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
Linda, does the special ed administration require parents to sign a release for the child to wear a restraint? And is there a place where they can ratify when the child should wear a restraint and when it should not?
This is my 4th reminder for public information that describes Ms. Smith's job duties and the date on which they were submitted.
lee de cesare
Answer to response from Cobbe:
So does this mean parents have to sign the final restraint plan for their child?
And does your description of Smith's job duties mean they are the same as an elementary school principal?If so, please send me a copy of the job description of an elementary-school principal that constitutes duties that comprise Smith's job. And am I correct that Mr. Valdez is the official from whom you await a reply to this question of job description and when it entered the official record? New question: Was the job description formulated before or after Ms. Smith assumed her book-depository job? And find out, please, how many other employees in the book depository get a principal's salary and perquisites. Thank you. ldd
From: Linda Cobbe [mailto:lcobbe@sdhc.us]
Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 1:11 PM
To: lee de cesare
Subject: Re: public information
Student restraints would only be used if that is part of the individual educational plan for an ESE student, and it would be spelled out in the IEP under what circumstances they could be used. Those plans are developed with a team of specialists and the parents, so no child would be restrained without the parent's permission.
I am waiting for a job description for the principal on special assignment at the book depository. Basically, she manages the book warehouse and she's still at the elementary principal level.
Gentlepeople of the Hillsborough County Legislative Delegation:
How closely do you follow the conditions that prevail in your community and take the initiative to make them better?
Or do you just get voted into office and romp up to Tallahassee to preen as legislative stars in the Senate and the House and forget the people's wellbeing that voted you into office back home?
If so, for shame. In classical Greek times, the citizens of Athens, who modeled our first democracy, would have given you a thumbs down in the forum and would have either exiled you for 20 years or killed you. Athenian citizens took democracy seriously, so the leaders did too.
Thucydides got 20 years banishment for bad army leadership, and now scholars worship him for his history of the Peloponnesian War. Often generals who returned from battle to Athens after fighting another Greek city state were put to death for failure to advance the interests of Athenians. I think that law would work well for Florida. If you came back to your home base and had done nothing for the citizens of Hillsborough County, maybe the citizens should gather on Franklin Street and give you a thumbs down.
Athenian citizens were tough. They put Socrates to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. He was, in a sense, head of the Athenian schools. The schools in Hillsborough County need that kind of pitiless evaluation. Its leaders--both board and administration--are lousy. They treat teachers badly, use the Professional Standards office to frame them for cooked-up charges to shut them up by threatening their jobs with false charges.
The board and administration don't want anybody to reveal anything about the way they run the schools before it is run through the Public Affairs spin Laundromat.
Maybe we need those banishment-put-to-death protocols in Hillsborough County.
It's worth pondering. The legislative delegation has not done a thing to counter the depredations in the schools due to bad board members and greedy administrations; the current specimens in both phyla retain the same sicko DNA of management as obtained when Dr. Lennard tried to prove Mr. Erwin crazy in the early '90's because Erwin reported graft and theft in the schools. Instead of Superintendent Lennard's investigating these charges, he tried to invalidate them by proving Erwin berserk. The administrartive brigands and board clones joined in the task with energy and glee.
Dr. Lennard's conduct makes this citizen believe that the graft started at the top with Dr. Lennard, now elections supervisor. The internal auditors of the Supervisors of Elections office should be on the q.v.
On my schools blog leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com, I catalog the underbelly of the vile job the board and administration do in managing the schools.
I tell how badly they treat teachers, how indifferent they are to education (two lack a college degree; how can they care about the county's children's education when they don't care about their own educatiion?), and how grasping they are about tax money that pours into the schools based on the student headcount. They bloat administrative salaries for the C students who pour into administrations after graduation from second-tier schools while the A and B students go into teaching. The administration and board use tax money to hire buddies and sycophants. Two board members have children in administration working their way up the ranks to become top operators to continue the wretched tradition of lower-quartile specimens that clog the administrative ranks. The board spends thousands of dollars for joy rides around the country under the aegis of learning how to be better board members. So far, one does not detect any improvement on the board dais from their pricey tax-paid peregrinations. They may have become more expert in the rituals of room service, but they don't show any sign of learning data that help the children in the county schools.
The only way that we can get a new attitude towards education from the top is to clean house in the complicit board.
Jennifer Falliero, April Griffin, and Candy Olson are all up for re-election. They have opponents, thank God. The three are all terrible board members who do not care about the wellbeing of the schools but care about travel money and making $9.000 more than beginning teachers for doing nothing but lolling on the board podium and gadding around town posing as benefactors of education.
They all three are androids for Ms. Elia, corrupt board superintendent. I pray the opponents win for the good of the community. The Hillsborough County legislative delegation should help the opponents of Griffin, Falliero, and Olson win if they care about their community and keep that possible citizen congregation in the Franklin Street forum hereabouts known as the voting booth.
Members of the legislative delegation must have concern for what's going on in their county's schools if they care about their community. The schools are in the thrall of a greedy, obtuse board and administration whose only interest is to tap into the money pit of state funds based on student head count so that they can strut around town and look important at all the tax-paid political summits they attend, create bloated-salary jobs for buddies and sycophants, and hand out no-bid contracts with or without graft.
The legislative delegation should work through its budget power to rein in the villainies committed in the schools by the board and administration.
Money they understand. The legislature controls the budget. Review the fine print of the budget to see how you can make things better for the teachers and students in the Hillsborough County schools. As Tennyson says, "Live true, right wrong, serve the king (community), else why born?"
When your romance with Tallahassee ends, you will come back to your home in Hillsborough County. Will the school leadership have improved because of your Tallahassee sojourn, or will we have still a corrupt board and administration presiding over our children's and grandchildren's education about which you were too indifferent about or too cowardly to fix?
We measure a person's life by the deeds he or she has done or omitted to do. Will yours show your deeds to have been those that bettered your community with your time in state office, or will it show that you did everything to balloon your ego with your "public service" but nothing to make your community--especially the schools--better?
On my blog are analyses of the up-for-election incumbent's on the board. If you do not like what you read about their conduct--I present my view of all three board candidates' history and psyches--then do something about it. Talk to the opponents of the incumbents and see if they have potential to change the vile system that now prevails if they beat the incumbents. Give them your advice on how to win if you find them apt.
And don't pour tax money into the Hillsborough County board and administration's coffers for them to squander it as they now do on bloated salaries, no-bid contracts, and hiring buddies, board and administration children, and sycophants.
You have the facility to turn off the spigot in Tallahassee to school boards and school administrations who abuse their power in order to pamper themselves and to impoverish the students and teachers. Use it.
Lee Drury De Cesare
20-year resident of Tampa's Beach Park
Now retired teacher at Madeira Beach, where my husband was mayor for 12 years after he got tired of fishing. My children went to Grady, Coleman, and Plant. I still have one grandchild who begins Plant in the fall.
Brandon Law People: look at the profile of Jennifer Pole Girl Falliero, your board member, on my blog.
Do y'all want Brandon to have a person with such louche morals leading the schools where your children attend, other people's children attend, and my grandchild attends? Pole Girl's opponent is a pharmacist. I believe he lives in Valrico. Get in touch with him and offer your support. Nobody could be worse than Pole Girl Falliero, whom other board members--all of them--voted to be chair despite their knowing her on-site adultery. This maneuver gives you a pivotal clue in judging the board's moral calibre.
The Capitol 400 South Monroe Street Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001 2/6/2010
To: Chief of Staff Eikenberg Governor Crist
Chief of Staff Eikenberg:You did not respond to the below letter to you with the Secretary of the Children's board name.
Nothing makes a voter mader than a politician's not responding to a request for information once in office.
This negligence differs markedly from the rapt attention a voter gets when the candidates are on the stump.
Please see that Governor Crist gets the below communication and that he acknowledges that he has done so. Thank you.
Lee Drury De Cesare 15316 Gulf Avenue 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708 leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com
Governor Crist:
I append a letter to the Secretary of Children's Services, George Sheldon.
I asked for an investigation of the ongoing child-abuse practices of the Special Education retarded children's care in the Hillsborough County schools.
I append as well a picture of the junk room the administration assigned these children as a classroom. The picture is grainy, but it gives a flavor of the squalor and danger to the children of this classroom: it has unstable furniture piled against the walls that inquisitive children can pull down and injure themselves or others, That danger, a teacher alerted me to.
In addition, the junk class room has a storage room next door with a door that goes unlocked between the room and the children's classroom. The same teacher told me this adjacent room could contain dangerous substances. I can't confirm the last conjecture because it is seldom possible to get a straight answer from the administration and board. They are either in Nixon Ian cover-up or limited hangout mode, or they just plain lie.
In addition, one special-needs child wore a bus restraint throughout the class day. His having one on in class violates the state restraint laws as I read them. I infer the supervisors of this area--Mr. Smiley and Ms. Morris-- allow the regular staff members to keep the bus harness on the boy for its members' convenience, although these quixotic supervisors used the restraint law to trap untrained substitute teacher Steve Kemp into a Professional Standards restraint-violation charge that Superintendent Elia planned to use to fire him in a case of the pot's calling the kettle black.
The reason for the plan to fire Kemp, in my opinion, was that he had a blog discussing the schools. The board and administration don't believe in free speech and don't want the schools discussed; they want to sanitize all information about the schools by running it through the Community Affairs office to turn their depredations in to happy talk to fool the taxpayers.
In the Steven Kemp case, the special-needs supervisors did not follow the protocols listed in their job descriptions when admitting new, untrained substitute teacher Kemp into the classroom.In fact, the administration via Mr. Smiley, division head, and Ms. Morris, principal, put substitute teacher Kemp in this junk classroom without giving him a word of instruction or training of any kind in how to supervise these children, a specialty in which teacher Kemp had had no academic or workshop training. The board lawyer Gonzalez claims in a letter, however, that Mr. Kemp had training after a false charge of child abuse filed against Kemp by special-ed division supervisor Smiley with the sheriff's office.
Mr. Smiley's job descriptions and that of the principal involved, Ms.Morris, both say that they are responsible for orienting new teachers. They did not do so in the Kemp situation. These two have received no corrective action from Ms. Elia or other higher-up bureaucrats as far as is publicly known.Instead, these responsible for filing child-abuse charges against Mr. Kemp continue in their supervisory positions as far as the world knows.
The special-ed administration after Mr. Smiley's filing the child-abuse charges against Kemp then irrationally kept Kemp on duty in the classroom six days after the putative incident occurred, illogically and carelessly letting a teacher whom the administration labeled a child abuser remain in the classroom with the child whom he was accused as abusing and with other special-needs children as well.
Although they excel in skullduggery, the administration and board do not show stellar abilities in logic.
I filed Professional Standards charges against these errant supervisors. The Professional Standards office's head, Ms. Kipley, claimed after several months had gone by that she had not received my charges and then authored what she thought was a linguistic coup based on a copy of my inquires.
Ms. Kipley's academic background of home-ec degree does not prepare her to perform a linguistic coup or even an adequate job of punctuation. She is capable only of trapping teachers with Professional Standards charges when the administration wants to terrify these teachers about their job security.
La Kipley quoted my email out of context and with no scholarly indication of omissions and additions. This lack of skill is not to be wondered at since we deal here with a person with a home-ec degree that nevertheless makes $150,000 a year to carry out the administration and board orders to frame teachers who show the slightest signs of resistance with a Professional Standards charge.
The administration never files a Professional Standards charge against administrators, only teachers, because the Board and administration want to shut up teachers' complaints about how ill the Board and administration run the schools. So they have allocated Professional Standards charges to menace teachers and threaten their jobs.I recently asked the Professional Standards office via the Community Affairs office for public information about teachers' and administrators' Professional Standards complaints. I got sufficient teacher filings, but I got no administrator filings even though an administrator at King High School had recently invited pubescent boys into his office, ordered them to close the door, ordered them to remove their shoes and socks, and proceeded to fondle their feet.
I later learned that the administration had secretly had this apparent foot fetishist examined by a psychologist after parents' complaints and some question of lawsuits, but the administration and board typically did not release this information to the public.
Teacher complaints have validity because the public believe in teachers; hence teacher complaints if allowed menace administration and board power, their control of tax money, and their freedom to hire buddies without advertising the jobs, not to mention exercising other ad hoc perquisites for administration and board delectation.
Ms. Kipley is a prime example of unqualified people hired into administrative positions without credentials and without advertising. Ms. Kipley has home-ec degree in a job that calls for a master's in a valid academic area.
To top off this outrage against taxpayers, Ms. Elia recently hired Ms. Kipley's husband as an accountant. He had a high school diploma and no accounting experience. I examined applicants' submissions, and at least four had an accounting degree and experience. One was a handicapped woman for whom an affirmative-action plan should apply. The schools have no affirmative action plan for the handicapped as they should have according to Federal regulations.
Ms. Kipley is particularly under qualified for this important job of head of Professional Standards. Her sexist home-ec degree no respectable university grants any more. This degree manqué explains why she did not know standard punctuation protocols when she misquoted me. She is, of course, ethically challenged as well: giving ethics the back of one's hand is a bona fide occupational qualification for this job that the administration and board use to intimidate teachers into silence by cooking up professional-standards charges against them and threatening their jobs.
Ms. Kipley got the job without its being advertised presumably because the board and administration could count on her sycophancy in pressuring teachers they targeted with Professional Standards cooked-up charges.
Both Kipleys' hiring is emblematic of why the administration features such ubiquitous academic mediocrity, having only one Ph.D. in administrative midst, although the pay of administrators shows bloated, especially compared to that of teachers.
I know that you are involved in a threatening campaign with Mr. Rubio, who just won a straw poll in Pinellas, the county in which I live on the beach.
People care about education. Were you to treat this information I send you seriously and address it and let the press know that you are doing so and insist that Mr. Sheldon do so as well, I believe people would take your promise of being solicitous of education seriously.
Junk Classroom That Houses the Special-needs Students
I hope that you will take an interest in this charge that I have filed with the Child Welfare department, which gave it a brusque, unconvincing turndown by saying that the agency had no authority to investigate my charges because, I assumed, they were against high-level school bureaucrats. I further request that you to follow George Sheldon's handling of it. He has not provided me with public information that I asked for several months ago. The Attorney General says 48 hours turnaround is the citizen's right to expect with public information requests.
I want you and your staff to monitor Mr. Sheldon's further treatment of my charge and to let Senator Storms know that you approve of her vigilance in asking him to continue his review. I want you to alert Senator Storms, who took an interest in this important charge when I contacted her.
I have asked Mr. Sheldon to set up a meeting with the superintendent and board for those who want to weigh in on the problem. I do. I know at least two teachers who do. Other teachers would want to comment if the administration notified them of the meeting and their attending would not jeopardize their jobs.
humane treatment of the retarded. I was fortunate enough to have had the help of Senator Ronda Storms in this situation, thank goodness. Without her help, I don't think my charge of child abuse against higher-up school people would have had a chance of being attended to. She asked Mr. Sheldon to report back what he has done if anything to remedy it. Ms. Storms has the courage, all too rare in elected officials, of actually doing her job to help citizens get a decent society that includes humane treatment of the retarded.
Junk Classroom That Houses the Special-needs Students
Inspector General Steckler's online report of the child welfare agency that Mr. Sheldon heads says that the processing of the complaints by that agency is not up to par. I believe the turndown of my case by the local field officer of Child Protection, one young Mr. Turner, apparently ratified by Mr. Sheldon, confirms Inspector General Steckler's assessment.
Please ask Secretary of Education Smith to take a livelier interest in this situation than I have observed him to have done in the past problems that lie outside the bureaucratic rituals over which he presides hermetically sealed in his office complex.
Junk Classroom That Houses the Special-needs Students
c: George Sheldon Mark Rubio Inspector General Steckler Senator Ronda Storms Education Secretary Smith
Dear George:
I have received a copy of Senator Storms's letter regarding my complaint about the abusive conditions that the profoundly retarded children endure in the Hillsborough county schools. Your local bureau chief declined since he said your agency didn't have authority to intervene in abuse by Hillsborough County schools' personnel. That leaves a whole lot of county children uncovered by your agency's protection.
I have asked you for public information that I have not received yet. The Attorney General has said that 48 hours is a reasonable turnaround time for public information.You have far exceeded that time frame in my public-information request. I ask for it again and add this: Give me a copy of the information in your agency manual that confirms that you don't have any control over abuse of children by school personnel; in fact, give me any exceptions to protection that this manual lists.That this in an unexplored issue that your agency has not thought of or avoided is in question. It seems a giant oversight to me and needs attention.
This meeting with the Hillsborough County superintendent and board could be a start.Senator Storms has asked you to get back to her on what you do about this problem.I request that you come to Tampa for a meeting with Ms. Elia, me, and others. Your station chief seems a tentative person to me, and we need a firm voice in this situation. I hope that you can provide it. Also, this meeting should not be shut up.
The school board and administration have a policy of giving out information only through the Public Affairs Laundromat so that the public is kept ignorant of how the schools are really run. So I ask that you not bar any press that wants to attend. Your boss Mr. Crist believes in government in the sunshine, and this allowing of press people in would enhance that goal.I think the board should be at the meeting. This is something they are responsible for monitoring but have not. Their presence would mean that they can no longer say that the problem of the abusive practices in the severely retarded area is something they don't know about.
I also have a couple of teachers who want to come, and they don't get out of school until five. So the meeting should be a few minutes after five.The school board must have a conference room. I suggest that the meeting be there.I appreciate your help in this matter.
Gonzalez moonlights at USF; he made $14,000 last year in addition to the $275,000 from Hillsborough County School Board. Candy's husband is a bankruptcy judge in Ft. Lauderdale. lee From: twinkobie [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com] Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 11:53 AM To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] Rata-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-t...
Dr. Genshaft:
The email exchange below will give you the flavor of the kind of attitude your counselor Mr. Solis has toward a member of the public that pays his salary. It is not acceptable either in tone nor in willingness to answer a public-information question that a citizen is entitled to ask and entitled to get a speedy response to.
I ask you, your board, and your chief counsel to tell me if what Mr. Solis says about hiring the law firm of Tom Gonzalez is indeed coincident with the university's practice of hiring and whether it is coincident with the equal-opportunity hiring laws and the equal-opportunity requirements attached to federal grants to the university. If so, I shall ask for elected officials' and the EEOC's attention to your hiring protocols and the federal government to do a compliance review of the same. Whatever Jesuitical construction you put on not employing him, you hired him for a job--at least one, the Al Arian case---and paid him $33,000 of tax money for his services. That's employment in anybody's book.
Please vouchsafe this citizen a response to this question. I don't know the email formula for Dr. Roy Weatherford of the union's email. Pray forward it to him.
Respectfully,
Lee Drury De Cesare 15316 Gulf Boulevard 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708 tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
copy: Dr. Roy Weatherford, faculty union USF
From: Solis, Gerard D. [mailto:GSolis@usf.edu] Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 1:09 PM To: 'lee decesare' Cc: Mohn, Lori Subject: RE: public information
Dear Lee Druryde Cesare:
If you will review your request, which appears below, you will see that you asked for Mr. Gonzalez's "salary". This word choice is consistent with your question as to whether Mr. Gonzalez is employed by USF:
I would like to know if Tom Gonzalez is the attorney the university uses in its legal business with the workers and faculty, and if those are not areas of his employment at USF, is he at all employed by the university at all, in what area, and what was his salary last year?
We answered that question for you in our response (see below). We can only respond to what you specifically ask for and not what you may have meant or intended.
I interpret your email below as a new public records request because it’s asking something different than your original request seeking salary information. In response to your latest request, I can inform you as of the date of this email there are no records responsive to your request because we have not received a bill for Mr. Gonzalez’s services. This concludes USF’s response to your request of 01/26/10.
Gerard D. Solis Senior Associate General Counsel University of South Florida Office of the General Counsel 4202 E. Fowler Ave., ADM 250 Tampa, 33620 Tel: (813) 974-2131 Fax: (813) 974-5236 gsolis@admin.usf.edu
From: lee decesare [mailto:tdecesar@taMPAbay.rr.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 12:40 AM To: Solis, Gerard D. Subject: FW: public information
Mr. Solis: The Attorney General has said that 48 hours is a reasonable turnaround time for a public-information request. Mine has languished longer than that by far. I ask again to know how much money the university paid the Gonzalez firm last year for its services.
Lee Drury De Cesare
From: Mohn, Lori [mailto:lmohn@usf.edu] On Behalf Of Solis, Gerard D. Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 4:35 PM To: 'tdecesar@taMPAbay.rr.com' Cc: Mohn, Lori Subject: FW: public information
Dear Lee Druryde Cesare:
The University utilizes the law firm of Thompson, Sizemore & Hearing, P.A. on various legal issues. In response to your request, attached please find a copy the agreement between Mr. Gonzalez’s law firm and the University of South Florida. Mr. Gonzalez is not employed by the University of South Florida.
Sincerely,
Gerard D. Solis Senior Associate General Counsel University of South Florida Office of the General Counsel 4202 E. Fowler Ave., ADM 250 Tampa, 33620 Tel: (813) 974-2131 Fax: (813) 974-5236 gsolis@admin.usf.edu
-- Posted By twinkobie to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 1/29/2010 08:50:00 AM
