The biggest lie has always been to keep quiet; and the best life-enhancer is to provoke, unsettle, rile – in short, to make people face the truth.
Gore Vidal
Gentle Readers: I wrote to the AG and asked for him to render an opinion on the secrecy of the Hillsborough County Board on such things as the names of candidates for jobs such as the principals that La Gaceta cited in this week's paper. I believe that there should be a hyperlink to candiates' credentials so that citizens have the chance to review applicants' backgrounds. Then they could judge whether Ms. Elia's choices made in secret hired the best people.
I cite as examples of crooked hires Connie Mileto because she was a favorite of Dr. Hamilton, not because she had the credentials for the job: she had neither suitable degree nor needed experience (she had been a kindergarten teacher).
I know Kipley's husband's getting the job in accounting was pure stealing of a job that should have gone to one of the four people with required accounting degrees and experience who applied (I examined the applications.)
Ms. Kipley's husband got the job because Kipley had lied to back up Ms. Elia's lies in using the Professional Standards division as vector against teachers whom she wanted to fire or throw into a state of anxiety because of the terror of the loss of their jobs. This is situation in the current case of Steve Kemp, whom she framed because he has a blog, and the board and administration hates blogs because they might publish some truth about the administration and board instead of the sanitized stuff that comes through the Community Affairs division.
This cruel behavior by the superintendent is vicious behavior that smacks of sadism. And the board sits with a glaze on its eyes and pretends that it knows nothing. It doesn't care what Ms. Elia does to teachers. Board members make sentimental noises about teachers for political posturing, but that is just political bilge.
I sent Steve Kemp to April Griffin for her help with his semester-long suspension for a cooked-up child-abuse charge that the sheriff threw out. Ms. Griffin did nothing public or discernible after the meeting to help Steve. At that meeting, she had told Steve not to say they met or report what they said. She made it seem shameful to meet with a teacher and be concerned with teachers' mistreatment.
After this fruitless meeting, Ms. Griffin apparently returned to her conversion regimen to become another board member who rubber stamps Ms. Elia's ukases.
What a disappointment Griffin is. When Kurdell and Olson jumped on her for asking that an item on the Consent Agenda that involved a no-bid contract to a former administrator be pulled for open discussion and Kurdell and Olson called her "disloyal" to the staff, Griffin should have shot back, "My first loyalty goes to the citizens as yours should." Instead, it made her wilt and give up doing anything bold or brave for the good of the schools and the welfare of citizens who pay the bills.
This lack of open government is what we need to emphasize in sending news out about the board and administration. Elections should include questions to the candidates about what they have done as incumbents or what they will do if new candidates to make sure citizens see what the school board is deciding and how its members do the deciding. They need to pledge that they will open the decision making to citizens and have an open government and not conduct the business of the schools behind closed doors.
We live in a democracy. We also live in a state that stresses the sunshine law. The School Board of Hillsborough County should not act as if its members and administration are exempt from this form of government and this state law.
Knowledge is power. Those who hoard knowledge hoard power. It is a trait that does not mark the open, responsible public servant.
lee
This is the AG's seal. I have a new computer and can't figure out how to copy it. ldd
OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEYGENERAL Opinions Division
BILL McCOLLUM ATTORNEY GENERAL STATE OF FLORIDA
PL 01 The Capitol Tallahassee, Florida 32399-1050 Telephone (850) 245-0158
Fax (850) 922-3969
Mr. Lee De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802 Madeira Beach, Florida 33708
The Office of Attorney General Bill McCollum has received your letter requesting this office issue an opinion regarding the actions of the Hillsborough County School Board in selecting principals under the Government in the Sunshine Law, section 286.011, Florida Statutes.
Regrettably the authority of the Attorney General to issue opinions is prescribed by law and is limited to public officials on questions relating to their own official duties under state law. This precludes this office from issuing opinions to private individuals or to public officials inquiring about the duties of another public official. I would note, however, that the Attorney General's Office is a strong supporter of the open government laws of this state and has urged greater transparency by governmental entities.
I am enclosing a section of the Government in the Sunshine Manual (which is prepared by the Attorney General's Office and printed by the First Amendment Foundation) discussing the importance of public participation in governmental meetings. An abridged edition of the manual is available online at: http://www.myfloridalegal.com/sun.nsf/manual You may access the Attorney General Opinions referenced therein online at: http://myfloridalegal.com/opinions.
I would also note that while the agenda may not be published until shortly before the meeting, you may be able to obtain the information regarding the superintendent's recommendations prior to that time under the Public Records Law, Chapter 119, Florida Statutes. Section 119.011 (12), F.S., defines "public records" to include:
all documents, papers, letters, maps, books, tapes, photographs, films, sound recordings, data processing software, or other material, regardless of the physical form, characteristics, or means of transmission, made or
Mr. Lee De Cesare May 15, 2009 Page Two
received pursuant to law or ordinance or in connection with the transaction of official business by any agency.
As discussed in the manual, the Florida Supreme Court has interpreted this definition to encompass all materials made or received by an agency in connection with official business which are used to perpetuate, communicate or formalize knowledge. See Shevin v. Byron, Harless, Schaffer, Reid and Associates, Inc., 379 So. 2d 633, 640 (Fla. 1980). All such materials, regardless of whether they are in final form, are open for public inspection unless the Legislature has exempted them from disclosure. Wait v. Florida Power & Light Company, 372 So. 2d 420 (Fla. 1979).
I am following the national torture discussion. When Paul Krugman, NYT columnist, wrote a piece saying we needed to prosecute the higher-ups who advocated torture to "save the nation's soul." I sent it to Ms. Michelle Obama and asked that she persuade her husband to take seriously the Krugman advice. Don't underestimate the persuasive power of wives. I have been throwing my weight around in the kitchen for the same guy for almost 53 years. Ms. Obama is her husband's intellectual equal, so he should listen to her. He obviously does. He is the only president whom I have seen sit quietly and listen intently when his wife talks.
Thank God, Frank Rich's column yesterday says that even though the president wants to let the issue go (Obama's one fault is that he does not want to fight for any reason--he is a chronically pacific man) and "move on," events are catching up with the culprits. It looks like a groundswell of national revulsion will force the President not to "move on" and ignore the torture issue but to allow Justice Department prosecutions to go forward. My lord, I hope so.
The "we need to move on" phrase is the favorite mantra of those who did dirty deeds and don't want to be held accountable. The "moving on" mantra reminds me of the "move-on" chorus that emerged from members of the Hillsborough County School Board after the Doug Erwin case's verdict went against them. Their crucifixion of Erwin for trying to out crime in the schools---leaking buildings that developers got top tax dollars for from the board, rigged bids, and outright theft of both school property and money--backfired. The jury didn't believe the administration and board lies. It cleaned the board and administration's clock in the Court House and vindicated Mr. Erwin. The board fired not one person after this crime spree reviewed in Erwin's Whistleblower case. They should have begun by firing Erwin's torture trio, Lennard, Hamilton, and Davis. Mr. Gonzalez should have gotten the sack as well.
However, today developers' names adorn incumbents' donor lists in the Supervisor of Elections site. They know a bribable official when the see one. People who took bribes before will do it again reason these fellows.
Dr. Lennard and his two main thugs, Hamilton and Davis, tried to shut Mr. Erwin up by portraying him as crazy. These tax-paid villains schemed to fire him and deprive him of his pension. Attorney Gonzalez supported this effort with duplicitous lawyerverbiage as did the whole administrative structure plus the school board--the latter's support mainly was pretending that its members did not know what was going on.
If the higher ups were the ones trying to squelch Erwin's story, then logic says they were reaping the benefits of the crime. The vicious treatment of Erwin by Lennard etal has no other answer for me.
I believe I have written before that all of us citizens want to believe in our public officials. It is the intense wish of citizens in the world's putatively best democracy that its elected public officials be honest and work for the good of the country, state, or city we elect them to represent.
We are naive if we think most public officials have the good of citizenry in mind. They most often have their own good in mind, and when we learn what is going on, we are sickened by the revelations, not jubilant. Crooks and narcissists in public office mean our democracy has failed us. It is not the information we want to know about. We want to believe in the tooth fairy and in honest public officials who work for the good of the people who elected them.
Frank Rich (my favorite columnist because he writes so well and is so on-target in his criticism of government) shows in Sunday's piece below that the Bush administration was knee-deep in the torture outrage.
The torture idea didn't originate with a few marginally literate soldiers from the impoverished hills and hollows of the country who joined the army because it was the only job they could get. The rap from the Pentagon on them was that these country bumpkins thought torture up on night duty at AbuGharib. That's what the cover story from the Pentagon and White House alleged. Instead, information is slowly leaking out that, as our suspicions suggested, torture orders came from the top, including waterboarding. That is the story that is now unfolding.
Moreover, the torture was not, as Cheney is claiming, to save American lives but to save the Bush administration's reputation by waterboarding a confession from a detainee that that a conspiracy by Iraq existed to attack the United States. That would justify the war the Bush team lied us into and remove the stigma of its members' lying us into the Iraq war that has killed and mutilated thousands of our service people and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
This cover-up sounds like the routine laundering of reality that goes on in the Public Affairs office to sanitize the actions of the board and administration.
If the White House and Pentagon can engage in dirty deeds and cover-up, then the Hillsborough School Board and ROSSAC can as well---and do. That was the barely hidden message behind Steve Heggarty's comment on the yearbook picture of the girl which exposed her pudendum for all the world to see that will look on and laugh at that yearbook picture of the poor girl for years to come.
Le Heggarty said, "We are not going to cooperate with your story" when asked about the exposure of the girl's private parts. The parents wanted the distributed issues of the yearbook recalled from the few students who received them, the books reprinted, and then reissued to the students.
But the board and administration care nothing for the psyche of a student. Students and teachers are mere serfs in a system of administration and board power and parochial grandeur. The teachers and students are necessary to suck money from the state that the board and administration then spend with a hey nonnynonny.
The administration and board won't take the trouble to rectify their error for a mere student or teacher. If it were an administrator's being embarrassed, that would be different. No measure is too hard or too costly to rescue an administrator--even the guilty ones like Principal Smith at Alafai.
Translated, Mr. Heggarty's response means, "We are going to stick by our cover-up lies and repeat them until they displace reality with our redacted version of the event to pretty up the board's and administration's "reputation."
It's well to remind ourselves that Heggarty used to be a reporter for the SPT and was expected to write text that was honest, not twisted, as his job now requires. Heggarty's job for the school board and administrtion is to write lies so that the bad behavior of these clients can come out looking OK for public consumption. That's essentially what the Pentagon and the Bush administration were trying to do with the waterboarding torture issue.
The point that I make is that if outrages against the truth can happen in the White House and Pentagon, they can happen in ROSSAC and the School Board of Hillsborough County. And we citizens do democracy no favor by letting these offenses against truth pass by without protest.
I have always hated Rumsfeld and considered Cheney in the throes of some major psycho-pathology. I also would like to smack Paul Wolfowitz silly.
I believe pathology of the School-Board members and Ms. Elia is far gone, far gone. They exist in some mental cul-de-sac of a world where they are all powerful and the teachers and students are serfs. I fear their illness may be past curing.
Op-Ed Columnist Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush
* By FRANK RICH Published: May 16, 2009
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as AbuGhraib.”
The GQ article isn’t the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.
What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon’s internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective “military analysts.” Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these “analysts” appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”
When Barstow’s story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon’s inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld’s current spokesman cited the inspector general’s “exoneration” to attack the Times articles as fiction.
But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general’s report, not The Times’s reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow’s charges. The inspector general’s office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.
Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles — surely not because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon inspector general’s office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?
In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn’t buy the heavily redacted report’s claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.” The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.
But the new administration doesn’t want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general’s report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!
The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.
And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for AbuGhraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.
It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew...” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.
I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
The administration of the schools and the board promote suppression of free speech constantly.But they have gone a step further to suppress reality and substitute their own. It's like when the Bush spokesman told the press it didn't understand that the Bush White House lived in its own reality.
Ordinary people who share the common reality of humanity's perception of life view constructing another reality as schizophrenic. People who try to substitute their own version of reality for the common reality shared by most people have entered the world of meglomaniacal schizophrenia.Read the psychological data on schizophrenia. I think you will suspect the mental health of the ROSSAC inmates.
The latest evidence of this board-administration self-delusion concerns the yearbook picture of a female student that shows her pudendum.
The administration, board, and Steve Heggarty, head of Community Affairs, says that ROSSAC won't "cooperate with your story" of the girl's exposed vagina in the yearbook. He won't leave ROSSAC's manufactured reality and join the world.
In other words, ROSSACians say they won't be a part of any negative story about the school administration's misconduct. Kurdell says to forget it as does Olson after first expressing concern for the girl.
The board and administration not only want to suppress free speech; they try to suppress reality and substitute their version of "What do you mean by a vaginal-exposure picture in the yearbook? It's not there, or it's a shadow. And even if it were, you are-- every one of you-- to pretend it's not there and are not mention it again. Those are our orders. That's our reality.
The administration, the board, and the public-relations machine of Community Affairs are all pushing their version of reality as the truth. That response of the school administrative, board, and publicity juggernaut of the schools shows that they don't only suppress free speech; they also try to suppress reality and substitute their propaganda for the facts.
This megalomania has gone on so long with success that the board, administration, and its spin-machine publicity people in the press- community-relations crowd of the schools think they can alter reality for the world by denying it and that they can't shape reality to flatter the board and administration.They expect all us ordinary-reality folks to go along with this schizphrenic deception. lee -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Good heavens, this is magical. Somebody sent me the salaries of Bay Area jobs. You could spend all day with this. leeAnonymous has left a new comment on your post "Beyond the Blue Door of Reality":
I think you will really like this: http://www2.tbo.com/static/news-special-reports-data-bay/tbo-special-reports-database-hillsborough-salaries/
I have requested public information from the Sarasota County Schools.Please have your secretary keep tabs on the fulfillment of my request.
Dr. Hamilton lists Sarasota as a client on a previous list recorded on his lobbying Web site.Now he is consultant for the Mixon firm, which mysteriously received your lobbying contract.I suspect razzle-dazzle manipulation to keep Dr. Hamilton as Sarasota's lobbyist via a sham consulting perch at Mixon.
I don't know how you can afford a lobbyist in this economic downturn. Did you do a needs study before hiring a lobbyist?Did your superintendent mayhap slip one past the board without its registering on the board's radar? This appointment may have been the fruit of a male-bonding stint of your superintendent and Dr. Hamilton at Joe's Bar and Grill, where many similar macho deals are sealed with a martini--or several. Ditto for the Mayberry Machiavelli to Mixon. The problem with these maneuvers is that each one requires equal-opportunity ads to prove that Sarasota does honor its pledge to be an equal-employment-opportunity employer. And the board is responsible for that pledge, not the superintendent if he did not honor it.
Dr. Hamilton is a disagreeable, rumpled, grumpy man who loved to brag at HCSB that he was a "bastard" to work for and who was Superintendent Dr. Earl Lennard's henchman in attempting to crucify Doug Erwin, a school administrator who discovered shoddy, leaking school buildings that got top dollar for contractors stamped by the board, rigged bids, and outright theft. Google Doug Erwin to read the story of a school board terminally derelict in duty and with some probably on the take.
Mr. Erwin finally filed a whistle blower suit against the board, won it, and escaped to Georgia retirement with his pension intact and his settlement of $165,000 for the crucifixion by the administration and collusive board. The taxpayers footed the bill for administration and board crime. The board fired not a single person afterwards. It should have begun with the superintendent.
When Mr. Erwin had tried to get the board and administration to do something about the crime he uncovered, they instead mounted a campaign to prove him crazy. It was the old chestnut, "Oh, don't listen to Doug Erwin. Everybody knows he's crazy." Those that did not partake in the crucifixion of Mr. Erwin were out in the streets without a job.
Dr. Lennard and his goons along with a complicit board had tried to fire Mr. Erwin and remove his pension. This behavior suggests to me that people in high administrative slots were benefiting from the in-school crime that Mr. Erwin tried to expose--including the board as well since it was rubber-stamping the leaking school buildings for contractor top-dollar reimbursement. You now see contractors of all stripes listed in incumbents' donor lists online in the Supervisor of Election's records when they run again for office today. That smells.
The people who govern HC schools are not nice people, not ethical public servants, so Hamilton was in his element. This "gentleman" has not mastered grammar and punctuation (doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're) yet has made his money in education and now tries by hook or crook to double-dip his pension and a lobbyist take from taxpayers when he is still marginally literate and still not up to the mark ethically to represent children in the schools, especially my grandchildren, to the legislature.
I wrote the president of UF, Dr. Machen--and his wife, too, cautioning about letting slack thesis committees turn loose on the world UFPhDs who probably bought and paid for their theses. These reluctant scholars head straight to the K12 administrative racket: that's where the money is in bloated salaries and perquisites, in irregular contracts to buddies, and in--I am sorry to say it--under-the-table deals from the firms the schools do business with.
I wonder what these creatures do with their tax-kitty purloined money. They will never buy a master painting or read a good book. And these cultural barbarians can wear only a limited number of vulgar gold jewelry with giant zirconias and go to Hawaii for pricey vacations with non-stop room service only so many times before even they get bored.
While in HillsboroughCounty, Dr. Hamilton indulged himself in a there's-no-fool-like-an-old-fool caper that involved promoting a pet kindergarten teacher, Connie Mileto, past qualified people for the post of government liaison in Tallahassee. She's there now. I observed La Mileto at an HC political meeting. Her idea of good public relations with legislators is to giggle loudly, squeal with delight in thin air, and hop up to lock her arms around a trapped Solon's neck while his eyes tick-tock to left and right in squirmingembarrassment.
Dr. Hamilton's wife divorced him during this saga that was discussed in every cafeteria, meeting hub, and mop closet in the schools county wide. Dr. Hamilton has since gone back to his wife, poor woman to be fool enough to let him in the door, but now thanks to the Sarasota School board and other boards that throw around taxpayer money in the good-ol'-boy-and-girl-rape-the-tax-kitty system that seems to predominate in school boards. Dr. Hamilton bodes to pull down maybe a half million dollars a year from these lax school boards in the lobbying-consulting racket he has devised.
Pray, this taxpayer pleads, examine this appointment for equal opportunity hiring and suitability of the candidate to lobby for the state's children's needs. I don't want a character like Le Hamilton within 25 miles of my ten grandchildren, three of whom are now in Sarasota schools.
The citizens of your county elected you to stand guard of the schools to which they have entrusted their children and grandchildren. If you don't do this job and shield my grandchildren from Dr. Hamilton, I shall ask the funding agencies who give your schools grants to conduct compliance reviews and remove the grants because you don't deserve them.
Citizens should not have to reach beyond the local governing body of schools, the school boards, to get these boards to obey the laws. But a citizen, thank goodness, has that resource if school boards shirk their duty.
If you would be willing to explain why this apparently skilled teacher [Steve Kemp] is being kept busy as a paper pusher I would love to hear about it. Its not just Steve. Ms Griffin this could happen to any one of us. It happened to me. Ms. Kipley herself told me how the numbers of abuse complaints against teachers has tripled in the years she has been in charge of professional standards.
If I recall correctly, I posited that it might be helpful to give guidance to teachers on how to avoid these problems. It seems to me as long as administration is willing to let teachers twist in the wind and show them little support (not good politically I guess) this "problem" will only get worse. If these abuse complaints have tripled as she said we have a problem that NEEDS to be addressed NOW.
Any suggestion that it is in the interest of teachers to curtail their participation in discussing these issues in blogs is a self serving attempt to protect the status quo which, in my opinion, is tantamount to sacrificing teachers for political expediency.
Those are the matters I want to speak to you about. Are you willing to talk to me? I believe we can find a way not to violate Mr. Kemps right to due process and your obligation to remain unbiased. What do you think?
May 1, 2009 11:24 PM Blogger April Griffin said...
Mr. Vaughan,
I am always willing to discuss issues that will improve our district. I always have been. I will not discuss an employee who's case is not settled without that employees permission though. I would do the same for you and I hope you can respect that.
Please call or email me and we will talk about your experiences and suggestions. You have my number right?
At your service, April
May 2, 2009 10:30 AM
Teacher Lee's correction of grammar-punctuation errors:
Lee says:
I sent Mr. Kemp to Ms. Griffin for help with the child-abuse frame-up the administration has devised for him. He did not tell me what she said except that she said not to tell anybody that he had been to see her.
The latest wrinkle in this case is that Linda Kipley claims she did not get the three Political Standards charges against Smiley, Sosa, and What's-Her-Name that I sent Kipley in February. Kipley lies. She pulled the same scam when I filed charges against Dr. Hamilton for using the school mails for personal business two years ago. I have smartened up since then to such administration tactics. I had kept my files on the three-administrator charges and zapped a replacement to La Kipley instanter.
In a subsequent board session after her meeting with Kemp when Mr. Kemp's case came up for discussion, Ms. Griffin asked Mr. Valdez how long the investigation of the case would take. This question signaled that Ms. Griffin had not spoken to Mr. Valdez after her interview with Mr. Kemp. Otherwise, she would have known the answer to this question.
I don't believe Board Member Griffin had given Mr. Kemp's case a thought after her interview with him in which she told him that "things are going well behind the scenes." That is political claptrap. If Ms. Griffin wanted to help Teacher Kemp, she would have interviewed Mr. Valdez, the Teacher Torture Committee Enforcer behind the scenes, and she would have asked him for a written summary for the board of the status of the case and what he had left to do to wind it up so that Ms. Elia could make the recommendation that Linda Kipley had conveyed to Mr. Kemp when he asked her about child-abuse cases. Ms. Kipley, always all heart, said that she had never known one case of a charge of child abuse in the state that did not end in the teacher's dismissal.
You don't have to read all of Freud as I have to know that what the administration with board cooperation is conducting in Steve Kemp's and in other teachers' cases when they are caught in the Political Standards' spider net: it's psychological terror.
The administration and board want a teacher android to come out of that experience, one who has abandoned his blog. In Kemp's case; they want him to give up not only his blog but also his free-speech rights.
Some apparatchik from the administration called up Mr. Kemp and cited the particular subject that Ms. Elia did not want him to discuss on his blog.
What nerve. If you are a teacher, you must waive your Constitutional rights to keep a job in the school system. And this is happening in the world's most perfect democracy. And the board, which swore to uphold the Constitution, is pretending it does not know what is going on.
Something has gone haywire here.
The administration and board are bonkers about blogs and want them abolished. Ms. Elia is obsessed with good publicity, the kind produced by the Public Affairs Office about the schools and administration that spins truth until it disappears in a fog of allusion that takes the facts if unpleasant and converts them into an advertisement for how wonderful the board and administration are.
Back to the meeting of Kemp and Board Member Griffin: Why would a board member instruct a teacher not to tell anyone that she had met with him? Is she afraid of Ms. Elia and the rest of the rubber-stamp board members?
Why isn't it perfectly kosher for a board member to meet with a teacher? Teachers and their students are the heart and soul of the school system. So why aren't they at the center of a board member's concern instead of their being some kind of forbidden element that the board member does not want to be associated with? The public won't like that situation if it finds out about Ms. Griffin's attitude.
Such moral cowardice in a board member is a discouraging attitude from someone who claims she is pro-teacher. In fact, Ms. Griffin's is not a pro-teacher stance. It is an I-am-afraid-to-be-associated-with-teachers attitude because I am scared out of my shoes of Ms. Elia.
Why Ms. Griffin is afraid of Ms. Elia presents the puzzle. She is technically Ms. Elia's boss, but you would never know this unless you master the written hierarchy of board and administration. Ms. Griffin may also be afraid of another pile-on led by Carol Kurdell and Candy Olson for "being disloyal to the staff" when Griffin, in her salad days as board member, asked for an item on no-bid contracts to come off the agenda for discussion.
The staff's no-bid pick was a former administrator just starting out his consulting business with tapping into the administratorol'-boy-and-girl network of financial deep pockets supplied by tax payers who don't know what's going on. This situation provides a peek behind the Wizard-of-Oz curtain. where all board business gets decided and put on the Consent Calender merry-go-round, where it whizzes by unexamined to the taxpayers.
Ms. Griffin couldn't take the heat of other board members' disapproval (Susan Valdes supported her),so she has backed off from bringing any of the secretly decided consent agenda to the table for discussion and has not uttered an enlightened peep since that time.
The hush-hush Star Chamber Elia dictats that slide by on the Consent Agenda were what Publisher Patrick Manteiga of La Gacetacriticized in a recent issue of "As We Heard It." Mr. Manteiga condemned the shut-tight quality of the board agenda especially as it applied to the hiring of principals. His criticism could go to any item on the Consent Agenda. The Consent Agenda is secret and hidden from the public. Those principals' names should be on the Board Agenda with hyperlinks to their credentials for the voters' information.
I would like to have seen the candidates and their credentials who applied for the jobs that Dr. Lamb's and Ms. Edgecombe's children got as administrators (I heard both's children have school jobs). I suspect many of those competitors had credentials superior to the board members' children; those board-member children were hired in the superintendent's jobs program for relatives, sycophants, and buddies.
Ms. Elia runs this in-house jobs program with the board's collusion. Not one board member demurred when Ms.Elia ordered the hiring of Mr. Kipley's husband for an accounting job that required a degree and experience in the field that at least four other candidates had. I reviewed the applications. Mr. Kipley had only a high school degree and no experience. Where were the board members when this occurred? On the podium examining their cuticles.
I would like to be a fly on the wall listening to Mr.Thomas's and Ms. April's interview if he ever secures one from this increasingly politically glib and evasive board member. I wager that he will hear a whole lot of incumbent boilerplate from a board candidate who looked promising when she ran for office and who pledged much change for the better but who, when she got on the board, has turned out to have rolled over to the Elia juggernaut that dominates the board. She and others succumb to become a passive school board and dominant superintendent
I expect my blog will cost me my life in these, my golden years. The board and administration will hire a hit person (equal opportunity makes women able to tap into assassin jobs now, thanks be to the goddesses of women's rights). I will be found next to my ancient Mercedes in the parking lot on a board night, sprawled in a dead-as-door-nails slump. The board will rubber stamp the assassin's pay-off with tax funds, no questions asked even if the entry on the board's money page is "Assassin for Troublesome Blogger." My assassin's money at least will not go to administrators' bloated salaries that are in inverse proportion to these reluctant scholars' performance on the Stanford Binet.
I cannot let the grammar-and-punctuation errors of Ms. Griffin above go uncorrected in Board Member Griffin's comment. I have corrected her errors. Woe is me that I have to do this task for a school-board member.
But I am a teacher, after all, even in retirement. I insist that anybody who has not mastered basic grammar and punctuation that children's parents expect them to learn in K12 schools so that they can get jobs that do not involve flipping burgers should not be on a school board. That person should be in a classroom somewhere learning what he or she should have learned before: basic literacy.
Correction of Board Member April Griffin's Grammar and Punctuation:
Mr. Vaughan,
I am always willing to discuss issues that will improve our district. I always have been. I will not discuss an employee who's[WHOSE] case is not settled without that employees [POSSESSIVE: EMPLOYEE'S] permission though. I would do the same for you and [COMMA FOR COMPOUND SENTENCE] I hope you can respect that.
Please call or email me and [COMMA FOR COMPOUND SENTENCE] we will talk about your experiences and suggestions. You have my number right?
I emailed the charges directly to Linda Kipley, Ms. Cobbe.
If she says that she didn't get the charges, she is as usual lying. I cc'd people.
I know the last name of the top administrator: it was Smiley.I cannot recall the names of the principal and lower-level administrator involved.Their names would be on the child-abuse charge that Ms. Kipley and Ms. Elia filed against Steve Kemp.Please send me those three names and the job descriptions of each one so that I can refile the charges.
And don't tell me I have run out the clock.I filed in a timely fashion, and somebody found it convenient to lose charges against administrators instead of teachers. Lee Drury De Cesare
-----Original Message-----
From: Linda Kipley [mailto:Linda.Kipley@sdhc.k12.fl.us]
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 1:50 PM
To: lee
Cc: MaryEllen Elia; Candy Olson; carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl; jennifer.falliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us; Jack Lamb; Susan Valdes; April Griffin; Patrickmanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com; geneliudut@lagacetanewspaper.com; Stein@sptimes.com; Marilynbrown@tampatrib.com; Linda Cobbe; Ken Otero; Dan Valdez; Lewis Brinson; Gretchen Saunders; Wynne Tye; Cathy Valdes; 'Connie.'; David Steele; Gwen.Luney@sdhc.k12.fl.us; Stephen Hegarty
Subject: Re: results of my filing professional standards charges
Dear Ms. DeCesare:
In response to your request for this office's "findings on the unprofessional conduct of the three administrators involved in the dereliction of duty" in the "Kemp-case," no such records exist.
Replacement of file to Professional Standards that Ms. Kipley said she never got:
Ms. Cobbe: Please hand deliver this to Ms. Kipley, head of Professional Standards.
This is the second time Ms. Kipley has lied about a filing by me to Professional Standards.
I filed a Professional Standards charge against Dr. Hamilton for using the emails for personal matters. Ms. Kipley claimed she didn't get it. I had not saved a copy and at that early time in my career of monitoring the ROSSAC crimes against ethics did not know that Ms. Kipley has a career of lying so outrageously that the teachers at Hillsborough High wouldn't go into a conference with her without a tape recorder when she was principal there.
Instead of firing La Kipley when she had no more tolerence at HHS from the teachers because of her lying as they should have, top administration drafted her for the job of head of Professional Standards, a job of a higher rank than principal and more pay. This ROSSAC move confirms teachers' maxim that "If you mess up, you move up" in the administration. ldd
To: Linda Kipley, Professional Standards
From: Lee Drury De Cesare, citizen
2/11/09
Please consider this a formal complaint against Mr. Ron Smiley, head of Section 5 of Special Ed.
In the matter of the case of Steve Kemp’s alleged child-abuse charge filed by Mr. Smiley at the Sheriff’s Department, I protest its validity on the grounds that Mr. Smiley himself bears guilt in the situation for his not rendering to Mr. Kemp the help that Mr. Smiley’s job description clearly outlines:
• Help teachers develop a strategy for the instruction and assessment of the subject area curriculum so that every student develops to his maximum potential;
• Be responsible for assisting the administration in monitoring absences and arranging coverage of classes when no substitute is present;
• To insure dissemination of information and subject area supervisors to all members of the department and to insure understanding of all directives issued;
• To assist the Principal and Assistant Principal for Curriculum for evaluation of teachers within the department and, when necessary, work with teachers to improve instruction;
• To become a trained classroom observer eligible to serve on Preparing New Educator Teams.
• To work with teachers within the department to produce the highest standards of teaching (This includes visiting classrooms, making helpful suggestions for improving lesson plans, counseling with teachers within the department, and coordinating the work of the group to achieve departmental standards.
Although Mr. Smiley visited Mr. Kemp’s classroom, he spoke not a word to Mr. Kemp in accordance with the above directives. Instead after the lapse of a week, he went to the Sheriff’s Department and filed felony child-abuse charges against Mr. Kemp for his hooking the harness one student had on to a chair while he dealt with another child.
The sheriff’s office has dismissed the felony charge, but the administration continues its baseless charge against Mr. Kemp when it is the supervisory people like Mr. Smiley who should be cited for abuse of Professional Standards.
To: Linda Kipley, Professional Standards
From: Lee Drury De Cesare, citizen
2/11/09
Professional Standards charge against Principal Marion Ross of Special Ed
Please consider this a formal complaint against Principal Marion Ross of the Special Ed division.
In the matter of the case of Steve Kemp’s alleged child-abuse charge filed by Mr. Smiley. District 5 head, at the Sheriff’s Department, I protest its validity on the grounds that Ms. Ross along with Mr. Smiley and Ms Sosa bear guilt in the situation for their not rendering to Mr. Kemp the help that the three’s job description clearly outlines:
Ms. Ross’s Job Description:
• Proactivity: Demonstrates readiness to initiate action and take responsibility for leading and enabling others to improve the circumstances being faced or anticipated;
• Organizational Sensitivity: Is aware of the effects of his/her behavior and decisions on all stakeholders both inside and outside the organization;
• Oversees and is responsible for school’s instructional program…and its results;
• Oversees and is responsible for the safety and discipline of the school’s students;
• Oversees and is responsible for the accuracy and timeliness of school’s records and reports.
Ms. Ross gave Steve Kemp no assistance that coincides with the above duties of her job in this case. The only thing she said when she entered the room with Mr. Smiley and a physical therapist was that she “didn’t want to lose her job for child abuse.” She gave no help to Steve Kemp before she threw him into a classroom of severely retarded children. Steve had no education in or training to serve this student population. Ms. Ross gave Steve no advice or orientation to help him do the job right... In this lack Ms. Ross was derelict in her duties as a principal; thus I file Professional Standards charges against her.
To: Linda Kipley, Professional Standards
From: Lee De Cesare, citizen
Date: 2/11/09
Please consider this a formal complain of breech of professional standards by Supervisor Sosa in the Special Ed division. This charge is a refutation of the charge of child abuse against teacher Steve Kemp.
Ms. Sosa assigned Steve to the substitute duty of teaching profoundly retarded children without ascertaining his training.
Mr. Kemp has no academic credentials in caring for profoundly retarded children. His education is in teaching children who have trouble reading to read.
• Ms. Sosa’s job description says that her duties include the following;
• Provide support for ESE teachers at assigned school;
• Assist teachers in monitoring the effectiveness of curriculum and materials used in the classroom;
• Assist teachers in the pre-referral process of intervention strategies, observations, and conferences;
• Provide in-service for general education teachers as needed;
• Provide program-specific orientation and training for newly hired teachers;
• Assist in developing intervention strategies in regard to behavior management and school discipline;
Provide support for parents and function as a liaison to the school, parents, and community agencies.
Supervisor Sosa was derelict in these duties when she and Principal Ross threw Steve as a substitute in a room the population of which was profoundly retarded children. Neither she nor Ms. Ross gave Mr. Kemp any orientation or comments on his conducting this unfamiliar client base, not a word. This is dereliction of Supervisor Ross’s written duties, and I protest her behavior and ask that she be subject to a Professional Standards charge. Mr. Smiley was the Judas who had turned in Steve to the Sheriff’s Office; thankfully, the felony charge of child abuse went poof in the sheriff’s hands. He didn’t buy it. What sensible person not living in the alternative reality of the ROSSAC denizens would not have the same reaction?
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