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
Grandpa and Christophe at New College for his TIP medal
Ms. Olson, you are board member of our grandson Christophe's area of town.
Find some way to let him know unobtrusively that the school system applauds his achievement.My impression is that this school system does not nurture and value intellectual achievement nearly as much as it should.
The children who are in trouble seem to get all the attention. But the bright children are the ones who grow up to lead and inspire.
New College president,Dr. Michaelson, who is a smart fellow, says the key to getting admitted to NewCollege is to take the toughest courses in the advanced areas that one's school offers. Christophe will go to Plant.I see the principal at the board meetings.I will interrogate him on Plant's honors program.
Dr. Michaelson said something I have always believed in: read, read, read.
Mind that you are kind to my grandson.If not, I have the resources of the Professional Standards committee to take corrective action.
Lee Drury De Cesare, granny of Christophe Jean
Dr. Michalelson:
His granny and grandpa were proud to see grandson Christophe Jean receive the Duke TIP medal yesterdayamong other young people from around Florida. I think he was the only recipient in the TampaBay Area.He goes to Coleman, where our four children and one other grandchild attended.
New College's protocol sounds like Oxford's: private tutoring with oral exams at the end.
Newton hated the oral exams he had to give at Cambridge before the authorities excused him from teaching. He went to Cambridge from his little hamlet not knowing a lick of geometry and learned it on his own, making himself supreme master in that area for all of Europe in short order.
It would be hard for me to see young candidates squirm under committee questioning in their orals.
My husband said that when NewCollege gets a PBK chapter that all the 700 or so students will become automaticmembers. I don't know how you will negotiate the detail of no grades, but my guess is you will get a chapter.
The PBK nationals are snobs.They prefer small, elite colleges to big blue-collar ones like USF.This attitude explains how Eckerd has a chapter of PBK while USF is still on its knees begging.I lit into the president of PBK recently for this torture of USF. I have two grandsons there. I attacked him through his grammar-punctuation insecurities. The current president of PBK national is a philosophy teacher, so you and he speak the same language. He won't be able to befuddle you with syllogisms as his usual gambit to gain the upper hand.
Your field is philosophy. Nobody could have made me major in philosophy.I read it from time to time because I figure one must suffer to be learned. I recently finished Thomas Huxley's commentary on Hume's philosophy.I hurt all the way through. I had Dr. Thomas Altizer for a course in religion one time at Stony Brook.He was an impressive, magisterial teacher, who affected my attitude toward religion. I am Episcopal, and my people have always been anti-authority. So we clap when somebody announces that God is dead. Episcopalians enjoy a liberal environment thanks to Henry VIII's marital misadventures.
Your being a Kant authority does not endear you to me.Next to Spinoza, he is the worst.And Berkeley beats them all for squinting obscurity.
You have a lively wit and would have been a teacher whose class was fun.We have few of those as we go through our education. I had my share of droning pedants.
My grandson Christophe has the gift of wit as well.He got it from his witty mother, our baby child. And from his granny, of course.And his grandpa is a slick-tongued New Yorker.
Thank you and NewCollege for giving two grandparents a proud family day. We were proud of Christophe.
Spice: It's a Mexican spice that I got online. It is supposed to be magic on everything.
To Whom It May Concern,
I am requesting: INSPECTION and/or COPIES of the following public records: emails from Lee Drury De Cesare to the School Board for the week of May 17th to May 24th, 2009. Rejection notices of any of those emails.
I include the emails from Lee Drury De Cesare that you may have set up parameters to reject. I would like a copy of those reasons for rejecting the emails of Lee Drury De Cesare.
Should you deny my request, or any part of the request, please state in writing the basis for the denial, including the exact statutory citation authorizing the denial, as required by s. 119.07(1)(d), F.S. I will contact your Public Affairs office within 48 to discuss when I may expect fulfillment of my request and payment of any statutorily prescribed fees. If you have any questions in the interim, you may contact me at 727 398 4142 or email tdecesare@tampabay.rr.com. Thank you.
Sincerely,
lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Blvd. 802
Madeira Beach, FL33708
727 3984142
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
To: AllMembersSarasotaSchool Board and superintendent
I tried to send a message to Ms. Brown of the board.This rejection message below came back.
A publicly supported institution cannot reject a citizen's email. It is not spam.
I have been trying to collect information about the School Board's hiring practices to determine if they are coincident with the equal-employment opportunity laws and with the equal-opportunity provisions for federal funds.The board and administration can't shut me out of your email system because I have begun this inquiry or for any reason coincident with the inquiries of a citizen to a public institution.
Please open my email to Sarasota Schools. Shutting any citizen out of the communication email system is not only unethical but illegal.
I am sure your attorney will inform you that I am correct; and if he doesn't Attorney General McCollum will.
Lee Drury De Cesare
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From: lee
To: 'Shirley Brown'
CC: 'Kathy Kleinlein' , 'Frank Kovach'
, 'Carol Todd'
, 'nina' , 'Gary
Leatherman'
In-Reply-To:
Subject: *****POSSIBLE SPAM*****RE: Blogger: Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch - Edit Post "Comment on Boa
Dear Dr. Smith: As president of the Florida Association of School Superintendents, I am sure you take seriously the goals of your organization, especially the two that begin the goals list.
These are the following:
It shall be the goals of the Florida Association of District School Superintendents to:
1. significantly influence the development and implementation of the best possible education practices in the school districts of Florida;
2. assist Superintendents in implementing those practices as well as in meeting requirements established by law and regulations;
It grieves me to tell you that Maryellen Elia, superintendent of the Hillsborough County School system, acts athwart these goals. She is adverse to blogs and is not above cooking up false charges in the Professional Standards office against a teacher who has one. Her helper in this office is its head, Linda Kipley, who willingly joins Ms. Elia in this barbarous exercise.
Ms. Kipley herself has a home-ec degree, and Ms. Elia just hired Ms. Kipley's husband for an accounting job even though he had no accounting degree nor the needed experience the job description cited. For the life of me I cannot see how a home-ec degree and a high-school diploma in administrative positions adds luster to the administrative coterie of pals, sycophants, children of board members, and hangers-on that Ms. Elia has assembled to lead the schools.
Ms. Kipley's husband has only a high school diploma. Four of the other candidates had accounting degrees and experience in the field. One infers this hiring of the unqualified husband of Ms. Kipley was reward for her joining the superintendent in manufacturing charges against teachers whom Ms. Elia wants to fire or to terrify because they have blogs.
This conduct surely goes against the Florida Association of School Superintendents' goal of "the best possible educational practices," not to mention its violating Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act ("requirements established by law," Goal 2), which mandates equal opportunity in hiring, not favoritism for an already-employed wife's performing acts of skullduggery to undermine teachers the superintendent has it in for.
The board and Ms. Elia dislike blogs because they deliver candid reports that have not gone through the Public Affairs Office's Laundromat and spin machine that cleans up the behavior of the administration and the board for public consumption.
Ms. Elia and the chair of the backstage terror committee who executes Ms. Elia's attacks on teachers via the Professional Standards Abu Ghraib cell block, one Mr. Valdez, have kept Special-ed teacher Steve Kemp on suspension for the whole semester on the cooked-up charge of child abuse. The Sheriff threw it out directly after Ms. Elia dispatched underling Smiley to lodge it with the Sheriff's office.
Steve Kemp has a blog, and La Elia and Le Valdez are trying to squeeze him and make him increasingly terrified of his losing his job if he does not give up his blog, sacrifice his dignity, and abandon his Constitutional rights. I hope he doesn't for the reason cited in Goal 2 of the School Superintendents Association: "meeting requirements established by law."
An Elia apparatchik even called up Mr. Kemp to cite the subject he could not write about in his blog. I infer as good citizens the Florida Association of School Superintendents supports the Constitution and does not encourage its member superintendents to shut down free speech in their individual schools. Surely that is not the best educational practice.
I believe you need to cite the organization's support of law to Ms. Elia, who is not a big fan of the Constitution. Surely this attitude does not fulfill "the best possible education practices" desiratum of Goal 1 or "meeting requirements established by law" in Goal 2.
I assume also that the "best possible education practices in the school districts of Florida" includes a condemnation of cooking up false charges against a teacher to make him shut down a blog in a sadistic terror tactic to interfere with his free-speech rights. Relevant counseling by you of Ms. Elia would complement the "meeting requirements established by law and regulation" of Goal 2 since the Constitution trumps all other laws, and Ms. Elia and her administrative barbarians are violating it.
This untoward superintendent behavior corrupts the children and frightens the horses. It as well defies the goals of the Superintendents Association.
I am sure the Hillsborough County teachers would be grateful for your good counseling of Ms. Elia: the punished pedagogues who work under the yoke of Ms. Elia's disregard of their rights and experience her practice of cooking up professional-standards violations against them to make the poor wretches toe an arbitrary and inhumane line that she sets are not optimum working conditions to be sure.
Pray use your best efforts, Dr. Smith, as president of your important association to convince Ms. Elia to act in ways that would do the goals of the Florida Association of School Superintendents proud and improve the ethical climate in the Hillsborough County schools.
Perhaps you could make Mr. Valdez an honorary member and work on him too.
Respectfully, Lee Drury De Cesare 15316 Gulf Boulevard 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708 tdecesar@tampabay.rr.comSent via Fax to 850 921 5273
I formed the habit of writing to wives of important men when I had a problem that needed the CEO of Xerox's attention many years ago.
I had convened the Tampa Chapter of NOW that got a write-up in the paper.So a young woman and a male friend came to me at my office at Hillsborough Community College (I was professor of English there for 28 years before retiring) because the men at the local office of Xerox sexually harassed young women who were recent hiresin jobs that were not traditional secretarial.The men were comfortable with women as subservient stenographers and secretaries, but not sales reps, a "male" job. Thepassage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had prompted the central office of Xerox to demand the beginning of such hires whether the sexists were ready or not for the change.
Too many of theXerox men expected these young women to act not as representatives of the jobs they were hired for but rather as a species of in-house prostitutes for the men's amusement. This denigration of these young women made me hopping mad.
I called the head of the local Xerox and tried to get him concerned about the situation, but he blew me off with the equivalent of "boys will be boys." I figured I had made my good-faith effort to get the local Xerox manager to do something to quell the harassment, and he didn't take me seriously. So I sought other means.
I knew from experience how long it took and what diligence it demanded to get the EEOC to act on complaints. And a charge by an individual is never forgiven, so her career is over even if she helps others who have suffered similar discrimination.Woe to her who bells the cat.
This young woman seemed desperate.I thus decided to write to the wife of the CEO of Xerox about the seamy situation at the local Xerox office. That way, the young woman's name would not be on an EEOC charge from the EEOC and ruin her career.
So successful was this letter Mrs. CEO Xerox that I have since lived by the maxim of"When things look hopeless, appeal to the wife of the power guy."
No more than a week later, Xerox sent a troop of its lawyers from headquarters down to the Tampa office. They fired some of the harassers and sent a number to Coventry.The sexual harassment abated. When these guys' jobs were on the line, they suddenly became fair-minded.
Years later the mother of one of the young women affected came up to me in the Publix vegetable department to thank me for intervening. She said she was glad to report that her daughter had made a successful career in the field.
I understand General McCollum will run for governor.At least that's the political gossip I heard. He will face Ms. Alex Sink, from the Democrats.I know her a little, and your husband will have a job on his hands to defeat this formidable woman. I gave wasted money to her husband when he ran for governor; the poor man was a dreadful campaigner.But Ms. Sink is a different story.She is graceful and articulate on a platform.She reminds people of everybody's favorite sister.
If General McCollum makes it into the governor's office, I hope he will be alive to the real needs of education.Most politicians invoke the template false piety of love for teachers and how we don't pay them enough and believe those old chestnuts suffice.
Every field in which women dominate features low pay. The K12 field comprises mostly women.In Russia, where the medical field is full of women, doctors get low salaries. However, pay for teachers at all levels islow in this country.My baby daughter as an insurance assistant vice president makes twice my salary at the end of my college teaching career.
It is true that we don't pay teachers well and looks to remain the same until their numbers go down precipitously as they escape to other fields that pay better than their teacher salary. Then the market will set teachers' salaries.But that will not come during General McCollum's time.
If General McCollumwants to promise something different and rational on the stump, he could cite ways of weeding out the great army of C-student administrators making bloated salaries in inverse proportion to their IQs.These reluctant scholars weigh down K12 Florida education by making C-student decisions at the top.All the then-Governor McCollumwould have to do to weed out some of the dummies is to make clear that in his time in office schools will obey the Equal Employment Opportunity laws that the K12 hordes now disobey by word-of-mouth hiring of C-level buddies.
Ms. Elia, superintendent of Hillsborough County, doesn't know where to put commas yet makes $300,000 a year from taxpayers who expect their children over whose education she presides toknow grammar and punctuation to evade flipping burgers at McDonald's when they exit the secondary schools. This lady hires sycophants, children of board members, hangers on, and chums when administrative jobs come up with artificially bloated salaries.A Governor McCollum's touting TitleVII as Mr. Crist has sponsored open governmentwould cut intothis practice, and the K12 cumulative administrative IQ would improve if the jobs got wide advertising that tapped into the better national talent pool. Then administrative decisions would improve.Pound for pound, smart people make better decisions than dumb people.
Florida teachers would approve of this practice.And there are many more teachers than administrators who vote.
As governor, General McCollum could sponsor the law that the Number One school system in the nation, Massachusetts, has on the books: To get a job in Massachusetts' school systems, an administrator candidate must pass the same language exam that teachers must pass to teach.
The second in command to Ms. Elia was Dr. Jim Hamilton, until last year when he retired to double dip by forming his own lobbying company. He didn't know the difference between homophones "your" and "you're." Yet he captured state school systems as lobbying clients without their the K12 administrative networks' doing any advertising of the job. This is example of the the K12 closed-to-outside-talent bureaucracy that violates the equal-opportunity laws.Dr. Hamilton is now consultant to Mixon and Associates.He brought his bevy of school-board clients with him as he moved his franchise to that company in Tallahassee.
Dr. Hamilton not only mixes up homophones but also can't write an extended piece with structural logic or moderate felicity.He reveals some strange ideas in his lucubrations such as his gauche essayinstructing new board membershow to dress for board dignity when the gentlemanhimself wears rump-sprung suits and looks like an unmade bed.
I wrote Dr. Machen, president of the University of Florida (and Mrs. Machen as well), about the state's flagship university's allowinglax vigilance or cupidity in theses committees.These lax committees turn loose to prey on the state K12 education system the empty-headed candidates who rush to infest K12 administration. More of these than we would like to think have bought and paid for their theses and slip them past thesis committees asleep at the switch. I cited Dr. Hamilton as a probable member of this fauxPh.D. genus. Such specimens as he have turned K12 administration into a racket in which literacy takes second place to cupidity.
Recalling that there are many more teacher voters than administrator voters,General McCollum as governor would please a significant part of the Florida education world by getting the Massachusetts administrator literacy law passed in Florida.Enacting the administrator literacy-test law in Floridawould benefit the state's administrators' intellectual growth and hence mprove the K12 administration decision makers' thinking apparatus. It would for sure tickle teachers pink.
General McCollum could bring about better schools by putting an end to the practice of evading the equal-employment-opportunity laws by school boards themselves. In HillsboroughCounty, the board has ceded the hiring perquisite to Superintendent Elia. The superintendent exercizes as a kind of patronage privilege all hiring that interests her.She hires with impunity sycophants, buddies, the no-talent relatives of administrators, two of the board's children. An egregious case is Ms. Elia passed over qualified candidates with degrees and experience and hired the husband of the Professional Standards office administrator to the accounting department. He had only a high school diploma.
The accountant with the high school diploma and no accounting experience is spouse of Ms. Kipley, head of Professional Standards. She has a home-ec degree, but what she lacks in academic bonafides she has made up for in pliability and wretched ethics by helping Ms. Elia cook up professional-standards charges against teachers Ms. Elia wants to find ways to fire teachers if they speak up to oppose her policies or have a blog that critiques the schools.
The HillsboroughCounty Board is not big on free speech either.I got kicked out of a meeting and threatened with jail by the gigantic Jolly Greeen Giant head of security for using a name in my presentation before Chair Board Member Jennifer Falliero. Ms. Falliero plotted my eviction with the Jolly Green Giant head-security hulk to get back at me for exposing her adultery on school grounds with the head of the Public Affairs office, Marc Hart, whom she seduced by haunting his office. She broke up his marriage and made his two young children suffer with a drop in school grades for one and the exacerbation of an illness for another.
I have no sympathy for floozies who make little children suffer whether the floozy be off or on a school board. A granny of ten such as I will find a way to out this despicable behavior that the administration and board covered up while they firedthe dumb cluck Ms. Falliero seduced, Mr. Hart, to his personal and professional detriment while making Ms. Falliero board chair.
I am never helpless, however unless I am facing the gorillas in the midst of the Serengeti. I got the ACLU to come and lecture the board and its attorney on the First Amendment.
The spectacle of a teacher's being punished on manufactured charges keeps other teachers fearful of speaking up for fear of being framed to lose their jobs too. That propaganda value is one reason for making these false charges and suspending a teacher to writhe in limbo with no idea of when or if he or she will ever be cleared of the false charge. Blogs discuss forbidden issues such as savaging of teachers by Ms. Elia and the Professional Standards Office. That's one reason why Ms. Elia and the administrators hate them and try to snuff them out.
Propaganda value is one of the main reasons for framing Special-ed teacher Steve Kemp. He has suffered the sustained fear of losing his job for a whole semester for having an education blog that the administration and board fear.Ms. Elia and her chair of the behind-the-scenes terror committee, Mr. Valdez, has held Mr. Kemp on suspension for the whole school year to get him to give up his dignity and his blog. He has not buckled yet. I hope for the First Amendment's sake that he won't.
Blogs are noxious to the board and administration because they present a picture different from the massaged and spun one that emerges from the Community Relations department to make the board and administration look good. The public pays for its own bamboozlement.
In sum, General McCollum could set a record of response to real problems in the schools if he gets to the governor's office.And you can and should be his chief advisor and dilute the sexist tradition of vacuous first ladies. For some reason, maybe because it has to do with nurturing the family's children, women are more interested in education than are men it seems to me, especially that of K12, although I have not yet seen any studies that confirm my belief.
When Mr. Obama announced for President in Philadelphia, I sent his campaign a thousand dollars and didn't buy a new dress or new shoes for a year.I feel perfectly correct in sending missives now to the First Lady of the nation to put in a word for some project dear to my heart.I sicced Ms. Obama onto the new Secretary of Education about conditions in the schools that involve poor administration by dumb administrators and outright crooked practices such as Superintendent Elia's flagrant misuse of taxpayer dollars to invent a job for a retiring administrator, Dr. James Hamilton, for the few months he needed a taxpayer salary supplement and an office from which I infer he cold-called on the school phones school-board clients statewide for his double-dipping consulting hustle.
I have received a letter from the national Secretary of Education about whom to call for help, and I shall call them. That job creation adventure of Ms. Elia for Dr. Hamilton should not go unexamined by critical eyes.
You can do much for the schools if your husband gets elected for governor, Mrs. McCollum.And I will write you from time to time to mention some issue that he needs to be aware of when he is governor and you are First Lady.
If General McCollum becomes governor, I will feel free since my husband is a Republican (married for almost 53 years to a Democrat) to come up to Tallahassee and sit in the waiting room until then Governor McCollum sees me to talk about my grave concerns that he can solve.It will do no good for him to tell his assistants to tell me that he is ill and cannot see me.I will say, "I am a registered nurse with license to practice in Florida.Take me to the governor's bedside so that I may recount to him my concerns about the school system whilst I lay a cool Sister-of-Mercy hand on his brow."
Thank you for your response to my request that you issue an opinion about the refusal of the Hillsborough County School Board to print the names on the Board's Web site of prospective employees and to hyperlink to their resumes before any hiring takes place.
In an open government, citizens should see the basis for decisions on employment that Superintendent Maryellen Elia now makes secretly and Board Members Candy Olson, Jennifer Falliero, Doretha Edgecomb, Susan Valdez, Jack Lamb, and Carol Kurdell approve without giving citizens a chance to offer input. The board and administration conduct an entirely closed hiring process. That defeats government in the sunshine.
The information you included in your response will be helpful in fighting the abuse of hiring that the board and administration have turned into a jobs program for relatives of board members, sycophants of all stripes, buddies, buddies of buddies, and favors for school administrators for doing the unpleasant jobs that the superintendent sometimes assigns them such as cooking up Professional Standards cases if the administration wants to fire or terrorize a teacher with losing his or her job unless the teacher deserts his or her dignity and Constitutional rights as the price for keeping that job.
There exists a case currently that involves special-ed teacher Steve Kemp, whom Professional Standards charged with child abuse on distortion of evidence that the sheriff threw out. However, Kemp's case has languished for a school semester after the sheriff threw it out while the administration, superintendent, and board try to terrorize this teacher into shutting down his education blog, the real reason for his cooked-up case.
The board, superintendent, and administration abhor blogs because they publish information that the board, superintendent, and administration want first sanitized via the Public Information Office. For instance, the administration just published a yearbook with a girl's pudendum showing in a picture, setting her up for ridicule for years to come when anybody opens that year book. The board and administration's position is that the exposed vaginal area of the girl is "just a shadow" and board members such as Chair Kurdell have responded when asked about the problem with an injunction not to discuss it.
The board and administration have refused at the girl's parents' plea to withdraw the limited year-book copies already distributed by the administration and to reprint the yearbook without their daughter's perineum in view. Steve Hegarty, head of the Public Information Office, has responded to people's inquiries this way when they ask about the situation: "We [board, administration, Public-Affairs Office] will not accept your version of this situation. We won't comment on the (vaginal area exposure)] questions."
In other words, the board and administration use the tax-paid Public Information office to promulgate stories favorable to them and suppress stories or redact unfavorable information about them. They refuse to answer questions on a negative incident such as the girl's exposed vagina in a school year-book picture.
Such outrages as refusing to give citizens hiring information before the hiring is done, punishing a teacher with a cooked-up charge because he has an education blog. and publishing a year book with a girl's pudendum pictured should not go on in the Florida school system. I hope that if you become governor, a job I understand you will be running for, that you take corrective measures to rein in abuses of teachers such as those perpetuated in the Hillsborough County school system, to encourage schools to have open governments, and to respect the dignity of students. The board does not correct the superintendent and administration in any of their unethical skullduggery's. It cooperates with the administration's punishing and terrorizing teachers and distorting public-relations reality to present the board and administration in a favorable light.
I shall forward a message to Mrs. McCullum via your office mail. A man's wife says a great deal about his character. I have been wife, a Democrat, for almost fifty-three years to the same old Republican guy and have a good deal of influence on his important decisions despite our political differences. The woman who cooks and has the babies in a household usually does have influence on her husbande and should have major influence in the family. George Bush has succeeded in turning my husband from life-long Republican to Independent, a feat that my fifty-three years of curtain lectures failed to do, although I cooked enough food in those years to feed India for a week. I asked my husband what he thought of you. He responded, "He's a pretty good guy." He was mayor of our little beach town for a dozen years until he couldn't take the bickering anymore. Now he is retired to his Stratolounger in front of the round-the-clock sports stations.
I am not a ninny voter, General Mc Cullum; I am a serious citizens who expects diligent service from our elected officials. Democracy promises that my ten grandchildren will live in a real democracy, not a sham one in which public officials such as those that inhabit the school system's board in Hillsborough County refuse to obey the open-government laws and hides information about the way the administration and board make decisions behind closed doors that affect the community's life.
The Dark Side, alas, took charge in the Hillsborough County schools in the early Nineties when administrator Mr. Erwin discovered newly built leaking, shoddy schools for which the board rubber stamped top-dollar payment to contractors. In addition, Mr. Erwin unearthed rigged bids and outright theft of school property and money. Mr. Erwin asked the superintendent and board to do something about these crimes. Instead, the board with the help of the attorney Tom Gonzalez, the firm of whom has held the job for thirty-seven years, sat by and let Superintendent Lennard and his administrative henchman try to convince people that Mr. Erwin was crazy and then attempted to take his job and pension away from him. They failed.
Mr. Erwin finally ran out of good faith and filed a Whistle blower lawsuit against the School Board.
The jury, thank God, saw through the board-and- administration lies and found for Mr. Erwin, awarding him a $165,000 settlement. When Mr. Gonzalez and the firm's lawyer who prosecuted the case complained to the judge about the size of the award, the judge told them that Mr. Erwin would have gotten more had he a more competent lawyer.
The taxpayers paid for the ethical violations and outright crimes of the board and administration in this dark incident in the board and administration's history. The taxpayers in fact subsidized unawares crime against the state.
Some of the Dark-side DNA of the Erwin years still motivates the board and administration of Hillsborough County. It emerges in such things as making hiring a racket for the pals, sycophants, hangers-on, pets and offspring of the board and administration; in refusing to let citizens view what goes on when the board and administration make decisions for the school district, and of using public relations to deny the administration's allowing a year book to be published showing a female student's private parts.
Respectfully,
Lee Drury De Cesare 15316 Gulf Boulevard 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708 tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
REQUEST FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL'S APPEARANCE BEFORE THE HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD
I make a citizen's request to General McCollum to appear before the Hillsborough County School Board at a date and time worked out by his office and the School Board.
I request that he address the importance of removing impediments now in place that keep citizens of the county ignorant about the process of decision making that the board and superintendent use to do school business. These decisions affect the whole community, so the community should see and hear the process. Presently the board and administration bar the community, teachers, and students from discussions of board and administration decisions. This is not open government.
Not only does the board not give teachers and students a regular slot on the board to comment about their concerns, the administration with the board's complicity punishes teachers who do or say anything that the board and administration disapproves of. They have, as illustration, suspended Special-ed teacher Steve Kemp for a school year for a trumped-up charge of child abuse by the Professional Standards office that the sheriff threw out. Ms. Linda Kipley, head of Professional Standards, claims she lost the charges of incompetence and failure to fulfill their job descriptions' duties of the three administrators involved in the charges against Mr. Kemp that I filed in February.
The School Board of Hillsborough County and its administration make a mockery of the First Amendment and the government-in-the-sunshine law of the state of Florida by its deliberate behind-closed-doors decision making affecting the whole community that it shuts out. Citizens and the school family get no information about how the board and administration make decisions that govern the schools. That's not the mark of democracy but of dictatorship.
Respectfully,
lee drury de Cesare
c: Philip Claypool, head of Ethics Commission, State of Florida
Dear Mr. Claypool:
The Hillsborough County School Board allows the superintendent to cook up false charges against a teacher whom she wants to fire or terrify about losing his or her job.
Such is the current case of Steve Kemp, a special-ed teacher whom the Office of Professional Standards and Ms. Elia manufactured a case of child abuse against on distorted evidence to scare him into giving up his education blog.
The sheriff threw out the case directly, but the board and administration put Mr. Kemp on a semester-long suspension to try to squeeze the concession of his abandoning his education blog by terrorizing him with the threat of job loss. There he remains today.
The board and administration don't like blogs because they present a different version of what the administration and board do in leading the schools. The board and administration want all information about the schools to go through the vetting and revision process of the Public Affairs Office before it reaches the public so that the public will receive a rosy view of the board's and administration's actions. Hence, the public pays to have itself bamboozled by the board and administration about such outrages as the sadistic savaging of a teacher to make him or her give up his or her First Amendment right to author a blog.
I know state law gives the board and administration the right to hire and fire. But it does not give them the right to terrorize, abuse, and denigrate.
This is a matter of ethics. I ask that you review the situation for its violation of ethics and take corrective action.
Respectfully,
Lee Drury De Cesare 15316 Gulf Boulevard 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708 tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Grandpa and Christophe at New College for his TIP medal
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