunk sufficient to tell Olson and Kurdell that she served the public, not the staff, when the two barked that Griffin was being "disloyal to the staff" by asking for a no-bid contract to come off the Consent Agenda for discussion. Griffin lacks courage and leadership snap. So distressed did this Kurdell-Olson assault render Griffin that she curled up into the fetal position and has never unwound since except to do Ms. Elia’s bidding.

This coward's rollover, alas, has occurred in every new board member so far. They cave in and take on the herd instinct. That's what happened to Nazi Germany when Hitler committed atrocities in the German people's name. Any school denizen who resists gets frozen out by Elia et al and wants to come in out of the cold must roll over. A renegade who wants to work for the citizens and students must have character enough to withstand hostility.

We all wait for a board member to stand up to Elia and the two board harpies Kurdell and Olson. We yearn for a board hero. One should not hold his or her breath, sad to say. I doubt that new member Stacy White will play Batman to Elia's Joker in ROSSAC Gotham City. I never heard of a druggist who wore tights and drove a Batmobile.

Board-and-administration hiring scams perquisite for board and superintendent allow no-talent relatives and buddies, any stray hangers-on, plus out-of-work layabouts to get jobs in the schools. That's the fact that the evidence supports.

Elia hired buddy former assistant superintendent Jim Hamilton after he retired to hustle his consulting firm's clients among schools he had been in contact with in his years of mooching off taxpayers as a high-level administrator despite never having learned the difference between “your” and “you’re.” He was one of the ROSSAC incomptents on the oversight committee of ROSSAC colluders who rubberstamped the faulty buildiings as ok even though, for instance, of the Blake High School's building that leaked like a sieve. In fact, between his retirement and his departure from the Elysian fields of ROSSAC, Elia created him a bridge job lasting several months so that he continued attached to the umbilical cord to the taxpayers to get paid although retired. A deep throat told me that his name appeared on this ersatz job before it even went on the books. There was a penciled-in caret on the school Web site with Hamilton's name interpolated after Otero's. The villains are so sure of getting away with their scams that they don't even bother not being clumsy.

The marginally literate Hamilton got his Hillsborough County lobbying slot without Elia’s justifying it with a needs study or, indeed, any justification. The board's attitude was "Whatever." God forbid that the board cared enough to demand a needs study for one of these superfluous buddy jobs that soak taxpayers.

I wrote the University of Florida president and his wife-never underestimate the power of curtain lectures--to complain about the premier university in Florida's allowing a man who couldn't get homophones "your" and "your" straight to purloin a Ph.D. from the thesis committee by skullduggery or graft. I said the university had no right to loose such specimens as Hamilton into the school system. I based my letter to UF president on Le Hamilton's ill-structured, ill-worded, badly punctuated white paper for the board in which he advised its members on professional attire (I am not making this up) when he goes galumphing around looking like an unmade bed.

If new board member Stacy White wanted to leave his name as board history's hero who helped cleaned crooked board policies, he would invoke Roberts Rules and move that the board must post on its Web site any new job; its description; the venues where it got advertising; the names of the applicants; and their resumes. There would be across the board syncope at this suggestion because putting jobs, their qualifications, applicants and their qualifications for the job would end the scam of passing out jobs to the unfit. Dr. Stevens, Ph.D., computers could coach ROSSAC computer illiterati how to do this task. Our druggist board member could bring in a bushell of Xanax to pass out before the deed went into effect or sodium pentathal for the hard cases.

A few respirations past their entering office, new board members roll over and assume board group think. They are henceforth Elia's automatons. Whatever she says is gospel to them. Zeig heil.

I heard “you’re” “your” Hamilton’s Tallahassee lobbyist pay clocked in between $64,000 and $94,000 a year. That’s buddy pay that doesn't come out of Ms. Elia’s pocket but that of taxpayers. So it's hey nonny nonny to her.

The heartbroken Hamilton wife, a principal--a good one by repute, quit her job, fled upstate, and divorced the old coot. Then when Mileto got the job in Tallahassee nailed down with younger legislative prospects to stalk, Hamilton limped away, and his faithful wife re-married the old rascal.

"Dr." Hamilton had pushed through before he retired then-doxie Connie Mileto’s candidacy for the senior administrative Tallahassee position despite her being an "Eency Weency Spider" kindergarten teacher. This was one of those There’s-no-fool-like-an-old-fool sagas with La Mileto's having in addition to her kindergarten certificate a PH.D in dazzling a dopey dotard to climb the ladder to a job for which she lacked credentials.

Everybody in the school system knew about this passion-passion spent tale. At its height even janitors discussed it in mop closets and grounds keepers vetted it while smoothing turf lumps.

Always a mystery to me was how Le Hamilton attracted any female attention at all. One infers that his hygiene protocols are the same as those of knights of the road and observes that he spray-spits when he attempts to pronounce sibilants. He looks like he slept in his clothes. His suits are rump-sprung, bag low, and contain nothing. He galumphs around in a lurching shuffle. I never saw him pick his nose, but I wouldn't put it past him.

A candidate with a political science or history degree should have gotten the job Mileto snagged as ROSSAC kindergarten Mata Hari. Thanks to Ms. Elia’s now hiring the old dope Hamilton for the unneeded Tallahassee lobbying job duplicating duties which Mileto’s job is supposed to cover, Hamilton and Mileto reunite in Tallahassee as a reignited lobbying pas de deux. They reign the Heloise and Abelard of the lobbying racket.

Hamilton's job's being handed to him without Elia's advertising it violates the drumbeat board mantra of "We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer." I have heard Tom Gonzalez opine that the schools aren't liable to the equal-opportunity laws. That was when he hinted at suing me for extortion, and I told him he knew he couldn't not only because of the First Amendment but also because of the SLAPP law.

I guess this lobbying sinecure means Hamilton's poor wife, who one hears had been fool enough to remarry the old goat, will now have to divorce him again.

Because the administration and board couldn’t tolerate the bad Alafia publicity by the usually somnolent press, Elia sent Lie-about-educational-credentials GED 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 equal to the Alafai principal perch.

It says something about GED Griffin's brain power that she agreed to accompany La Motel Breath Falliero despite Falliero's having threatened to kick Griffin out of the board room because Griffin said something Falliero didn't like when the latter chaired the board.

The board's unanimous vote had made La Motel Breath chair of the Hillsborough County School Board despite their all knowing of her long-term on-site adultery with Community Affairs head Marc Hart. The administration finally fired him to keep him away from the ravening Jennifer. Board members showed how much they valued the board and parents' concern that their children have ethical role models at school when they voted the resident adulteress as board chair.

The false-job offer worked. Smith took the pretend job. She is sitting somewhere in the book depository, feet on the desk now, paring her nails.

During Elia's empty job creations for the likes of Hamilton and Smith, she balances her budget on the backs of the helpless at the bottom of the pay scale. A reader writes me this:

Governor Scott has invited Supt. Elia from Hillsborough County to be his advisor so to speak about education as the SDHC has been so successful! What has been kept quiet is that all support personnel such as paraprofessionals, bus drivers, etc. must take a mandatory 3 day pay cut and still work them because the coffers have run dry. Talk about mismanagement! The union is doing nothing about it of course. Because of the economy, no one dares stand up! They always go after the weakest.

So bad the situation got at Hillsborough High under Linda Kipley's principalship that the faculty wouldn't attend meetings in her office without a recorder so persistent were Kipley's lies. The superintendent, then Earl the Pearl Lennard, didn't fire Kipley as he should have but switched her to head of Professional Standards at a higher job level and higher pay. This maneuver proved teacher shibboleth that "if you mess up, you move up."

Kipley has a home-ec degree. College cooking sheepskins sunsetted in the Pleistocene Era in the valid academic world, yet Kipley occupies a vital, extravagantly paid position that requires a psychology or criminal justice degree--or at least some degree with more academic heft than a home ec certificate.

The job description says head of Professional Standards requires a master’s-degree, but Ms. the administration ignored the formula for a creature who would do the dirty work of filing false charges against teachers to keep them scared and mum.

That was the maneuver Kipley pulled off on my friend Bart Birdsall. He spoke out in the community against strictures put on gays’ use of county libraries passed by then Hillsborough County Commissioner Rhonda Storms. Bart immediately found himself in the tentacles of the Professional Standards gulag.

The power the quiescent board yields to Ms. Elia means that she can overrule any education prerequisite such as a master's for the head of Professional Standards. So enamoured is Eilia with power that people crawl out on all fours when leaving her office in deference to her lust for obeisance.

La Elia was reputed to schedule early-morning conferences with low-level employees to discomfit them as much as possible by the early hour and cursed them out in street argot during these interviews. I wrote her a letter asking if this rumor were true: no answer. No response. Elia's ghost writer must have been out with the mumps. So I asked La Eliar directly in a board meeting about the bruited information that she cursed out low-level people in her office. She didn't raise her head. But I heard no more tales of early-morning curse-0uts of her of lower-level employees.

The superintendent gets away with outrageous conduct because nobody questions her. Certainly not the board: they are her bosses and can fire her. But the whole board, including the guys, are terrified of this small, dumpy woman of no appreciable talent except chutzpah.

Not only does La Elia tell school employees what to do but also tells her gutless board bosses where to get off. The board is supposed to make policy, and Elia is supposed to carry it out. Elia does both. So feeble is board members' grasp of their job, its scope and its duties, that members do not know what they should do and should not do or how to do either. When something unusual comes up on the board, all eyes swing to Elia's chair.

After about two weeks delay had given personnel honcho Valdez time to fake one, I got a copy of the job description of the Smith faux job. Then I asked who inhabited the job before Smith: no answer. Nobody could have inhabited a job that did not exist.

It’s always Alice-in-Wonderland time in ROSSAC country, which exists on the other side of the looking glass. east of the sun and west of the moon, over the rainbow, and in the environs of Something Flew Over the Cucoo's Nest,

QED: the Smith job is an out-of-thin-air job devised by Elia at taxpayer expense that cuts into the meagre pay of the lowest paid in the system cited above by my reader to solve a bad-publicity problem by ponying up an unneeded job for Smith. And also for granting a empty lobbying job for Lady Killer Your-you're Hamilton. Board members don’t care enough about taxpayers' interests to stop the board Consent Agenda's rolling past, lift off the bogus job for scrutiny, and demand from Elia the needs study and other justification for the new job. Board members are too scared of Elia and too contemptuous of taxpayers to do that.

Any board member who questions things gets the pounding that GED Griffin got from Carol Kurdell and Candy Olson when Griffin, in the first throes of idealism after she joined the board, asked that a non-bid contract to a former administratior come off the Consent Agenda for scrutiny. This request raised the hackles of the board’s two resident monitor crones, who guard the ancient tradition of wrongdoing that comprises what Ms. Edgecomb in one of her rhetorical flights into the nut regions of the stratosphere calls “institutional memory.” The crones gave Griffin a tongue lashing, accusing her of “being disloyal to the staff.”

If Griffin had a lick of sense and a modicum of guts, she would have stood up, glared down the board dais at her two torturers, and shot back, "I am not working for the staff; I am working for the students and taxpayers."

There is always hope when a new member arrives at the board that he or she will emerge a swashbuckler for justice. The ubiquitous prayer is that not only does the new member have brains but also has chutpah. Mr. White is under scrutiny. I do not intuit leadership potential there. We are going to have to make do with his beguiling dimple, I fear.

Would the fates have decreed that the dimpled darling have both dimple and Lancelotian bravery. We can only hope that he will emerge a champion of right and justice. We will not hold our breath.

The appointment of the no-bid former administrator that Griffin called off the agenda went back on the rolling Consent Agenda after approval of the smirkingly triumphant board majority five to two, Griffin and Valdes dissenting. I believe if there were a leader on the board that these two would follow that leader. But they can't themselves lead. They are not made of the right stuff for leaderhip.

The unspoken rule is that administrators never gets punished no matter what they do; but teachers even have stuff made up against them for punishment. For example, that Ms. Elia's vice principal daughter was supposed to know about drug activities of a superior and kept mum. If a teacher had failed to report the situation--as was Edgecomb‘s daughter’s case, that teacher would be the object of a lightening-fast Professional Standards Gestapo shake down and out the door on unemployment compensation before you could say “administrative perks.” But since the culprit was daughter of a board member, well then, that is a different kettle of fish.

To rescue Edgcombe Junior, there would occur a major reshuffling of data and an obscuring of the facts so slick that even Sherlock Holmes would be nonplussed. Indeed that was what occurred: major reshuffling and obscuring facts that made Sherlock throw up his hands and tell Dr. Watson to get him a vodka and tonic, heavy on the vodka.

And nobody expects the CTA to raise a pinkie--not in this geological age, not in this postlapsarian era. Prevailing wisdom is that CTA exists cheek by jowel with administration. CTA members would be better off banking their CTA dues to hire an attorney if they needed one when the administration frames them with a Professional Standards charge.

In the drug dust-up, the Edgecomb offspring enjoyed not only the tradition of never punishing administrators in any situation; but she also benefitted as well from the protection of being a board member's child.

Board attorney Tom Gonzalez must have temporarily ceased slurping soda and chomping chips on the podium and rushed to dip into his mouthpiece bag of tricks to construct a footnote to a footnote to make Elia’s daughter not only guiltless for covering up a dangerous drug situation in the schools but also for having an obligatory Nobel nomination for Elia's child signed by all board and administration sent to the Stockholm Nobel Foundation by private jet paid for by Florida taxpayers, bien sur. The senders will have have only recently learned what a Nobel is.

Since the significant way that the board and administration keep teachers oppressed is 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 evolved Gestopo ethos to keep teachers silent with a targeted program of Professional Standards charges, making them fear losing their jobs. This sicko sadistic power gives the board and administration control of teachers’ ability to earn a livelihood. This power renders teachers terrified and mute. The situation ranks an offense to the human spirit.

The head of Professional Standards is Linda Kipley, whom I have observed wearing see-through plastic baby dolls on the job. Wearing plastic see-through baby as work footware is such gaucherie that it qualifies as firing offense. You just know in your bones that when La Linda was principal at Hillsborough High but so dishonest that teachers refused to go into a conference with her unless equipped with a recorder so likely is Kipley to lie that La Linda's trashy see-through babydolls served objective correlaative for her ethics.

The Professional Standards head job got no advertising, besmirching the the board mantra that it is “an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” This lack of competition for jobs violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and violates as well the federal contracts that the school has that require affirmative action plans for disabled people and equal-opportunity protocols. There are no affirmative action plans extant; I asked. There is no obedience to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

I asked for affirmative action plans because a job for accountant opened up and had a number of applicants, one being handicapped. I reviewed the application files. Four applicants, including the handicapped applicant, had the accounting degree and the experience called for in the job description. But of these qualified people, none got the job.

Guess who did? Mr. Linda Kipley, of course. And guess what credentials he had for the job? Not one. He had a high school diploma, period. I take that gift of a job for Le Kipley to be due to his wife's doing the Professional Standards dirty work of filing false charges against teachers to keep them terrified and not intrepid enough to fight vicious, unfair discrimination.

Thank God the patriots who rebelled against the repression of King George were fighters. Had they shown the lack of spirit that the county teachers display, we would still be an English colony. Every generation has to renew its liberty. Every group must guard its honor. Every generation has to face down the buggers.

Such abysmal distortion of the authority to hire the most qualified people--not buddies, family, pets, sycophants, and flatterers---to work for the taxpayers flummoxes one. What vaulting sense of distortion for the authority one holds in the name of the taxpayers can account for such behavior? I believe that it comes from years and years of the school board's not being held accountable for its vicious behavior. Most ignore this behavior. Most ignore the school board.

People don't pay attention to the school board even though in every opinion poll they aver that education is the most important thing a voter must consider. Even though they will never soar into the upper reaches of the Stanford Binet, the C and D students that people the board and administration caught on early to this lack of oversight years ago and exploited it.

Ambitious local politicians don't start their political careers at the school board. If they want to go to Tallahassee eventually, they start at the County Commission or even the Tampa City Council, Those who run for the school board are phlegmatic lifers. Getting on the board and remaining there until the end of time is their idea of heaven.

That nobody cares what the school board does, not the press, not the public, frees the board lifers to exult in their power over billions of tax dollars and the unchallenged right to hire unqualified people and only those qualified by their relationship to the board and administration. These unchallenged privileges against the common good have made the school administration a bailiwick of bad behavior with no concern except for its denizens' petty power and privilege eked out over years of public and press lack of oversight. They persevere to scheme and fight to preserve their booty, the retaining of power over the billions of tax dollars that inhere to the school-board-and-and administration rackets and the right to hire misfits, tra la la.

The lack of voter interest and voter oversight yields a sense of Olympian privilege to board and administration to act majestically capricious with self-reference as sole gauge. They feel no compunction about not acting for the good of the community in such ways as Ms. Edgecomb's inferred reason for running for the board to shield her daughter's job demonstrates. "Let drugs infest playgrounds to a faretheewell, but keep your hands off my kid, the vice-principal."

Yet all boad members take an oath of office to protect the laws and to serve the community, including hiring capable people in equal-opportunity contests. They don't. So their "we are an equal-employment-0pportunity employer" is Hindenburgian claptrap.

No wonder there is only one Ph.D. in the ROSSAC redoubt. His degree is in computers. I think his name is Stephens. There must have been no relative, hanger-on, or sycophant who could even turn on a computer for the board to have gone to the extreme of hiring a qualified person for a job.

Delusions of grandeur burgeon as dominant side affliction that the board and administration rapidly acquire. What is fair play, concern for students, respect for taxpayers, and a modicum of ethics compared to delusional thinking? The verities of good behavior don't have a prayer in La La Rossacland.

ldd

All TOGETHER NOW: "BOOOO!"

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N.Y. / Region

Cuomo, Pushing School Cuts, Offers a Target: Superintendent Salaries

By THOMAS KAPLAN

Published: February 6, 2011

Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

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De gustibus non est disputandum.

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