I work both sides of the bay since I live on the beach. The following I passed out at Suncoast Tiger Bay on October 9th. lee

What’s Wrong with Schools?

I viewed problems with education from the inside while teaching college English for 28 years.

One doesn’t hear critics’ citing the biggest problem afflicting schools: the mediocre minds that clog education’s bloated, overpaid bureaucracy. My experience confirms the faculty-lounge shibboleth that smart people imbued with the ecstasy of learning go into teaching; dumb ones absent that tendency head for administration.

Academic weaklings home in on administration because that’s where the money is. Administrators craft school budgets and with somnolent boards’ ok award themselves bloated salaries. When applying for jobs, members of the country-wide administration cartel cite each other’s pay bloat as base and demand even higher salaries. This flim-flam has gone on so long unchecked that school superintendents will soon surpass the pay of the president of the United States.

Significant is that there is never a shortage of administrative job seekers but always a shortage of teachers. The administrative money scam lurks behind this equation.

Florida teachers must pass language-skills tests to get their jobs, but not administrators. The writing of marginally literate superintendents in both Hillsborough and Pinellas counties shows they have not mastered basic punctuation and grammar. Yet Elia’s almost $300,000 pay is more than the US vice president’s; Wilcox’s almost $200,000 salary is more than an associate Supreme Court justice’s.

The chief goal of education is mastery of words. The world considers no person educated bereft of the ability to write correct language. “Let me hear the man speak so that I may know his mind,” says Dr. Johnson. Let a sample of his writing pass muster to enter the ranks of the educated says academic standards.

Both Elia and Wilcox should have taken the same language tests as teachers to get their jobs. Administrators must by law in Massachusetts, the number-one school system in the country.

The two groups’ comparative grasp of bottom-line literacy is a barometer of the intellectual quality of superintendents in number-one Massachusetts compared to those in Florida.

Mastering grammar and punctuation is not a feat that requires Nobel-laureate brains. It’s a chore that begins early in a student’s life. Hence, a person’s not acquiring basic-literacy competence over the stretch of time from grammar school to graduate school and the award of an advanced degree by some slipshod university to such punctuation-impaired candidates means we deal with obtuse specimens who do not belong in education.

An administrator not astute enough to handle commas is unlikely to be smart enough to prevent the recent transportation meltdown in the Hillsborough County school system. Its solution required a pricey consultant. I read the consultant’s report. It was common-sense stuff that the on-site administration should have been able to come up with itself.

The Hillsborough County administration often summons ad hoc consultants to tell it how to extricate itself from situations smart top people would have anticipated and solved. This practice costs taxpayers double money: payroll for dumb administrators and consultant fees for hired brains to prop up dumb administrators.

My assessment of Dr. Wilcox’s grammar-punctuation deficiencies comes from his Nova dissertation and a smattering of his office writing. Grammar-punctuation errors riddle both. These are not abstruse linguistic conundrums that grammarians fight over at conferences; they are ordinary grammar-punctuation errors that public-school teachers weed from the writing of students for them to graduate and get a job. Yet Dr. Wilcox harvests close to $200,000 a year in tax money plus a car to lead a school system that imbues students with the writing competence Dr. Wilcox himself lacks.

Despite his crippled grasp of language, Dr. Wilcox’s lordly $200,000 makes invidious comparison with the entering teacher’s $34,000. The public gives pious praise to teachers but elects obtuse boards that award superintendents and featherbedding administrators big money. Boards never think to say, “You know, with all these administrator candidates lining up for jobs, we have a buyer’s market and can offer a reasonable salary, not the bloat at which the administration cartel has pegged the going rate. Who knows? Maybe a candidate with a valid academic degree, the ability to write and even punctuate, and a lively interest in learning instead of money will show up for the job.”

This step might lead to a downward spiral of the administration cartel’s hiking salaries to Enron-executive levels.

Pointing out Dr. Wilcox’s lack of competence with language gets no thanks. When this superintendent worthy appeared at the Pinellas Democratic Club and made a speech that made not a whit of sense, my fellow Democrats cheered him and booed me when I questioned the literacy of Republican Wilcox’s Nova thesis. Charged with identifying questioners, the Pinellas Democratic chair said she would never call on me again because my question was rude. The Pinellas school board member present to whom I brought up the problem snubbed me. Democratic women followed me into the parking lot to tell me I was unladylike to point out that Dr. Wilcox’s thesis was marginally literate. Dr. Wilcox spat some epithet at me as he exited. He may not know commas, but he knows invective.

Literacy standards get grim enthusiasm when it comes to inculcating them in students but horrified revulsion when applied to an overpaid superintendent. One could more easily get a pass for being a grave robber than for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes in this administration pay scam.

Email to Dr. Wilcox:

Dr. Wilcox: I request Information below. The first four come under the state's public-records law and require timely response; the additional ones come from curiosity of a Pinellas citizen’s interest in the county superintendent’s view of education:

1. What is your base salary and your annual salary's worth with all perquisites added?

2. What is the beginning teacher's salary in Pinellas County? The last time I asked you at Tiger Bay about teachers' salaries shortly after your arrival in St. Petersburg, you didn't know these data and justified your own bloated salary by saying with an air of self-congratulation, "You get what you pay for."

3. Can you confirm that a Pinellas County teacher must pass a pre-employment basic-skills writing test? Can you confirm that the Pinellas County superintendent does not have to pass a basic-skills-and-literacy test as teachers do as condition of employment and as must all administrators in Massachusetts, the number-one school system in the country?

I would like to see the folder with the unsuccessful candidates’ applications who competed with you for the job. Where can I review this information?

5. Do you think a superintendent's academic achievement matters as an indicator of intelligence and hence ability to lead the schools? Would a better superintendent have core-academic degrees in, say, history, mathematics, or philosophy rather than degrees with courses such as curriculum instruction, instructional technology, or urban education?

6. Have schools of education that provide such exotic studies as the three cited trivialized education for school administrators and teachers?

7. Do you think it’s important that a school superintendent has read the core literature of Western civilization such as Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Shakespeare’s Richard III, and Hamilton’s Federalist Papers? Why or why not? Have you read these?

8. Your Nova Ed.D. award shortly preceded your hiring as Pinellas superintendent. Would the Nova records people report that you did Ed.D. coursework there and that your Ed.D. process required the three to seven years needed in most universities? How long did it take you to earn a Nova Ed.D.? Did the Nova Ed.D. require competence in two other languages besides English as most university Ph.D.s require? What were your two foreign languages?

9. A shibboleth in faculty lounges is that smart people go into teaching while academic weaklings go into administration. Is this accurate or unfair? Does the fact that neither you nor Hillsborough County superintendent Maryellen Elia has a firm grasp of grammar and punctuation validate this claim? Do you infer that most taxpayers would resist your bloated salary when compared to that of teachers if they knew you had not mastered basic writing skills that Pinellas teachers instill in students who graduate under your supervision?

10. What is the highest salary made by a teacher in the Pinellas school system?

Excerpts from Dr. Wilcox’s Writing

CITATIONS ARE REPRESENTATIVE and do not include all errors.

Dissertation title page note to a St. Petersburg reporter: “… read it laying down…”

Verb: illiterate present participle: lie-lay-lying-lain. A sentence precedes the ellipsis, so it needs an extra period.

Page 3: “The specific research question was: What technique…”

Misused colon: a sentence should precede it.

Page 5: “…the British, French, and Confederate flags have been flown…”

Passive verbs afflict the document throughout.

Wordiness abounds:

Page 26: “Some individuals may believe that the resources and improvements which come with these programs within a school magnet program, most of which were located in predominantly Black inner-city schools, were as important to the Black students located in these schools as was increasing the number of non-black students to desegregate the school.” 52 words

Edit: Some believe magnet-program resources were as important to Black inner-city schools as desegregation. 13 versus 52 words

Page 43: “Teaching methods which complement the magnet curriculum theme, need to be identified with and also accompanied by state-of-the-art staff development to assure that teachers understand and utilize the teaching methods.” 30 words

Redundant comma separates subject and verb. “State-of-the-art” is a moss-grown cliché. Educationese “utilize” appears instead of “use.”

Edit: Leaders should stress magnet-teaching methods and staff development that ensures teachers master and use them. 15 words versus 30

Page 61: “All data collected for this process objective was qualitative as represented by the three curriculum documents.”

Subject-verb disagreement: “data were.”

Page 70: The quantitative data was… Disagreement of subject-verb: “data were.”

Page 75: “As a promotional technique, Astronaut Tracy Caldwell was in attendance, as was the Mayor of the parish and dignitaries from the Chamber of Commerce.” 24 words

Redundant comma cuts off restrictive trailing adverbial clause. “Mayor” is lower case unless a proper name follows it.

Edit: Astronaut Tracy Caldwell, the mayor, and Chamber-of-Commerce dignitaries attended to promote the event. 13 versus 24 words

These bloated specimens display educationese as does the thesis throughout. Educationese sounds as if computer androids manufactured it. This bizarre dialect emerged from schools of education and never employs one word when it can use two; it shuns a single-syllable word if it can blow the word up to a sesquipedalian monster. The spread of educationese faux-academic glop has given academic writing a bad name.

Revision: “Teachers’ methods complement curriculum; staff development helps teachers achieve goals” 11 versus 30 words

“…the likelihood of their within-a-school magnet program being successful…”

“Program” should be “program’s”: possessive before the gerund.

Page 80: “There are likely a myriad of possible reasons parents of non-Black children may not send their children to these schools, many of which these parents may not share with others” 29 words

Subject-verb disagreement: “myriad ‘is,' not ‘are.’” The structure of this sentence ranks so defective that reading it is like riding a spavined horse. Both experiences give you a crick in the neck.

Edit: Non-Black parents do not send their children to magnet schools for myriad unknown reasons.” 13 versus 29 words Another specimen wordy sentence like those found throughout: “A condition beyond the control of the researcher was that the enrollment within a school magnet program is voluntary and is impacted by many variables for only which children’s parents are knowledgeable,” 32 words

Sense: “for only which” should be “for which only.” This is another riding-a-spavined horse sentence.

Translated to plain English: “The magnet program is voluntary, and only parents know children’s needs.” 14 versus 32 words

Page 76: Terminal objective one was: Techniques will be identified….

The writer should review colon use. The above colon is dead wrong. It splits a linking verb and its predicate nominative.

Page 79: “…magnet program being successful at attracting…”

Program’s being: possessive before the gerund

“…within-a-school magnet program, regardless of actions taken by staff.”

Redundant comma cuts off a restrictive adverbial prepositional phrase.

Page 80: Another limitation was that students within a school magnet program only contributed to a part of the school’s racial composition.

Misplaced adverbial modifier should go before “to.”

Page 81: “Programs within a school magnet program has been ordered by the Federal court as part of a desegregation plan.”

Subject-verb agreement: Programs…have been ordered

Page 82: “Indicated” appears three times on this page. The writer substitutes “indicate” for “say” throughout and “utilize” for “use.”

“The same is true for the Recruiter for the Office of Magnet Programs who has increased the number of personal contracts with the prospective students and parents as a means to increase non-Black enrollment.”

Lower-case “Recruiter.” If there is only one recruiter, the “who’ adjective clause is nonrestrictive and requires a comma before it.

FROM DR. WILCOX’S OFFICE CORRESPONDENCE

November 4, 2004

“Thank you for sharing this information with me which will provide the opportunity…”

Comma after “me” for nonrestrictive adjective clause

November 10, 2004

“You expressed concern about students missing two days of school.”

Possessive before the gerund: students’ missing

November 8, 2004

“Thank you for your letter and your “hand” made thank you notes.”

Dr. Wilcox invents an exotic use for quotation marks. No rule sanctions the ones around “hand.” He also splits a closed compound (handmade) and would do well to hyphenate “thank you” as two words before a noun acting as a single adjective.

“From your letter and from my conversation with others it has become clear…”

Comma after “others” for long introductory prepositional phrase

“The administration and Sarah’s peers feel differently.”

“Feel” is a linking verb. A predicate adjective, not an adverb, follows it: “different,” not “differently.”

“I am in receipt of a copy of your letter dated October 20, 2004 regarding…”

Comma after 2004 for conventional material

“You asked, ‘What lesson was this supposed to teach (your) daughter?’”

Dr. Wilcox must mean “my” instead of “your. The parentheses should be brackets for an author’s interpolation in a quotation.

“Well, I am not sure it is “supposed” to teacher her….”

Dr. Wilcox applies idiosyncratic quotation marks here. One would like his citation of the rule for these.

“I hope she learns that her family loves her and will support her, but they also know when to let go because sometimes it’s just time to move on.”

The redundant comma after “her” splits a compound noun-clause direct object of the verb “learn”: “that her family… but [that] her family….” Pronoun reference: “They” should be “it,” referring to collective noun “family.

The above quote comes from the only extended piece of Wilcox office correspondence that I have. I thought it a good letter, compassionate and psychologically adept, until I arrived at the clichés “to move on” and “to let go” in the exit paragraph. This hackneyed psychobabble converted Dr. Wilcox’s letter into banal condolence template. When a person invokes “move on” and “let go” to persuade the one addressed to forget about the injury the latter suffered, it elicits suspicion that the moving on and letting go are for the person-doing-the-addressing’s convenience, not for the comfort of the person addressed.

“…about the toll it has placed on Sarah and your family, and about what it has cost us as a school family.”

The comma after “family” is superfluous: it separates two adjectival prepositional phrases. The “and’ joining them obviates the need for a comma.

The one-and-a-third-page letter from which the above quote comes is part of the non-dissertation writing that convinces me that separate people wrote the dissertation and the letter. The forensics are too different to believe one person wrote both in my view.

Email to the president of Nova:

president@nsu.nova.edu ; ferrero@nsu.nova.edu; ferrero@nsu.nova.edu ; maherm@nsu.acast.nova.edu

Dr. Paroncy:

I inquire about what academic rigor Nova applies to approval of its doctoral dissertations.

This question interests me since encountering the 2003 Nova dissertation of Dr. Clayton Wilcox, superintendent of Pinellas County Schools.

Your online dissertation guideline

(http://www.scis.nova.edu/NSS/pdf_documents/Diss_Guide.pdf) cites strict standards for grammar, punctuation, and writing that the Wilcox dissertation does not display. His slender 83-page thesis cites only 12 items in its bibliography and lacks footnotes. Given the wordiness and plethora of passive verbs, the thesis would run fewer pages with these faults amended.

I question authorship since my rhetorical forensics say the dissertation style varies from the one displayed in Dr. Wilcox's Pinellas superintendent’s office communications.

I know that Nova's credit stands behind each dissertation it accepts to fulfill the doctoral requirements of the university. Universities that don’t exercise care about the quality of students’ dissertations get the reputation of being diploma mills.

I attach a partial list of the grammar-punctuation-style errors in the thesis and office communication for your review. I attach also the only extended piece of office writing I have by Dr. Wilcox. Comparing it to the style of the thesis forms basis for my inferring that different people wrote the dissertation and the letter.

I would appreciate your sharing with me your assessment of whether Dr. Wilcox's dissertation be coincident with Nova's standards.

Thank you.

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

lee drury de cesare

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: lee decesare
To: bbushaw@pdkintl.org; eeller@pdkintl.org; jstorm@pdkintl.org
Cc: jamato@oceanport.k12.nj.us; happynappi@aol.com; Arliss.Roaden@sdhc.k12.fl.us; carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us; jennifer.faliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us; montolino@aol.com; susanvaldes@sdhc.k12.fl.us; april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us; candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us; dorethaedgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us; letitiastein@sptimes.com; Marilyn ; chrischerau@bellsouth.net; Gimbert.1@osu.edu; andrews.128@osu.edu; almeroaden@comcast.net; bernadine_moldoch@kenton.k12.ny.us; zhaoyo@mail.msu.edu; fujicons@aol.com; andreson@synergyltd.com; rlmeyers@hotmail.com; rstrahanoski@comcast.net; rstrahanoski@comcast.net; OTFrazier@aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 1:21:48 PM
Subject: protest of local PDK speaker's selection

To: Chair

International PDK

From: Lee Drury De Cesare

Subject: Inappropriate selection of speaker for local PDK annual dinner

Date: September 18, 2007

Dear Mr. Roaden:

One sees with dismay that the local chapter of PDK has chosen Ms. MaryEllen Elia as speaker at its annual dinner.

Ms. Elia, superintendent of Hillsborough County schools, is a particularly problematic choice for a society that devotes itself to excellence in education.

Ms. Elia’s record on excellence in education is quite markedly deficient. Her record is more demonstrative of ambitious pursuit of the superintendent position to bloat hers and other administrators’ salaries than to promote excellence in education. She uses her position as superintendent not to augment excellence in education but to exercise a unilateral power rubberstamped by a complicit board to diminish teachers’ participation in education decisions that affect them and their students. These board-superintendent decisions define a system’s policies that strip teachers of input and thus negatively impact any education excellence to be achieved by the very people--classroom teachers-- who insure this transcendent goal.

In the first place, Ms. Elia’s writing ability does not exhibit the hallmarks of someone with devotion to excellence education. She lacks basic punctuation skills, and her rhetoric is junior-high level. Any person dedicated to excellence in education learns how to write and punctuate at an excellent level. Ms. Elia has not. One can examine her writing output on the school Web for confirmation of this observation.

Ms. Elia acquired her job in an irregular fashion, using board-administration politics instead of credentials to become superintendent. A complicit school board lowered the Ph.D. requirement to the master’s that defines Ms. Elia’s terminal degree and rejected candidates objectively superior to Ms. Elia with diverse experience, writing ability that included published educational research, and Ph.D.’s from distinguished institutions. Ms. Elia got the job instead of the better candidates because she was the inside candidate calculated to keep the administration on the same path of mediocrity in education, unsatisfactory to everyone except the administration and an entrenched coterie on the board interested not in education but in maintaining political incumbency.

In her two years as superintendent, Ms. Elia has alienated teachers by administering by fiat, not by cooperation. She imposed recently an extra class on teachers to solve her budget problem in implementing the state class-size amendment without consulting teachers, for example, and dumped the ukase on them without warning with the board’s approval. She has even refused to accord teachers along with students a designated time on the board agenda to give them a place at the table where the board and she make decisions and inflict them on teachers without their input.

The board has colluded with Ms. Elia in squelching teacher input at board meetings, for example, by the Chair’s , Dr. Lamb’s, calling teacher applause of a colleague’s comments “out of order” and gaveling teachers down mid-clause when the meager three minutes allowed them for comment is over.

This three-minute limit is especially offensive, given some board members’ wont to ramble on ad infinitum and all board members’ eating up time by flowery comments to each other on the “awards” they have won for their spurious achievements in the education administration bureaucracy’s ersatz prize scams and raffles.

The ill-conceived negative, impatient attitude toward teacher observations from board members in the public meeting has a chilling effect on teacher input even of those teachers who brave the hostility of the board to teachers’ presence at the public meetings of the board. Certain members of the board make plain they do not welcome teachers in the public discussion of school policy. One board member, Ms. Edgecombe, a former principal, has labeled teachers rude and discourteous to the board merely for their even daring to question the administration and the board’s policies. Another board member, Ms. Olson, called teachers lazy in a meeting when they protested the extra class imposed on them by Ms. Elia without their input, and the camera showed that Ms. Elia and Ms. Olson even passed notes during the negative comments on teachers' putative laziness.

In short, the board and administration make teachers’ reception as inhospitable as possible at board meetings without expelling them from the meeting altogether. The board and administration seem to regard teachers and their students as the field hands who provide the economic base for the board’s and administration’s grand show of civic panoply at the administration plantation mansion, not to mention their masters’ bloated paychecks and perquisites.

Yet the very teachers unwelcome at board meetings reign vectors of the excellence in education that PDK fosters.

Ms. Elia’s personal professional ethics as seen by me personally are distressingly deficient. I observed first hand how Ms. Elia and the head of Professional Standards, Linda Kipley, manufactured a case of misusing school emails by a media specialist friend of mine, Bart Birdsall, apparently to accommodate the country-administrator friend of Ms. Elia’s desire to punish Bart because he, as a gay man, protested from his home computer about the shutdown of county library privilege to gays in educational displays. It turned out that the Elia-Kipley cooked-up case had no basis in fact; but they harassed Bart nonetheless and didn‘t even apologize for terrorizing him when their case fell apart. He had to go to therapy subsequently to deal with the trauma of this cruel treatment by Ms. Kipley and Ms. Elia. The board knows about the distorted use of Professional Standards and looks the other way.

Widely known is that the Professional Standards unit is the administration’s covert weapon of coercion with which to squelch teacher disagreement with administration policies. The understood policy of retaliation for honest disagreement from anyone in the school family, especially teachers, is that the person protesting gets put under surveillance for entrapment and punished in some manner subversive of the dignity and professional status of the targeted unfortunate, especially teachers. The Professional Standards unit as run by Ms. Kipley for Ms. Elia’s outreach of control of school personnel does not so much promote professional standards as it imposes silence and fear of loss of job for those who speak up..

The which being said, I suggest that the local chapter has made an unfortunate choice for speaker of the PDK local dinner. The Hillsborough County area has two universities, a community college, and a wide range of possible speakers on educational excellence for this event who do not, as does Ms. Elia, disregard educational excellence and its purveyors, the teachers of the Hillsborough County School system.

I write not as a member of PDK but as long-time member of sister society PBK--Phi Beta Kappa-- for many years. Both organizations are devoted to education excellence, and the choice of PDK’s speakers for chapter events should confirm, not undermine, that goal.

I believe that Ms. Elia’s background and conduct do not confirm excellence in education and protest PDK local’s choice of her for the honor of speaking at its annual dinner.

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

;

Ms. Olson:



The intelligence that the school board had countenanced the administration to shut down teacher access to blogs astonished me. Apparently, the board objects to the blogs’ criticism of its rubberstamping Ms. Elia’s ukases and the criticism of Ms. Under-the- Radar Faliera’s breaking the law by creeping out of her home district under cover of darkness and moving to the glamours of South Tampa’s sparkling precincts.



I understood school-board members to be Constitutional officers whose oath of office includes their swearing to uphold the Constitution. Lots of people don’t like free speech, but that dislike does not mean any citizen’s free speech should suffer. Those citizens include school employees. And a public official, no matter his/her objection to people’s hearing other views than his or her own must not collude in cutting off free speech rights to members of the school family.



Please tell me if you support this shutdown of free speech in the schools. And if you agreed with it, tell me how that agreement is coincident with your duty as a Constitutional officer to uphold the Constitution. If you agreed to shutting down access to blogs by teachers at school, that is the same the same disregard for the statutes that is not unlike the Under-the-radar Board Member Faliera’s knowingly breaking of the law when she sneaked out of her district to live in Davis Islands and hoped nobody would notice.

There are, I understand, three board races in contention next election. Citizens will want to hear about the individual board members' stand on this issue of abridging free speech by a public body.



Whatever your views on this issue, traditional or exotic, would you please ask the tax-paid board attorney to give the board members a legal opinion on this shutdown of access to blogs? Thank you.


I will put this email on my leedrurydecesars casting-roomcouch.blogspot. com blog. I understand it is one of the blogs that the board has blocked.



lee drury de cesare

Ms. Faliera:

That you tell another board member to quit is diagnostic of your character: it’s Swiss cheese.

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory would light up like a Christmas tree if you were the testing subject. You are not smart enough to demonstrate symptoms of pathology on the test—real pathology takes talent and imagination; but you would catapult into the upper quartile in the I-don’t-know-when-to-keep-my-mouth-shut part.

You, who just tried to sneak “under the radar” in moving into South Tampa when you should stay within your district to obey the law, should resign yourself from the disgrace of your discovered attempt to cheat and hope to get away with it. You have lost the right to tell anybody else how to behave. I bet you were the kind of kid who wrote the answers on your hand for a test and hoped the teacher wouldn’t catch you.

Is your behavior what students should use as a role model? Should you say, “Now kiddies, do like Board Member Jennifer does. Cheat on the test, and if you get caught by a member of the press, blubber, ‘Poor little me.” I am not responsible for my behavior, so give me a pass.”

That behavior does women a disservice and serves poor role model for your two daughters. What about saying, “I did it. I shot the sheriff. Clap on the handcuffs.” Women will never get respect until they take responsibility for themselves. “Poor little helpless me” is the out-of-date ditz model, not the modern grown-up woman model.

Such events as your failed “under the radar” attempted coup reveal character, Jennifer. They turn over the rock, and out scurry all those little deficiencies of soul that afflict a person. This under-the-radar attempt to cheat shows you don’t have the right stuff to be a community leader, especially on the school board. Your ethics corrupt the children and frighten the horses. Your conduct puts you outside the privilege of telling another board member how to behave.

Brandon is cheaper to live in than South Tampa. Why didn’t you find a place in your girls’ school district and move there? They didn’t want to move away from their school and friends to South Tampa. You did. You could have relocated to Plant City. That’s in your district, and its ethos is coincident with your hillbilly mindset: down on gays, down on sex education, sucking-up to whoever’s in charge.

Why everybody thinks that South Tampa is paradise escapes me. The people there are as flawed human beings as those elsewhere. Most of them who put on airs of being aristocrats are only a few generations away from share cropping. I’m from Georgia. In Georgia we know old families and we know parvenus. The latter fills South Tampa. Living in a South Tampa McMansion with a big vase of plastic flowers in the foyer does not elevate a person’s character—not when the person has demonstrated what that character is by trying to sneak past the state law that she can’t live in another district and serve that district on the school board. You will be the same cheater wherever you live, Jennifer. Geography does not solve a person’s lack of character. As Shakespeare says (everybody knows he lived in South Tampa): “Time hath, my lord, a wallet on its back in which it keeps alms for eternity.”

You have not been an ornament on the school board. If anybody should resign, you should. You say nothing intelligent. You propose nothing new and useful. You just rubberstamp Ms. Elia’s outrages and call that teamwork.

Get a job--or get two if needed--to support your girls. That’s your main purpose now. Your stupidity in excusing your husband from child support is exceeded only by your fatuous advice to Ms. Elia on her evaluation: “Get some rest.” I ask you this: Did you trade that privilege of no child support for your children’s father’s agreeing to suppress some data that would curtail your public career? Why did you agree to such a disadvantage for your children? One would think you know that divorce records are public information. But it’s well not to over-estimate your intelligence.

And Dr. Lamb, a word with you, sir: your saying that “it’s hard to build a team when one member’s not there” shows how obtuse you are. Is being a potted plant your idea of being a team player? The team the board member’s allegiance goes to is the public. A board member has a right and a duty to say what s/he thinks, to object, to propose, to animadvert. That’s why people elected him/her.

I’m sorry Ms. Griffin exited the room. She could have shown team spirit better by sticking her tongue out at Little-Ms.-Sneak-into-South-Tampa, shooting her a bird, and declaring, “Ok, Jennifer start the ball rolling by giving us one of your customary stupid remarks.”

I diagnose Jennifer’s telling Griffin to resign is the official kick-off of the team of five potted plants that now will pile on Griffin and hope to rattle her. She should stay cool and not let the potted-plant team deter her from the job taxpayers elected her to do. Challenge administration malpractice, long entrenched by a gutless board scared of its own shadow. A leader must have the strength of character to resist a bevy of potted plants that chorus complaints about her. Ask Napoleon. That’s how he became first the Little General, then the emperor of France.

Lee Drury De Cesare

From: "Lee De Cesare"

Subject: Olson's Boggled Mind

To: candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us, carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us, jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us, april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us, jennifer.falierao@sdhc.k12.fl.us, susanvaldes@sdhc.k12.fl.us, doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us
CC: letitiastein@sptimes.com, mbrown@tampatribune.com, "andrea brunais" , jhill@sptimes.com

"It boggles my mind," board member Candy Olson said. "A district this successful doesn't get that way without competent leadership." (SPTimes-Stein)

Ms. Olson, that it "boggles" your mind--and that it doesn't take much to "boggle" your mind one takes as a given--that the bottom mass of an organization can keep it going even when the top tier exists in a bubble of delusional self-congratulatory euphoria borne aloft by the circulation of gaseous compliments among its ranks says a good deal about your mental capacity.

Here's a management fact: a competent, dedicated mass of workers at the bottom can bear up dopey leadership at the top. This is a management fact in corporate America, and it is a given in all the school systems across the country to which administrations the academic weaklings flock to get bloated salaries for their academic-lite degrees at 3rd-rate institutions. Everybody who has been in education for six weeks confirms the truism that the smart students go into teaching, the dumb ones go into administration. Hillsborough County presents a primie facie case for this fact.

When the Board attracts shallow thinkers and when that Board joins its shallow thinking to that of an incestuous administration marked by in-house hiring of mediocrity or worse for top jobs, then if the system continues to function, it works because the bottom-level majority keeps it aloft.

lee drury de cesareDate: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:33:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Lee De Cesare"

Subject: Monkey Biz

To: candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us, carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us, jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us, april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us, jennifer.falierao@sdhc.k12.fl.us, susanvaldes@sdhc.k12.fl.us, doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us
CC: letitiastein@sptimes.com, mbrown@sptimes.com, jhill@sptimes.com

Ms. Kurdell: Your shadow performance on the school board amazes me. If you were any less active, you would be motionless.

Despite this board phlegm, do you suppose you could bestir yourself to do these chores? Put a comma after “2000” in obedience to the items-in-a-series comma rule. Your English classes teach the standard rule, so a board member should use it. Popular periodicals omit this comma. But if you do not want to be taken for an advocate of The Rolling Stones school of punctuation, use that last comma in items in a series.

Use “chair,” not “chairman.” Study after university study has shown that the generic male designation injures the psyches of little girls. That you have not stumbled onto this datum in all your cited community youth service suggests that you have an exemplary capacity for avoiding requisite reading to serve in those jobs.
Remove the commas from before “and…employer.” That is part of a compound restrictive appositive.
Remove the comma after “Club.” It splits compound object of the preposition “from.”

Ms. Candy Olson has decried the importance of punctuation, affirming with more buffoonery than sense that commas aren’t important, that “clarity” is. Ms. Olson doesn’t seem to understand that commas assist clarity. Most parents don’t share Ms. Olson’s contempt for correct punctuation because they know that, for their children to move from the Hillsborough County school system into a good college or university, their admission essay must demonstrate an ability to punctuate correctly with Ms. Olson’s despised commas.

The extension of Ms. Olson’s anti-comma logic suggests that the board rule that the English classes in the schools should cease because Ms. Olson believes they contribute to a lack of clarity in written communication. That move would get Hillsborough County the kind of national press attention that accompanied Ms. Storms's shutting gays out of the library. Banning the teaching of commas in the school system would deepen the county’s national reputation as a bastion of troglodytes, both social and educational.

I note you got your degree from Eckerd. During the time you acquired it, I recall my deceased friend attorney Clara Britton, a graduate of the law school, and I visited the dean of the law school to protest its putting a quota on women’s numbers for admission.

Can you see the connection between using a neutral “chair” instead of "chairman' and such restrictions on women? If not, tell me, and I will enlarge on how misogyny is of a piece and how linguistic discrimination reinforces all other discrimination against women and girls.

Lee Drury De Cesare

CAROL W. KURDELL

Carol W. Kurdell was elected to the School Board (District 7 – at-large) in 1992 and re-elected in 1996, 2000 and 2004. Mrs. Kurdell served as Chairman of the School Board in 1996-97 and 2002-03. She is one of seven members responsible for making policy decisions and overseeing a budget of $2.6 billion for the 8th largest school district in the nation, and the county’s largest employer, with 30,000 employees.

Mrs. Kurdell is a Tampa native, a product of Hillsborough County Public Schools, and she holds a BA degree in Human Development from Eckerd College.
She represents the School Board as president of the Healthy Start Coalition of Hillsborough County, Inc. Board of Directors for 2006-2007. She is also chair of the Hillsborough County Department of Children's Services Advisory Board. She founded initiatives such as “Project Graduation” and the Peninsula PTAs.

Mrs. Kurdell has been a school volunteer, president of the Hillsborough County PTA/PTSA, secretary of the Florida PTA, and chair of the Florida PTA parenting committee. She has received awards for education ambassador, dedication, and public relations, as well as the Mayor’s Brotherhood/Sisterhood Award for Outstanding Community Service. Her civic involvement has ranged from the League of Women Voters and Tampa Woman’s Club, to Project LINK (Local Impact on Neighborhood Kids) and the Tampa Urban League.

From: lee decesare
To: angiemanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com; april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us; bmaxwell@sptimes.com; bruce.bolton@sdhc.k12.fl.us; burnsfortheboard@gmail.com; candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us; carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us; doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2007 9:35:40 AM
Subject: school administration use of consultants

After reviewing the murky prose of the pricy consultant's transportation study, I wonder why the administration needed it. I have ideas about the answer to this question.

Information about keeping abreast of school-transportation needs and changes in that field fills the Internet. Why didn't the the school-district transportation people use those resources to keep abreast of their industry to make the needed changes over time themselves to avert the pile-up of problems that required hiring an expensive consultant?

This transportation brouhaha presents the typical morphology of this administration's mismanagement. The administration hires from the inside plethora of incompetents, usually for loyalty to the superintendent and history of going along to get along, not for their education, experience, and proven skills. The Board does not insist that its pledge of equal opportunity in hiring forces the advertising of these jobs to produce superior candidates from outside the inside pool of mediocrity and incompetence.

The inside administration talent is too poor to produce good candidates for any of the extant administrative posts with bloated salaries and lax oversight from the superintendent. So things rock along as they did in transportation area until problems overwhelm the system because these untrained, not-smart people don't know how to manage because they don't have the education, experience, or skills to do it.

Why in the world wasn't there an MBA in the top transportation administrative position instead of a former bus driver? A trained mind at the top would have prevented the need to manage by consultant as is now the case. If I read right, this blowzy, murky, unneeded TIP consultant study price was half a million dollars. That's criminal waste of taxpayer money. With incompetents in top positions, the school system's pattern must be to manage by consultants. That procedure policy.

My lord, it would be cheaper to turn the administration of the schools over to these consultants altogether whom the administration must now summon now to fix the mess-ups of the poorly equipped insider people who now hold down these administratrion posts at bloated salaries.

These top administrative jobs pay considerably more than private industry would pay for such deficient talent. If advertised, the jobs would attract top-notch candidates from outside the inside loop of mediocrity, favoritism, buddy hiring, and sycophancy to the superintendent. Advertising on the open market would draw in top-talent candidates with excellent education, experience, and management skills to manage instead of hiring consultants to tell these unequipped people how to do their jobs.

Why in the world doesn't the board exert some leadership in this area and insist on a new hiring system that pays for talent instead of bumbling insider mediocrity?

I don't know how Ms. Ethridge can keep a straight face when she goes into one of her threnodies about the excellence of the staff. She makes herself part of the problem with these encomiums to failed performance by calling them excellent, exemplary, wonderful, and tra-la-la.

What the school system needs is a board of members who themselves have the intelligence, education, and courage to change the hiring system for the good of the community that pays for it.

lee drury de cesare

Still trying to track the dirty-trick evidence of the hoax administration professional-standards charge against Bart Birdsall

Bart demonstrated against the Storms county ordinance to punish gays by denying them library benefits. The administration doesn't like that kind of publicity: it wants to distance itself from gays and has refused to have special seminars on bullying of gay children.

Elia obtained emails from the county that Bart had sent as a citizen from his home to Joe Stines, County Library honcho. Elia and Professional
Standards Linda Kipley tried to claim Birdsall was misusing the school email despite these private emails' having come from his home computer.

County administrator Bean pitched in because County Public Library administratro Stines must have been too gutless to answer Bart's emails critical of Stines's cooperation with the county's shutting out gays from the library display. Both Stines and Bart are gay.

At Tiger Bay, Ms. Elia told me and Bart that her technological knowledge was too deficient to read the "to" and "from" of the emails, so she had innocently sent them to Abu Gharib Kipley to investigate. That was a whopper, of course, of the sort that Elia thinks is high diplomacy. She's that obtuse.

We have never been able to extract an admission from the culprits of how Ms. Elia got the emails from Stines. We want to know who at the school administration asked for these emails; or alternatively, who at the county voluntarily sent them to Elia.

We have not been watching Forensic Files for nothing. We will get to the bottom of this dirty little terrorist tactic if it is the last thing we do.

Ms. Bean: I understand that you will be at Tiger Bay on the 17th. I can't make that day but want to ask you a question about your perforance of your job.

Bart Birdsall, a school employee, was referred to the Professional Standards division for his alleged misuse of the school emails. What he had done was email your county library head, Joe Stines, from his home, his right as a citizen.

You apparently sent the emails to Ms. Elia. Why did you do so since they came from Birdsall's home email and made no use of the school email? What person at the school administration asked you for the emails since I understand your official response to why you sent them was that somebody in the school administration asked for them. Was the person asking for the emails Ms. Elia? If not she, then who? If so, how did any school official know about the emails that originated from a citizen’s private email? Who told her or someone at the school administration: you or Mr. Stines?

I would appreciate this public information.

lee drury de cesare lee_decesare@Yahoo.lcom

c: All members of the school board

Bart Birdsall

lee drury de cesare

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: lee decesare
To: candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us
Cc: dorthea.edgecombe@sdhc.k12.fl.us; susan.valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us; april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us; jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us; caro.lkurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us; betty.reed.web@flhouse.com; amanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com; arthenia.joiner@flsenate.gov; betty.reed.web@flhouse.com; bmaxwell@sptimes.com; bruce.burnam@sdhc.k12.fl.us; bucher.susanweb@flhouse.gov; carlton@sptimes.com; CharlesCarranza@hccfl.edu; deggans@sptimes.com; EGedalius@tampatrib.com; howardtroxlewr@sptimes.com; janetweaver@tampatrib.com; jbakas@aol.com; jennifer.faliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us; jhill@sptimes.com; JosephCastellana@hccfl.edu; justice.charlie.web@flsenate.gov; letitiastein@sptimes.com; lisa.caminchos@sdhc.k12.fl.us; MarkTarrago@hccfl.edu; mbrown@tampatribune.com; msbornwriter@aol.com; pacojs1@aol.com; paul.tash@sptimes.com; pgailey@sptimes.com; professork00ky@yahoo.com; ptash@sptimes.com; Rebekah.Torres@myfloridahouse.gov; RosaRomero@hccfl.edu; VirginiaPerez@hccfl.edu; YoselliceRamirez@hccfl.edu; Alberto De La Rosa ; jim aulisio ; Letitia ; patrick
Sent: Tuesday, August 7, 2007 10:48:11 AM
Subject:

Ms. Olson, Your remarks at last board meeting at which you said that it would be good for the Wimauma immigrant Hispanic children--including that little five-year-old sitting on her mother's lap in the SPTimes picture--to walk 2 miles to and 2 miles back from school beside an Interstate with no sidewalks, through high grass with broken beer bottles, one crossing guard, and pedophiles in the palmettos appalled me. You said these four miles for the Hispanic immigrant children was efficacious since it spoke to the national problem of childhood obesity.

Such thinking is of such cruel perversity on your part that it begs the question of why in the world you are on the school board if your attitude toward poor immigrant children is so heartless.

Your lack of ethics when it comes to poor Hispanic immigrant children of farm workers offends me, madame.

What would be a better suggestion is that you and all the other school-board-podium fatties walk at least four miles a day yourselves. Then the board would not evade introducing the healthy-foods program for county children that Bart Birdsall is always advocating.

The reason you avoid that children obesity-prevention program is that it would catalyze blow-back for you on the board dais, most of whom need to shed avoirdupois. Your embonpoint is such, ma'am, that you are a prime walker candidate yourself. Leave off projecting your own weight problem onto helpless, bus-deprived Hispanic immigrant children whose diet is not the South Tampa rich-food regime that you chow down on.

Your district is right next to Wimauma. You could have walked over to the busing meeting and lost some weight. Only Valdes, and it isn't even her district, went. Jennifer Faliera, whose district it is didn't attend. If it had been her right-wing bigot base, you can bet she would have been there. Nor did any other of the board or administration show up until the damage-control meeting at the church after the Times publisheed the board's and administration's busing outrage.

I am enchanted with the SPTimes's focus on the busing-outrage that flushed out you anti-Hispanic, anti-poverty people on the board and administration out of your holes.

lee drury de cesare

Tom, this what comes of your not keeping your promise to produce that teacher-pamphlet instruction book to tell teachers what to do in situations such as this. Stand-up guys keep their word. Shame on you, counselor.

I am annoyed at this woman because Bart and I could not coax her to come to see you and outline her side of what was going on. I sent her half dozen emails. I don't know if that would have helped because your job is to make the most Jesuitical case you can invoke to protect the skulduggery of the school board and the administration. That's evil, Tom. Clarence Darrow is watching you, and he is not pleased.

If just one school board member had the guts to instruct you to investigate, then that would free you to do so without sacrificing your board sinecure. God forbid that one of that tribe should show some initiative instead of lapsing into potted-plant lock-down mode.

The petri dish for bureaucratic sadism that the school system provides is sicko. That the victims take it is the double sicko. It's a regular sado-masochism factory.

That people--especially those affected-- don't protest this kind of outrage floors me. I wonder if murder in a ROSSAC mop closet would not merit s.o.p cover-up with Ms. Elia's lapsing into her manic damage-control mode. I infer this woman just wanted to hunker down and hope that retirement would rescue her from the bureaucratic sadists. She guessed wrong. She should have kicked her way to retirement. The quiet ones are always the target of the sadists.

If you don't bestir yourself, you will go to hell and have to hang out with F. Lee Bailey and other legal blowhards who reside there. Don't expect any help from me.

Bart, take a day off from Pilates and call your congressperson for a hundred of those whistleblower forms. Nag until you get them. I will help you pass them out at quitting time at this teacher's school at teachers' quitting time. If just one fills it out, that will be all it takes. You can never tell where courage will flair up.

lee drury de cesare

----- Original Message ----
From: "Montolino@aol.com"
To: Marian.Lambeth@fldoe.org
Cc: tgonzalez@tsg-law.com; lee_decesare@yahoo.com; Jean.Clements@floridaea.org; Yvonne.Lyons@floridaea.org; Chuck.Kiker@floridaea.org; susan.valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us; april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us; linda.kipley@sdhc.k12.fl.us
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2007 11:03:31 PM
Subject: New issue

Dear Ms. Lambeth,

I believe that a teacher friend of mine is being railroaded by her administrator. Linda Kipley of Professional Standards had this teacher down at the Professional Standards office sorting pens and paperclips during the end of the 2005-2006 school year. When she found out that Lee DeCesare (cc'ed to this email) a local gadfly and I knew about this case I believe Kipley suddenly removed herself from the meeting she was going to attend between the principal and the teacher. She claimed to the teacher that she was never supposed to be at the meeting, but once a teacher is pulled out of her classroom and school and ends up at Professional Standards and then a meeting is arranged between said teacher and said administrator, shouldn't Linda Kipley be in that meeting acting as an objective witness? I don't know. You might know what the procedure is. Anyway, the teacher was returned to her school under the same exact principal, and she was told the principal had to take some sort of course as a result. A rocket scientist does not have to figure out what happened next. I believe he was angry.

It has come to the teacher currently suspended without pay. She had not been allowed to transfer despite trying to do (according to her) everything that the principal asked of her and continuing to get poor evaluations by him. She tells me that Kipley finally gave in and told her she could transfer from the school (an obvious solution to the volatile problem that Kipley allowed to continue), but then two days later after being given permission by Kipley to transfer the teacher found out from the teacher union that the school board was going to vote to suspend her at the board meeting that night. So as soon as she was given the opportunity to transfer and get out of the volatile situation she suddenly is up for suspension. This does not seem to be due process. They have suspended her, and the poor woman is distraught. She believes she will lose her career, her livelihood, and her reputation.

What is her recourse in this case? I am asking as a friend to the teacher. She is so upset she doesn't know what to do. Shouldn't Kipley have allowed her to transfer earlier so that this explosive situation could have been avoided? Shouldn't an investigation take place investigating how the teacher's team members felt about her job performance? Shouldn't teachers at her school be asked whether the principal actually gave the teacher advice and mentoring to bring herself up to his expectations? They could be questioned and promised no retaliation from the said principal.

Please advise and help a woman who is so close to retirement and needs her job. This situation has be heartbroken for the poor woman, and it reopened the wound concerning my own case that I was trying to forgive and forget and start fresh this year. Today after talking to the teacher about her case I felt like I might have a heart attack, b/c I have been told by a counselor that I have post traumatic stress from the district's email investigation of me. I believe teachers should be dealt with fairly and humanely and not like cattle who are prodded to fall in line like sheep. I had put a stop to my counseling sessions, but I may have to return now. There should be someone somewhere who will help this poor woman!

I am cc'ing Linda Kipley, since I mention her in this email. Maybe she can shed some light on this situation.

Sincerely,

Bart Birdsall

Bart Birdsall
2309 W. Bristol Ave.
Tampa, FL 33609
home (813) 258-8817
cell (813) 362-7937
Montolino@aol.com

---

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CTA myrmidons:

The only thing I have seen you do at board meetings is suck up to the administration and teachers bedamned. If you let this teacher get railroaded without union due process, you are despicable sellouts to the administration.

lee drury de cesare

----- Original Message ----
From: "Montolino@aol.com"
To: Jean.Clements@floridaea.org; Yvonne.Lyons@floridaea.org; Chuck.Kiker@floridaea.org; lee_decesare@yahoo.com; BJAYS2@aol.com
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2007 6:49:03 PM
Subject: Pat Barton again

Yvonnne, Chuck, and Jean,

I will have ZERO respect for you all and CTA, if you all do not do something about Pat Barton getting a fair hearing!

If you allow the district to win against a harmless teacher who has tried hard to do everything the principal has asked her to do, then you all shoudl RESIGN! You are not helping teachers, if you allow this to happen! I am OUTRAGED! I am totally OUTRAGED!!!

Bart

Bart Birdsall
2309 W. Bristol Ave.
Tampa, FL 33609
home (813) 258-8817
cell (813) 362-7937
Montolino@aol.com

---

Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.

Susan, Where were board members when this Wimauma meeting described below occurred with immigrant parents of children to be bused in a trial run of this cruel maneuver?

Where was the school superintendent? She must have been gadding about on the taxpayers’ dime attending one of those school-
bureaucracy Cracker Jack prize hoedowns that local, state, and national school bureaucracies give each other to paper over how badly they manage schools.

I believe Ms. Elia has received a half dozen School Bureaucracy Cracker Jack Nobel Laureates in the last three months alone.

But the big question is this: Where, Susan, were you when this meeting of immigrant Hispanic parents took place? This is your constituency. Didn’t you run as a Hispanic who would look out for Hispanic children?

Or have you decided to become an honorary Anglo potted plant to blend in with the rest of the board?

The Tribune via an Elia leak jumped on you for spending the most money of any on the board to get your certification. I thought you were right to get that credentialing.

But now I wonder if the syllabus featured any of the ethics seminars you needed such as “If You Run as a Hispanic, Remember That If You Get Elected”;or “If You Are the Sole Hispanic Board Member, Don’t Let the Administration Jump on the Immigrant Hispanic Children First as the Guinea Pigs for No Buses and Even Five-year-olds Walking Two Miles on No Sidewalks on Terrain by Roadsides Strewn with with Broken Beer Bottles with Semis Roaring by, Only One Crosswalk,
and Pedophiles Lurking in the Tall Grass.”

During Board Meetings I have attended, you have nattered prolix lamentations about the poor children, the poor children, the poor children, and yadada, yadada, yadada. Apparently, you are fond of poor children in the abstract as rhetorical props, but you don’t give a fig about them in the flesh and blood—especially if they are poor Hispanic children of immigrant parents.

The way Hispanics get treated makes even me angry, and I am a Southern Anglo. I just got back from NYC attending the Russian Kirov Ring Cycle at the Met. Walking to and from my hotel for each of the four operas, I saw Hispanics stocking the boutique grocery stores, hustling in the delis in all the low-end jobs, and, on my 12 midnight walk to the hotel, loading big garbage bags onto trucks.

These are the jobs native Americans won’t do. Any large city in this country would shut down without immigrant labor. Yet the anti-Hispanic bigots complain that Hispanics don’t speak English well when not one of those native-born bigots could write a literate paragraph in the English language to save his or her ignorant life and consents to pay a Hillsborough County superintendent $300,000 a year who can't punctuate and write above 7th-grade level.

If you cared about the Hispanic that you should stick up for, you would have been on the scene in that hot cafeteria to talk to those desperate immigrant parents. You would have jumped on Elia and her myrmidons and demanded an explanation of why the cruel experiment with no buses started with immigrant Hispanic children of farm workers, not with a more privileged neighborhood with parents who know how to make their resistance effective?

And did you agree to send Ms. Strickland, who talks like a bureaucratic android with her repeating of“best practices” and “state criteria?”

I think she’s the one that got dumped from the top administration transportation job but reassigned at the same bloated salary, higher than the guy recruited to be her boss.

That maneuver demonstrates the “Mess-up-move-up” history one board member had enough chutzpah to vote against in the crooked assignment of jobs of the brouhaha that accompanied the administrative transportation meltdown. You, to your discredit, did not join the no vote against thespoils-system of awarding administrative jobs.

Elia sent Strickland as the fall guy to avoid the bad publicity that savaging immigrant five-year-olds will get the much-decorated-Cracker-Jack superintendent. She didn't care whether Ms. Strickland could communicate with Hispanic parents or not.

If your cared a bit about the treatment of poor immigrant Hispanic children, you would have insisted that a Spanish-speaking spokesperson go to explain the policies. You would have needed only an ounce of courage and concern for those immigrant Hispanic children to demand that Elia send one who had not messed up in her job and who could not translate into plain terms why the
administration loaded the burden of this policy on the children of a vulnerable Hispanic farm-worker community.

Shame, Susan, shame. You have been on the board for two years and have done nothing to fulfill your campaign promises to represent Hispanics and to work to reform a corrupt administration supported by a politically cowardly, careerist board, which you have willingly become part of.

Now you have the effrontery to ask voters to elect you again after this feckless performance. You have, in short, rolled over and become a potted plant. You have not gone to bat for these Wimauma or any Hispanic children.

My little Southern hometown would say that you “have got above your raisin’.” There can be no worse insult in the rural community where I was born.

You have not protected the community your heritage demands should concern you. You have buckled to Elia’s coercion, have not let out a peep of dissent so as not to antagonize the other board potted plants, and have consented to become merely another cipher on the board.

Scampering about the country racking up points for board certification is beside the point with such a record of collusion with what’s wrong with the administration of the schools. Certification is a band aid on your callous, feckless performance as a board member.

That is a defection indeed from what you promised you intended to do when you ran for this post. You have become just another politician who makes and breaks promises to get into the incumbency rut and never does a thing afterwards to justify your election.

What a letdown you are.

But worst of all is the abandonment of the vulnerable community of immigrant Hispanic children whom you have betrayed. That ranks a major dishonor on your record in my book.

lee drury de cesare

From St. Petersburg Times

PARENTS SAY 2 MILES IS A DANGEROUS TREK

[SOUTH PINELLAS Edition]

St. Petersburg Times - St. Petersburg, Fla.

Author:	SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
Date:	Jul 22, 2007
Start Page:	4.B
Section:	LOCAL/REGIONAL (LCR)
Text Word Count:	738

Document Text

About 200 pupils will have to walk that far in an area not designed for pedestrians.

The cafeteria, small and hot, was packed with 100 parents and their children squirming on small seats.

The mothers and fathers - some pushing Dora the Explorer strollers, others freshly changed from work clothes - waited patiently for the school district officials to speak.

Children living within 2 miles of Wimauma Elementary School will no longer have bus service when school starts Aug. 20, Karen Strickland, a bus system manager, told the crowd.

For many, Thursday night's meeting was the first they heard about changing school bus stops.

Strickland described a financial crunch, using words like "best practices" and "state criteria." Grim-faced parents had different issues. Sexual predators along the routes to school. Speeding trucks. Early work hours that conflict with school times. The change affects about 200 children who will now have to walk to school, up from 30 last year, according to school officials. The district deleted 17 bus stops in Wimauma as part of a pilot project for southeastern Hillsborough County that will expand to the rest of the county next school year.

Magnet schools, school choice and a shortage of bus drivers are behind the cuts, Strickland said. The state doesn't reimburse the county for transporting children who live within 2 miles of a school. State standards allow students to walk up to 2 miles to school.

How, parents asked, could school officials expect small children to walk 2 miles in a rural town with few to no sidewalks, across a highway with trucks hauling lumber and produce?

Parents grew agitated when district officials repeated answers.

"Why are we paying taxes? For this?" yelled Felipe Orenday, the father of a 7-year-old boy.

In a town where parents leave for the fields and other jobs by sunrise, children walk straight from the house to the corner bus stop. In the afternoon, many students take the bus to Bethune Park, where parents pick them up after work. That bus stop will be cut.

"There are a lot of [stray] dogs in Wimauma that are going to bite these children, a lot of bad people looking for children," said Juanita Ortiz, mother of girls ages 10 and 8.

The school opens its doors at 7:30 a.m., but parents said early work hours mean they won't be able to drive their children to school. Wimauma's roadsides are overgrown, their shoulders often strewn with broken beer bottles, they said. Cars race through the side streets, and homeless or unemployed men aimlessly roam the neighborhood in the afternoon.

Twenty-two sex offenders -including four sexual predators - live within 5 miles of Wimauma Elementary School, according to a state law enforcement Web site.

Strickland said the district transportation department can't fix law enforcement and community problems. State Road 674 isn't considered hazardous under state guidelines, she said, and the lack of sidewalks isn't enough to warrant busing as long as shoulders and rights of way exist.

Sheriff's Maj. John Marsicano attended the meeting and told parents he would try to get a second crossing guard for children along State Road 674.

Parents talked of starting a petition, but district officials told them they aren't singling out Wimauma. Families throughout the county will go through similar changes within the next two years.

Wimauma Elementary principal Roy Moral said his families face unique problems. He spent much of Friday trying to find solutions to the busing crisis.

"Many of our parents, because either they are blue collar or migrant farm workers, they have very limited options," he said. "During season they have to be out there at 6 a.m. And if they aren't working in the local area they are being driven down to Myakka City."

The area offers limited day care options, even if the parents could afford them, he said.

"This is not a suburban area. This is a rural area," he said.

Moral is considering opening the school earlier, either 6 a.m. or 6:30 a.m., so parents have a safe place to drop off the children before they leave for work.

Saundra Amrhein can be reached at (813) 661-2441 or amrhein@sptimes.com.

My Burnt Fort family's homecoming at the family cemtery; my aunts are 96 and 84.

School Board Institutional Memory Flimflam

“Institutional memory” ranks one of those gaseous terms that marginally educated people seize upon. They don’t know what it means but think it makes them sound intelligent to use it.

So on May 13^th, when we heard Ms. Edgecombe and Ms. Elia invoke “institutional memory” as if it clinched their right to continue the school system’s malignant hiring patterns, they thought they sounded erudite and irrefutable.

Wrong.

They showed that they didn’t grasp the simple meaning behind the bloated mouthful that has taken a malignant hold on their minds.

All “institutional memory” means is the history of an institution: its policies and practices since its beginning.

Board member Griffin, in criticizing transportation hiring practices, said the school board should change its job culture of “anybody who messes up, moves up.” Culture, of course, is part of the institutional memory or history of the schools.

When Griffin suggested changing bad hiring practices, Edgecombe and Elia jumped in with their mantra of institutional memory.

In effect, Edgecombe and Elia chorused, “Let’s go on with institutional memory. We like institutional memory’s bad hiring practices because so far the public hasn’t caught on to them. The clincher is that institutional memory has served to keep us in power. Hoorah for institutional memory.”

Boiled down, here stand institutional memory’s salient hiring features:

Ø Hire from within;

Ø Hire dumb if loyal;

Ø Hire incompetent;

Ø Cite “institutional memory” to justify the dumb-loyal-incompetent hires;

Ø When they fail, demote the dumb, incompetent denizens who caused the meltdown to their next level of Peter-principle incompetence to give them a chance mess up there too;

Ø Download a ton of taxpayer money as salary on these incompetents wherever they are;

Ø Rock on, racking up institutional memory until another meltdown occurs;

Ø Never learn by failure;

Ø Repeat the process until the last syllable of recorded time.

Griffin stands on the right side of history. Yet not one other board member joined her in voting against the corrupt culture of institutional memory.

Sooner or later, the public will catch on to board-ROSSAC official flimflam of institutional memory in hiring.

If enough people squawk, the abuses that make up the school system’s bad hiring patterns will give way to better practices. Out will go bad inside hiring; in will come good outside-competition hiring.

School board members will pull back from the malignant hiring policies that constitute the schools’ institutional-employment memory and sponsor better ones to maintain their incumbency.

Keeping their jobs is the Number One feature of board members’ institutional memory.

According to La Gaceta, board member Griffin stepped up in the transportation meltdown. I would love to know if it were she who insisted on an outside hire for the top job from which Elia reluctantly evicted the resident incompetent.

Elia claimed credit for the outside hire, of course, just as she claims credit for everything she thinks will give her good press. But I bet she fought it since Mr. Outsider wasn’t inside the system, so La Elia couldn’t be sure of his loyalty to her and institutional memory.

After all, inside hiring and ignoring outside talent defines how Elia got her own job.

Left to her own devices and guided by institutional memory’s malignant role, Elia would have replaced the incompetent top transportation minion with another of Elia’s incompetent, dumb inside sycophants or buddies. She might also have called in somebody from the school-wide snitch system that reports any whiff of opposition to ROSSAC institutio0nal-memory hegemony.

These unfortunates go to the Professional Standards Abu Ghraib for savaging and even firing.

Anyone who produces even a murmur against the holy ghost of ROSSAC stands in danger of firing according to the administrative dismissal liturgy of institutional memory.

After Elia’s rewarding a sycophant, a buddy, or a snitch with the top transportation job, institutional memory would roll on until the inevitable next mess up.

That is the way institutional-memory hiring functions in the school system: hire from within, never tap into outside talent, move the incompetent down a notch when he or she fails, and give nobody outside the school bubble a chance to apply for the job. Initiate a new round of bloated salaries at the taxpayers’ expense and sit back and ride the slo-mo train of institutional memory until the next breakdown. Then repeat the routine.

What is the cure for institutional–memory board addicts?

The voting booth, of course. Kick the institutional-memory bums off the board and bring in new people not addicted to the failed protocol of institutional-memory hiring that cheats taxpayers, students, and teachers of competent administrators. Elections can produce board members dedicated to the taxpayers’ wellbeing, not to that of Ms. Elia and her hangers-on.

Any Lamb or Valdes opponent in the next election cycle who explains to voters the Valdes-Lamb support of the institutional-memory hiring scam will be new board member.

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