Commissioner Smith Finally Comes Through with a Little Nudging

In a long-standing commitment to the Women's Movement, I have found that if you can't get a person in an official capacity to do his or her job, you move up the food chain and write his or her boss. Or you see what bow-wow committees the culprit serves on, and you write the bow-wow committee's chair and ask that all members of the board be provided a copy of your communication about the subject culprit's derelictions.

Dr. Smith didn't answer two letters from asking him to tell Broward County to send me the data I asked on the hiring of Dr. Jim Hamilton as their lobbyist. One supposes he was engaged in throwing spitballs in his wastebasket instead of doing his job.

So I sent a letter to him with copies to the governor and the big-time members of the committee called the Board of Governors that oversees the state universities in Florida. Fortunately, Dr. Smith is on that committee. Those are the names cc'd below his letter to me.

Now I have to see if Broward obeys the commissioner. If not, I will use this letter to pressure its recalcitrants to send me the data on Hamilton's hiring that I asked for two times with silence as the result.

If Broward is obdurate, I go back to Dr. Smith and the Board of Governors and the governor for another round.

You just keep that routine up as long as it takes. Civil rights requires patience and persistence. It's like training a child to go potty. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

lee

3/31/2009

Dear Governor Crist:

I see that Commissioner Smith is also a member of the Board of Governors in addition to his commissioner job. I hope he is more conscientious about that assignment than he is about doing the job you appointed him to do as commissioner.

I request that you prod Dr. Smith to do his primary job: see that the schools in Florida obey the law.

I have mailed two requests to Dr. Smith to help me to get Broward County to obey the Public Records law and send me data I have requested. Broward has not answered my identical requests. Neither has Dr. Smith answered my two requests to him to get Broward School Board to obey the law.

Will you expedite this request for public information from the Broward School Board by instructing Dr. Smith to do his job?

Thank you.

Respectfully,

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

Dr. Eric J. Smith Commissioner of Education

T. WILLARD FAIR, Chairman Members
PETER BOULWARE DR. AKSHAY DESAI ROBERTO MARTiNEZ
. PHOEBE RAULERSON KATHLEEN SHANAHAN LINDA K. TAYLOR

Maureen Dinnen, Chair Broward County School Board 600 S. E. Third Avenue
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301

On March 23, 2009, Commissioner Smith received the attached complaint from Lee Drury De Cesare who alleges that the Broward County School Board has failed to comply with the public records law.

t1UJ•~
EdW. Jo~an
ED W. JORDAN, CIG, CFE, CIA INSPECTOR GENERAL
325 W. GAINES STREET SUITE 1201• TALLAHASSEE, FL 32399-0400• (850) 245-0403• www.fldoe.org

FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

DPE, Copyright IRIS 2005" shapes="_x0000_i1025" width="97" height="95">

Dr. Eric J. Smith Commissioner of Education

T. WILLARD FAIR, Chairman

Members

PETER BOULWARE DR. AKSHAY DESAI ROBERTO MARTiNEZ

. PHOEBE RAULERSON KATHLEEN SHANAHAN LINDA K. TAYLOR

DPE, Copyright IRIS 2005" shapes="_x0000_i1026" width="91" height="38">

Maureen Dinnen, Chair Broward County School Board 600 S. E. Third Avenue

Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301

On March 23, 2009,

Commissioner Smith received the attached complaint from Lee Drury De Cesare who alleges that the Broward County School Board has failed to comply with the public records law.

t1UJ·~

EdW. Jo~an

ED W. JORDAN, CIG, CFE, CIA

INSPECTOR GENERAL

325 W. GAINES STREET SUITE 1201· TALLAHASSEE, FL 32399-0400· (850) 245-0403· www.fldoe.org

Another Problem Extant: my being cut out of the tapes of the educational channel's showing of the board meeting. I couldn't find myself on the three most recent tapes in which I had appeared.

Here's where you have to be prepared to expect a new assault on your sanity. Anybody who challenges authority must expect to be labeled crazy.

This is where you settle down to a long campaign waged mostly with the written word. My winning suit is that I can write and can punctuate what I write correctly most of the time. I sometimes nod off, but I am usually on the beam.

Persistence is everything in this hustle for fairness. And Florida schools are notorious for not ceding public information. They can be brought to heel if only you have the energy. lee

Ms. Griggs: I am going to call Brighthouse Networks and see if there is some technical reason why I don't receive the files intact if you all have not changed them. I have a new computer so that I know I was missing in the tapes both on my old computer and on my new one.

The puzzle that stumps me is that when Bart Birdsall and I appeared to defend Steve Kemp, my part was not there; his was when he followed me to the podium.

I would like to think this is a technology problem. I won't stand for a publicly supported institution to tamper with democracy's First Amendment. If citizens put up with that, we will soon be out of the democracy business. I will let you know what Bright House says.

lee de cesare

From: Lucy Griggs [mailto:lucyg@educationchannel.org]
Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 11:12 AM

To: lee DeCesare
Cc: William Birdsall
Subject: Re: RE: Fwd:

Every time I have received a call or email from you expressing a concern about a School Board Meeting, Ms. DeCesare, I immediately checked the file, and found the meeting to be there in its entirety. We have not replaced anything in a School Board Meeting, because there was never anything cut out of one.

Logs on our encoding computer prove that the files have not been modified since their creation. Once again, I invite you to come over and view the files and the logs. I feel certain this will satisfy your concerns.

Lucy Griggs

Program Director

Tampa Educational Cable Consortium

703 N. Willow Avenue

Tampa, FL 33606

Phone: 813-254-2253

Fax: 813-253-3267

email:

Lucyg@educationchannel.org

www.educationchannel.org

"TV That's Good for Your Mind"

On Apr 1, 2009, at 6:10 PM, lee DeCesare wrote:

What does an undoctored view of the three dates in

question of your files show, Ms. Griggs? For days, I could not find my appearance on the educational channel's programs for the three dates in which I appeared.

Somebody, I inferred, had cut those files out.

Am I to understand that you have replaced the omitted portions in which I appeared on the two other previous dates previous to the March 24th one, in which you omitted my appearance?

I would be happy to be wrong but believe that I am not.

Have you now replaced my appearance on all three occasions in which you cut me out since I filed a complaint with the FCC?

lee drury de cesare

Lucy, Public-education channel:

I have just spoken to Gordon in the Technical Department of Roadrunner, Bright House's email service which I have on my computer.

He says that he can't account for these glitches that omitted me three times from the school-board tapes, that we get the same signals on the beach and people get in Tampa.

This is a mystery. Particularly strange is that when Bart Birdsall and I appeared on the board show to protest the mistreatment of teacher Steve Kemp by the School Board, I was cut out but Bart, who followed me, was on the tape.

I will come to the station on the day I go to the next board meeting: April 21. I should get there from the beach at about one:thirty p.m.

Tell me again the station's street address, please.

Thank you.

lee drury de cesare

Emotional Blackmail as Usual and Sneaky Tactics as Usual

Ms. Elia, Steve Kemp's blog site says somebody from the administration called him and asked him not to bring up a certain subject again on his blog.

Unfortunately, he has run out of juice and agreed to this outrage against free speech. I guess eight months on suspension sucks a person dry of courage in some cases. You and your ROSSAC team of torture ghouls are playing on his fear of never getting to teach again anywhere.

Has nobody in the administration any respect for teachers' Constitutional rights? Is it wall-to-wall thuggery in the ROSSAC bunker? Is there no public servant within the ROSSAC bunker or on the board dais who knows about the minimum free-speech rights every citizen has? Is the board as mute on this outrage as it was in the crucifixion of Mr. Erwin and Mr. Wiesner?

This event confirms my suspicion that ROSSAC denizens majored in shallow areas of study in third-tier colleges, did not master Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics or even Play Nice 101, and arrrived at their ROSSAC cubbyholes with the shallowest levels of intellectual sophistication and moral discernment.

You are clumsy at coercion, ma'am. No polish. No class. Rather crude and inept. I understand you were an undergraduate history major but would bet my best pair of Manola Blanicks that you never read The Federalist Papers, and if you did, you didn't understand Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The three may as well have been pissing in the wind as far as you are concerned.

You have instigated the child-abuse frame-up that has gutted Steve Kemp during a six-months' suspension; before you let him loose, you want to assure that he will offer you no resistance if you waive the child-abuse charge. Hence the crude call to pin him to wall on his abandoning his free-speech rights by not mentioning a subject you cited.

Don't be so sure that you have secured the fellow. He has not abandoned his blog, one notes. You didn't dare ask him to do that. I hope that he doesn't. I hope this worm turns. It will show you ROSSAC Visigoths that you can't slash and burn teachers' rights with their cooperation by manufacturing child-abuse charges against them and putting teachers on school-year suspensions to terrify them with job loss so that they buckle to your coercion.

I wonder what the Secretary of Education, the governor, and the Florida Commissioner of Education would make of your crude attempt to browbeat teacher Steve Kemp into giving up free speech as the implicit price hinted at in the phone call and request that you will drop the trumped-up charges against him that you and Ms. Home-ec Kipley of professional Standands cooked up.

I judge that you don't dare fire him after the exposure that his case has got. You will have to explain that junk-filled room where the administration put the mentally challenged students. Kemp was prescient enough to film the junk. He may have read more of Machiavelli than you think he has. And you will have to explain how Steve Kemp's bosses assigned him to continue to take care of these same children for six days after the incident arbitrarily cited as child abuse. If he is a child abuser, why would the administrators put him in an area with the same children to care for for six days after the alleged child-abuse incident? He had no training, yet the area director Smiley, the principal, and the supervisor gave him no orientation. The six days define the time that passed before the information wafted to you, and you jumped on it to charge him with child abuse at the sheriff's office to pressure him to abandon his blog and to be an example of the administration's treatment of teachers for minor infractions or none so that other teachers will keep their heads down and not utter a peep of complaint about the administration's sadism. Explaining this tangle of data will present a challenge of lying that will tax even your considerable gifts in that area.

And let me not forget: God bless the sheriff's office for throwing out the charge.

Do you imagine that the governor, the Secretary of Education, and the Education Commissioner would approve of the thuggery displayed in this case by the superintendent of Hillsborough County schools? 'Why should the state officials underwrite the stupidity of a bullying superintendent such as you have revealed yourself to be, ma'am? You don't know how to handle authority. You maul it. Your displays of bullying and raw retaliation do not enhance your status as superintendent.

As an ordinary citizen, I reserve the right to report on the outrages of malice and sadism perpetuated at the ROSSAC hellhole to as many people come to my blog.

Further, I request as public information who the person was that called Steve Kemp and what the topic is that you fear have on Kemp's blog. There must be records about this call and a written record to satisfy minimal management protocol. I want those written records as public information and will send this email to the Public Affairs Office to confirm my requesting them.

You bring obloquy to education, Ms. Elia. The board brings shame on its members by allowing you to crucify teachers to keep them from expressing their opinion about the way the administration misrules the schools. After the coddling of the incompetent principal in the Alafia case, your willingness to hire the incompetent Ms. Smith a coach on how act human for $345 a day with plans before the mothers put their feet down to send her and her assistant principal to Eckerd for personality-remake seminars for $4500 apiece, this crucifixion of a teacher on a trumped-up charge makes Caligula look like an old softie. Why didn't Mr. Kemp get such lavish assistance? Why isn't he ensconced in the ROSSAC rest home as one hears Ms. Smith is while you find or create her a better-paying job?


No wonder you don't cede teachers and students a standard place on the school board agenda. You are afraid of what they would say about your conduct. I am glad I got the chance to anatomize it at the last board meeting. I said you were a greedy, cruel bullying liar. That's the part of the March 24th tape the public television station cut out but reinserted when I filed an FCC charge. I am content that you gave the station the order to cut me out of the tape. But the dimwits didn't bethink themselves that they, not you, would be guilty in the FCC's eyes.

The show-and-tell student-teacher display at the last board meeting under the rubric "Teaching and Learning" was not a teacher-student forum. It was a staged display to make the board look cuddly as it oohed, aahed, and cooed at the children. The AID group was adorable, of course. The teachers were lovely.

But what is needed is a forum for teachers and students who are not adorable but who are honest and forthright about their view of the problems they face under a malignantly punitive administration and a criminally negligent board. Show-and-tell displays of cherry-picked, docile children and teachers don't fulfill that need for a an honest forum that shows respect for teachers' and students' opinions about the schools.

A forum for teachers in which they aren't adorable and submissive but candid and even truculent is the ticket. The same goes for students. I saw some militant straight students when Ms. Pole Girl Falliero tried to punish gay students by alerting their parents that they belonged to gay-oriented school clubs. You, the Pole Girl, and the other bigots lost that one. You will lose any battle over rights in a minimally fair fight.

That's what open government and democracy are about. Yet you feel safe from the board's rebuke if you stifle the democratic right of a teacher in Hillsborough County to free speech as the price of his job.

The board should have to explain to the voters why they allow you to commit such outrages.


lee drury de cesare

Ms. Cobbe, Public Affairs office:

Someone mentioned at the 24th board meeting that Connie Mileto and Dr. Hamilton were working in great harmony up in Tallahassee to promote the district's wellbeing.

We all recall the pair was the the ROSSAC Heloise and Abelard of the time when Dr. Hamilton maneuvered La Mileto past others who had better than a kindergarten background for the job of chief government-relations office.

· I request as public information 1. The ad Ms. Elia published to advertise the lobbying position that Dr. Hamilton holds;

· 2. In which venues the ad was published;

· 3. A copy of the files of those who applied for the job.

If the job was not advertised and simply handed to Dr. Hamilton, please say that.

Thank you. Lee Drury De Cesare

Some Comments on Goader's Blog

1. Goader–
   Because this whole situation has been exposed to the glaring light of day, the SB, Elia and buddies have no choice but to do the right thing. Do you want to go back into teaching–you seem to have the heart for it–or get outta Dodge (er, Hillsborough schools).Seems to me it’s up to you. Attorney? We need folks like you, but you need to look out for you.
   Best to you–

2. lee drury de cesare on March 29th, 2009 12:58 am

   Goader. I was delighted to hear from the invited teachers and children at show-and-tell time in the board agenda on the 24th that there is a formal effort to instill ethics in the children in the schools.

   I was so enchanted with the sight of the board talking about ethics that I dumped my planned comments and instead said I would identify people on the board who should under no circumstances offer themselves as role models of character to children looking for people in the schools to look up to.

   I told Susan VAldes that she was no role model because she was a hypocrite who yammered about “saving the taxpayer’s dollar” after her history of blowing $50,000 dollars on jetting around the country on tax-paid board lards while poor children in the county didn’t have supplies and couldn’t participate in class as a result unless their poorly paid teachers bought them the supplies.

   I told Jennifer Falliero that she was not role model for reasons everyone knew.

   I told Dr. Lamb that he was no role model because he used board secretarial help and stationery to write Pam Iorio to mitigate the water bill at his condomenium.

   I wheeled on Ms. Elia and told her she was a bully, was a constitutional liar, was greedy, was trying to up her salary to stratospheric heights so that she could retire with a pile of pension money, and that she was cruel, framing teachers for cooked-up crimes for having a blog or speaking out on something that concerned the schools.

   I felt exhilarated with the buzzer closed me down.

   They are trying to shut me up by having the public education station edit out my appearance in the board citizen comment. They have done it for three times. The station has called me to come in so that they can prove that they didn’t edit me out. My parts are still not on the programs. I believe the station thinks I am dumb and gullible.

   I have filed and FCC charge against the station, sending the staion a copy, and asked its management for its government grants lizf so that I can challenge the funding.

   It’s extraordinary that the administration has no better sense than to call you up and ask that you not talk about certain things. That is abridgement of free speech. You need a good First Amendment lawyer to sue them for every brick in the building.

   Meanwhile, hang on to your dignity and your citizenship. The next time they call you, refer them to me. I will make them sorry they got up in the morning.

   lee