Mr. Heggarty: This is the third request for the names and addresses of the people at the recent Plant High meeting with Ms. Elia. This is public information. You must send it to me or send an explanation of why it is not public information.

I would also like a copy of the notes that accompanied the evaluation of Ms. Elia by the School Board. This is also public information.

lee drury de cesare
c: Board Members
School Attorney

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/09/23/hub_officials_confirm_they_have_new_school_chief/



By Tracy Jan and Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff | September 23, 2006

Ms. Jan and Maria:

I see you finally got the new superintendent.You did a good job of summarizing the main points of the choice. I was interested that he got a scholarship to Brandeis. Do you know what his major was? Did he file his Ph.D. thesis with the committee?

I live in the Tampa Bay Area. We have a forlorn record of undistinguished superintendents. There is an incestuous process of a scam national search with the local in-house candidate inevitably chosen. These people are thuddingly mediocre. I reviewed the finalists' resumes, and our new superintendent was the least qualified of the bunch.

She is marginally literate, groomed by the in-house power-greedy cabal for the job so that they can keep power and continue bloating their salaries. Teachers start at $32,000.

The School Board is either enmeshed in the cabal or suckers for the administration flattery and cajoling. In any event, the School Board played along with the new mediocrity, Ms. MaryEllen Elia.

No outside citizen committee was involved in this important decision. The new superintendent was the schools building supervisor and presided over a real-estate scam that cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars, overbuilt classrooms, and instituted a boundary change that tore up a community called Westchase to cover up this overbuilding, and fudged the enrollment figures for the Hillsborough County Commission.to extract more money for her to squander The School Board considered that just a swell record, worthy of a ten percent raise. The new superintendent is the 3rd highest paid in the country although she can't punctuate.If she could punctuate, she would get her own nuclear deterrent. The Board just gave her another $12,500 raise, which brings her up to $262,500, while the bus drivers get less than $10,000, have a fleet of broken-down buses to transport the kids in, and not enough mechanics to fix them.

I attach my commentary on our superintendent selection. I always cite Massachusetts invidiously because it is the Number One school system in the country. Florida is 26 and has the superintendents to back up that pitiful place.

Where can I get a sample of Dr. Rivera's writing? Also, what about his thesis and his major areas of concentration in school? I have tried to emphasize the need for the candidates' thesis to review in the selection process, citing Dr. Johnson's dictum, "Let me hear the man speak so that I may know his mind." The School Board members don't see the connection between a candidate's ability to write and the ability to run an outfit that is supposed to graduate literate students. They don't know who Dr. Johnson is and don't care. We are hip deep in know-nothings down here in the education badlands of Florida.

I think y'all had one superintendent who had to take the literacy test three times with coaching in between to pass it because the hiring committee had jumped the gun and signed him up before it got his literacy-test results. Then it was stuck with him and had to provide him grammar tutors until he managed to squeak through the test on the 3rd try. I don't think any of our superintendents in either Hillsborough or Pinellas counties would have passed the test, and even Mississippi wouldn't hire them.



lee drury de cesare

http://www.Grammargrinch.blogspot.com

Illiteracy at the Hillsborough County School Board

Dear La Letitia Steins, Reporter St. Pete Times:

I saw you at your post in the back of the Plant cafeteria scribbling down on your reporter pad all the at-the-mike lucubrations of South Tampa parents who turned up to expatiate to Le Elia on her Grand Provincial Tour. Elia’s dwarfs were as thick as hops.

Poor Dr. Otero scampered around, following up Elia’s imperial motions to him to follow up on some parental plaint at the mike. Public Relations Steve Hegarty looked wan. He’s been staying up nights plumbing his grammar primer since my blitzkrieg attack on his literacy.

Late as usual, Dr. James Hamilton lumbered in. Or maybe the creature was Frankenstein: there were suspicious electrical burn marks around his hairline from lightening hook ups. What remains a mystery is how this primitive specimen, ignorant of the difference between “you’re” and “your,” acted Romeo to an ambitions kindergarten K12 Mata Hari.

That all the dwarves are men and that the head dwarf is a woman tickled my feminist heart. It’s too bad the first woman superintendent is not smart or beautiful or witty. But neither were white male superintendents.

If men get to be obtuse, homely, and verbally flatfooted, those privileges should extend to women. Ms. Elia represents an egalitarian advance because she possesses all those attributes the x-chromosome flavor when she stood before the microphone, addressing parents despite her resume’s revealing she cheated her way into the job, flubbed real-estate crime when she headed the building department, covered up overbuilding classrooms, fudged enrollment numbers to baffle the County Commission quidnuncs into giving her more money to misuse, practiced grungy ethics including lying outright when backed into a corner.

The microphone choreograph showed that Tampa’s South Tampa soi-disant aristocrats’ sense of entitlement cows Elia into permanent obeisance.

The words “boundary change” wafted from somewhere in the feudal hall. Elia lunged to the mike to say there would be no boundary changes in South Tampa.

One guesses not.

If the School Board and La Elia tried any boundary-change flimflam on South Tampa such as it got away with the peons in Westchase, South Tampa piney-woods aristocrats would assemble a posse, erect a guillotine in gated Culbreath Bayou, and lop off administrative and Board heads, starting with Elia’s.

My favorite tableau starred a mother of four with more effrontery than grooming. South Tampa matrons think it their right to appear in public in slovenly dishabille. This quadripara captured the mike with blowsy confidence and held forth for a coon’s age about how children should not have to comply with the school list of projects to fulfill their community-service requirement by doing such things as nursing-home duty when they could engage in church activities-- Jesus approved, to be sure—instead.

Not sure that she had gotten her message across in emphatic enough fashion, this intrepid bore repeated it with embellishments, vagaries, and multiple asides.

Elia listened with rapt attention to this parental logorrhea because it came from a South Tampa denizen. The superintendent’s behavior differed markedly from that she displayed when she looked on with bored hostility when the desperate parents of the Westchase boundary uprising pleaded for their children at the gimcrack Board meeting set up to seal the outrage with the Board’s official rubberstamp.

Starchy South Tampa matron chair Carol Bricklemeyer gaveled the pleading parents to silence after two minutes. She didn’t scruple to shut a parent up mid-sob about the wrenching of a thousand of their weeping offspring from their home schools to a new one. Bricklemeyer is a South Tampa paragon who took respite from bandage-rolling at the Junior League for a spin on the School Board but is now returning to her native South Tampa society-matron trivial pursuits, thank God for the children’s sake.

When our four children went to Grady, Coleman, and Plant, the superintendent of schools was a dumb white man with inferior intellectual and academic credentials. During those days, examining the administration’s grammar and punctuation had not occurred to me. I tried to reason. Reason is not a winning tactic with the school thugs.

Such local specimens as disgrace the academic world can always find a home in the superintendent’s chair in Hillsborough County. So that the same standards apply to women is only fair. I have worked forty-five years in the Women’s Movement to see an illiterate woman replace illiterate men as superintendent of schools.

Elia is the first x-chromosome equivalent of the dumb white guy heretofore filling superintendent chair. What a triumph for women’s rights: just the sort of thing I have always striven for, to be sure.

The superintendent has lost weight too—40 pounds, she announced with elegant frankness because, she told a reporter, she had to appear on TV. She did not cite as reason that she wanted to be a role model for county students caught in the national epidemic of childhood obesity.

Gravity has done its damage, alas: the poor woman’s cheeks have descended to form another set of jowls.

I am afraid this fleshly descent calls for plastic surgery. No problem: The Board will sign off on that. A woman making a mere $262,500 with her recent raise can’t afford plastic surgery. The Board can finance the face-saving magic for La Elia from petty cash, and chump taxpayers will be none the wiser.

I think Raymond O. Shelton, for whom the ROSAC building was named—reined superintendent during my children’s k12 years of school if my memory serves right. Shelton was the apotheosis of all that is amiss in Hillsborough County superintendents: ugly as a toad and dumb as a stump. Before Dr. Lennard displaced him, Dr. Shelton was the most profoundly mediocre man in Hillsborough County.

But then-Board-member Cile Essrig thought he was the knight of k12 dering do. She got mad for my saying that but now speaks to me again because she forgot what I said.

I lobbied for Greek and Latin in the schools while Shelton’s piney-woods idea of a bump-up in education was to put all the children in uniforms. Those South Tampa kids, obsessed with designer jeans, would have rioted before they swapped their couture duds for another kind of uniform. Their parents would have backed them up by raising a ruckus at PTA and menacing downtown administrators until they ran up the white flag over ROSAC and declared unconditional surrender.

South Tampa parents treat school administration like the hired help, and the administration sucks up to power very nicely, thank you.

I recall one illustrative incident of many while my family lived in South Tampa. Lindsay Germany, a daughter of Judge Germany—the guy whose name decorates the big library downtown--didn’t make Plant’s cheerleading squad.

So both the judge and his wife descended on the Plant principal, and she (I think it was Beth Shields then, but I was never sure, not ever attending a PTA meeting because of my credo that doing so would make me dumb) expanded the cheerleading squad to include Lindsay to propitiate the judge and his consort.

How that is for parental inculcation of fair play coming from the bench with the Plant principal’s endorsing the process with eager sycophancy?

This incident mirrors what I call academic and snob realpolitik. These South Tampa offspring of distorted privilege lead the Bay Area now, so the beat goes on.

Speaking of Mrs. Germany, she once turned up at our back door demanding that one of our daughters—Margie, I think—return a pair of shoes that Lindsey had lent her. I would no more go to the house of one of my children’s friends to retrieve a pair of shoes from a child than I would strip off and walk down Kennedy naked.

But South Tampa mothers live lives of such tremendous trifles that the back-door demand for a child’s tardy shoes represents a major issue to them—that and checking out Lily Rubin’s (now defunct) to see which of them a Republican husband of the military-industrial complex has dumped for a younger model.

Having defected from Gainesville in their sophomore year to marry a South Tampa scion, these women never got enough education to do anything but clerk in Lily Rubin’s yet felt entitled to sneer at women who held jobs. I did. I taught English. They whispered slanders at Palma Ceia Country Club lunches of us working women’s neglecting our children when they showed enough maternal care to storm the principal’s offices to demand a place for their offspring on the cheerleading squad. It serves these dopey air heads right to end up on alimony.

When my time came at the mike, I had already passed out the attached handouts’ labeling Ms. Elia and Dr. Hamilton illiterate. This was a time to abandon euphemism. I had only 50 handouts; I could have used 200. But I sewed the seed of knowledge, and its spread will fester relentlessly. This is how revolutions occur: one handout at a time.

Donning my professorial persona, I lectured on how students came into my classroom from surrounding schools not able to spell, punctuate, handle grammar, or even write a sentence much less a paragraph or essay. I said they were bright but illiterate. I said I had tracked the reason for student illiteracy to administrative illiteracy and referred to Elia’s and Hamilton’s grammar-punctuation solecisms in my handout and cited page numbers for the errors from the Prentice-Hall system-chosen text book.

I summarized by asking Elia how she justified milking $262,500 from the taxpayers a year when she herself couldn’t handle the grammar-and-punctuation expertise that the county schools demanded of its graduates.

La Elia flunked the test. She said, “Thank you for coming” and turned to the next questioner.

Applause rang out for Ms. Elia’s evasion. The crowd applauded superintendent illiteracy. But I know the context of that applause.

A young father of four intensely involved in his children’s education had said at the mike that his children brought home papers with A’s on them that had major errors the teacher did not mark with a red pen. He said he couldn’t understand how his children could learn anything if the teacher didn’t mark the papers. He said he wanted those fearsome, old-school teachers who were hardliners on the knowledge his children should acquire in the classroom.

Elia talked around the question, of course.

I went up to him at meeting’s close and told him that he should tell his children’s teachers that he wanted them to spend the time grading their children’s papers and red-inking errors. That’s what good teachers do. He said he would.

Insiders of education can tell you that there has grown the practice of teachers’ not spending time to review student papers. They throw them in the waste basket or mark them with an A. Grading papers—especially student writing—is hard, time-consuming work. I spent my weekends for twenty-eight years grading freshman English essays. Students demonstrated disbelief even trauma when they got back their first set of papers in my classes. Red marks were a new experience for them.

Many of the people in the room— more than half school personnel in some administrative job--had escaped from low-paid teacher positions to higher-paid administrative ones. These were the source of applause and even sports-arena hoots for Elia’s illiteracy.

These supporters of illiteracy didn’t want to rock the boat of the practice of shortchanging students by not coming down on the grammar and punctuation errors in their papers. Doing that duty was work. In fact, I venture that more than half of these former teachers may not have learned grammar punctuation themselves and couldn’t grade errors if they had to because they didn’t know enough to do so.

They didn’t want some trouble-making former professor to re-institute literacy requirements for them and make them do the hard work of grading student papers and red-inking errors.

Parents came up to me after the meeting and said they approved of my stressing literacy. One said she had been an English major and corrected people’s pronouns all the time. They wanted their children to learn to write the English language literately. What conscientious parent wouldn’t? They all knew that literacy is the vector of civilization, and they wanted their children to be part of that civilization if for no other reason that literacy meant their children had a chance to get into Harvard or Yale or Princeton.

One woman at the mike cheered me up. She belonged to a committee that was testing a math program that presented an alternate methodology of teaching the children math. Her 6th-grade son had not known how to show the process by which he arrived at a math answer, although he had aced FCAT.

This woman had tried unsuccessfully to get a meeting with Elia several times to discuss the evaluation of a professional evaluation for the program and possible adoption. Elia had not responded. I know this routine. If the administration or Board doesn’t want to hear anything that challenges status quo, they ignore you. The people who rule the roost at ROSAC are not those with inquiring minds thirsty for knowledge.

This cracker-jack smart woman had worked for IBM for eight and half years and knew her subject cold. Elia didn’t know diddly. The woman walked all over the puzzled superintendent.

If Candy Olson, potted-planted board member for this district, concerns herself with student welfare, she will ask Elia for this woman’s name and contact her. Such parents are the kind whose parental involvement the schools need—not the non-challenging kind that the Board and administration welcome.

I walked out with a fellow who had gotten up to complain about the kindergarten travails of one of his children. He looked old enough to be a grandpa and may have been one of those South Tampa men who had turned in his old wife for a new one and produced a new passel of kindergarten consumers.

He hadn’t put up with Elia’s piffle at the mike. He spat out, “You didn’t answer my question!” and turned on his heel to stalk away in disgust.

I said to him, “I admired your emphatic exit from the mike.”

He rumbled, “She didn’t answer my question and didn’t know the answer. This is the usual runaround. I am going to stay on them, and you do too. She didn’t answer your question either.”

One of my youngest child Margie’s classmates came up to greet me before I left. She said Margie had always been fun in school. She is still fun and the mother of two children in the South Tampa schools.

I may have to join the Plant PTA as a granny-for-literacy member to make up for my defection when my children were in school. My daughter Margie, mother of one Plant student now, soon to be two, will resist this move. She was glad I didn’t attend PTA when she was at Plant. She was afraid I would rise and bring up embarrassing questions.

Embarrassing questions are what the academic-manqué thugs who run the school system now need: the first question's being why taxpayers should subsidize their illiteracy with bloated salaries that the Hillsborough County School Board rubberstamps.

Ms. Leticia, thank you for your attention. To reward it, I will advise you to read A. J. Liebling (start with The Earl of Louisiana) and H. L. Mencken, the only two newspaper writers with admirable style. And Menken was a scholar of American English.

I will close as people did during the 19th century. I have been rereading Trollope’s novels from that time. Trollope is magic. He vies with Dickens as being my favorite 19th-century novelist.

Believe me to be,
Dear Miss,
With much sincerity,
Yours truly,
Lee Drury De Cesare

PS: This email goes to Mr. Hegarty, the spin doctor for the school rip-off cartel:

Mr. Hegarty:

This is a public-information request.
I noted a young woman taking names at a table in the Plant cafeteria for Ms. Elia’s appearance.

I would like a list of those names and addresses. I would stress especially the names of the parents who appeared at the microphones to ask questions.

Please don’t go through your Jesuitical routine of pondering the legality of releasing those names. It was a public forum; they spoke publicly. None discussed topics that impinged on national security.

Lee Drury De Cesare

Handout Passed Out at Plant Elia Visit

Taxpayer Support of Administration Illiteracy

Our four children attended Grady, Coleman, and Plant. Two grandchildren now move through the same schools. I view the school system through knowledge I gained as a parent and teacher: twenty-eight years a professor of English at Hillsborough Community College.

Since 6th-cetury Greece, the basis of all education has been language. Illiterate academics are uneducated people no matter how many degrees they append to their names. The online diploma mills will sell anybody a degree though he be completely unable to write. All enterprises feed off a person’s ability to use language correctly and well. Language facility should thus star in k12 education as it does in education anywhere.

At HCC, Hillsborough County students entering my freshman-English classes showed scant skills in English. Some who had made A’s in high school suffered ignorance of basic grammar and punctuation. Many had difficulty writing a basic declarative sentence much less a paragraph or essay.

These deficiencies meant that I perforce taught remedial English to bring ill-prepared students to the point at which I could then lecture on Shakespeare and Yeats to assign essays.

These mostly bright students did not lack imagination. However, although they were verbally fluent, they lacked ability to write literately.

Each semester for twenty-eight years, I marveled at this situation. When I retired, I decided to track the culprits responsible for illiteracy among my entering students. I find hard crediting concern over immigrants’ not speaking English from Americans who can’t write their own language and students’ entering college with feeble grammar, punctuation, and writing ability.

The usual suspects for the illiteracy problem are administration deadwood that runs schools and Boards that rubberstamp administrative mediocrity and incompetence. Setting standards for excellence in language comes from the top. Superintendent Elia does not stress literacy because she does not model literacy herself. The Board chose her and tolerates her marginal literacy.

This situation echoes the administration’s and the Board’s not having a school-wide health-and-weight program for students. Observing a Board meeting shows that obesity represents a problem for most administration and Board members; they decline to call attention to their own failing by starting a student health program. Hence, they engage in studied indifference to the epidemic of childhood obesity that will compromise children’s health as adults.

In the same way, the Board abets students’ graduating without ability to write by making such writing-challenged mediocrities as Ms. Elia superintendent. She avoids stressing writing excellence because doing so would call attention to her own deficiency. This situation means students will not enter college or the work force with the necessary writing ability because their k12 years did not stress it.

The administrators and Board have counted on the ignorant docility of parents’ and taxpayers’ not caring that the schools they pay taxes to support graduate students without ability to write literate English when they step into a college class or into an office job. If only a few parents complained loudly and often about the problem, the situation would change because School Board members are politicians who want to be re-elected.

Ms. Elia’s own English skills are pitiful. The comma baffles her. It also defeats Elia’s in-house ghost writer, Mr. Hegarty. He’s the over-paid word-doctor manqué who’s supposed to rescue La Elia’s clumsy, ill-punctuated essays, which feature not only grammar-punctuation bloopers but which also act repositories of banal diction and plethora of pussyfooting passive verbs.

I requested examination copies of the school English textbooks from the Board and Administration. Nobody answered me. No one gave me even the courtesy of a return email with the name of the departmental English text. This lack of response represents administration and Board habitual arrogant behavior to taxpayers who underwrite schools. When Board members run for office, they solicit your input; elected, Board members won’t deign to recognize a citizen’s existence.

Getting the English textbook name from a teacher, I bought the Prentice Hall Writing and Grammar, the department choice. It’s a big, flossy, overwritten book that costs taxpayers a bundle. Better, smaller, less expensive books exist. But when tax dollars are available to squander, Boards and administrations do so with a hey nonny nonny.

I cite page numbers from Prentice Hall in the following corrections:

Ms. Elia’s citations come from the Web page for the world to see. And these far from exhaust her Web errors. They represent samples only:

This first Web error I discovered (below) I complained about three times--to Elia once, to Board Member Ethridge twice. Since Ms. Ethridge was a former English teacher, I expected her to care about illiteracy on the schools’ Web page. I was wrong. I got no response from Ethridge until I wrote about the problem of the administration’s and graduates’ illiteracy to a state business organization—the sort that complains about not getting high school workers who can write. I sent the School Board a copy.

That ploy did the trick. The Board fosters illiteracy, but its members don’t want the world to know this fact. Only then did Ms. Ethridge rustle up somebody to correct the errors online. La Elia was indifferent to her online illiteracy. Power corrupts. It corrupts punctuation especially from a superintendent who believes she is beyond correction.

• Mary Ellen is married to Albert Elia and has two children, a son [sic] Albert [sic] and a daughter [sic] Tara.

Commas should enclose “Albert” and “Tara” as nonrestrictive appositives since they are sole son and daughter according to the biography. Prentice Hall 701

• “Keep in mind, [sic] that it will take increased commitments….”

The comma following “mind” is redundant: It cuts off the adjectival clause “that…” from the word it modifies, “mind.” Prentice Hall 707

• For the first time, [sic] at the end of the school year…”

The comma is redundant: it separates two introductory prepositional phrases. The comma correctly goes after the second one, ending in “year.” Prentice Hall 707

• “…to support the students, teachers [sic] staff…”

Ms. Elia does not follow the Standard-English item-in-series comma rule. Schools teach Standard English, not some lesser standard used in the commercial world. Prentice Hall 696

• “I can’t stress enough parental involvement in their [sic] children’s education….”

Vague pronoun-reference problem: “Their” has no antecedent. It cannot refer back to “parental,” the adjective. Prentice Hall 600

• “…the School Board is doing all they [sic] can…”

Pronoun agreement: A school board is an “it,” not a “they.” Prentice Hall 601

•  “While we may not be certain what the future holds or what the total impact will be [sic] we must be prepared…”

An introductory adverbial clause requires a comma after it. Prentice Hall 699

• “That includes the high-growth districts, [sic] like Hillsborough, who [sic] …”

• “Like Hillsborough” is a restrictive adjectival prepositional phrase: no commas. Prentice Hall 701

Superintendent illiteracy is a malignant tradition in Hillsborough County. For Auld Lang Syne, let’s include one of Dr. Earl the Pearl’s grammar felonies to remind us that superintendent illiteracy is a bona fide occupational qualification in this County:

• “With me this morning is [sic] Dr. Howard Sinsley, Superintendent of Pinellas County Schools, John Long, and Superintendent of Pasco County Schools….”

Dr. Lennard has committed a grammar felony: a subject-verb agreement error. “Is” should be “are” to agree with the compound subject. This error costs five points in a freshman essay.

Dr. Lennard’s errors cost him nothing. Emerging victor from vo tech as the pre-arranged insider job shoo-in against the pre-condemned $30,000 “nation-wide” search candidates, Earl the Pearl abused grammar and punctuation to his heart’s content during his tenure. At retirement time, the Board loaded up a Dempsey dumpster of golden-parachute goodies for him. He could now be on the Riviera on taxpayer tab if only he could speak French—or even English.

Ms. Olson has sat like a potted plant for twelve years and will sit four more since she won re-election. During that tenure, she has not departed from the administration’s orders. She is supposed to be the administration’s boss, but she has allowed the administration to act her boss. She has not mentioned the superintendents’ illiteracy. Perhaps a look at Olson’s own writing in her online biography shows why she has maintained forbearance for superintendents’ abuse of commas:

• Candy Olson has served on the Hillsborough County School Board since 1994, [sic] and has chaired the board twice.

The comma splits a compound verb. Prentice Hall 707

Here follows a Dogpatch subset of grammar solecisms from Dr. James Hamilton, the putative brains behind Dr. Lennard and Ms. Elia. Dr. Hamilton acts in-house k12 macho man who beats his chest whilst helping young kindergarten teachers skip over troublesome hurdles of relevant education and experience so that one can jump from the tots to a $120,000 administration job in Tallahassee without doing any work except perhaps batting her eyelashes, simpering, and being agreeable to K12 knights errant—very errant.

Dr. Hamilton has the dubious reputation of also acting the Rasputin who guided Dr. Earl the Pearl Lennard and Ms. Elia onto Hillsborough County superintendent perch by his masterful sub rosa manipulation of the politics of insider superintendent appointment. Dr. Hamilton’s writing shows that in addition to his illiteracy Dr. Hamilton suffers from delusions that he is Dr. Kirk from the Starship Enterprise.

• [sic]Cap’in [sic] I think that you’re [sic] molecules are spread across the universe, [sic]‘cause the transporter is jammed!

Dr. Hamilton, although Super-Duper Dude, does not know quotation-marks protocol. Prentice Hall 722 “Cap’in” should be “Cap’n.” Prentice Hall has no discussion of elision of letters, so you are just going to have to take my word on this one. There should be a comma after “Cap’n” for direct address. Prentice Hall 699 Dr. Hamilton Kirk of Starship k12 Machismo does not know the difference between the homophones “your” and “you’re.” No comma goes after "universe"; it cuts off a restrictive trailing adverbial clause. Prentice Hall 819

Dr. Kirk-Hamilton must have cycled too many times on the Star Ship transporter and messed up his synapses. Or maybe the Klingons had it in for him and rearranged his dura mater, pia mater, and arachnoid mater.

• Well [sic]Scotty, I’ve got an important message to get to all of the principals and site managers, so put down that bottle, [sic] and stoke those engines and get me back in one piece so I can get it out by the end of the day!!!!!!!! [sic]

Comma follows "well": mild interjection. Prentice Hall 699 No comma after "bottle": don't separate a compound verb with a comma. Prentice Hall 707 Only very young children, comic books, and grown-ups stuck in arrested development use a plethora of exclamation points for emphasis as does Dr. Hamilton. See Romper Room protocol’s page after “Eeency, Weency Spider” or consult Mr. Green Jeans, wherever he is--in outer space or in Disney World--for confirmation of this rule.



Apocrypha says Dr. Hamilton manipulated the Board’s advertisement for the “nationwide” superintendent search before Earl the Pearl’s ascendancy to insert a heretofore unheard of vo-tech superintendent requirement because Lennard had emerged from the bowels of Hillsborough County’s Vo-tech department, not a hot bed of scholarship to be sure. Le Hamilton, legend says, also engineered lowering the Ph.D. requirement to a master’s degree in Elia’s hiring because La Elia has no Ph.D.

In my considered opinion, Dr. Earl Lennard is the most profoundly mediocre man in Hillsborough County, equal to the dim-bulb former Dr. Raymond Shelton, but the competition for the honor remains keen.

Somnolent taxpayers shelled out $30,000 and $35,000 respectively for nationwide faux ads for which the winners had already won. The Board knew it would vote for the inside candidates when its members signed off on the $65,000 hit on the taxpayer tab.

Such waste of revenue pours money down a hole of mediocrity and demonstrates lamentable lack of ethics in those who run the schools. And the children are watching. I would like to assign the Board member from this district an essay explaining her participation in this fraud.

This piece of administrative and Board effrontery shows especially egregious when there are in the County poor children who can’t participate in class activities because they lack the supplies to do so, and the Board does not supplement the meager state allotment for such supplies. Instead, it raises already bloated administrator salaries.

I once asked Dr. Hamilton at a Tiger Bay event what subject his terminal thesis explored. He said he couldn’t remember. People who have written theses remember what they concern because researching and writing theses are hard work. A shibboleth in colleges and universities says that the academic weaklings go into administration. A corollary supposition is that many people in administrations have bought-and-paid for theses. One hopes such not to be the case with Dr. Hamilton. I asked him for a copy of his thesis. He said he didn’t know where it was.

The back story says that Ms. Elia’s need for Dr. Hamilton’s input into her superintendent decisions has led to his refusing retirement while occupying the same job with Dr. Otero, his replacement. Taxpayers paid for two jobs for one for some while without a murmur from the Board. Recently, Ms. Elia’s and the Board’s created for Dr. Hamilton a featherbedding job as Bus Czar. That he will park himself at taxpayer expense in this boutique sinecure has not created outrage.

When the bus-driver crises erupted, Dr. Hamilton became the bus czar under the impressive title of School-wide Enforcer or some such male-power-fantasy rubric, perhaps Attila the Hun’s Top Gun K12 Wowser.

Instead of awarding the bus drivers a decent salary (now $10,000 poverty level), buying new buses for the ones breaking down all the time, and hiring sufficient mechanics, the Board created Hamilton a Czar-of-Buses job. In his new aerie, Dr. Hamilton immediately hired a consulting firm for $232,000. One infers these pricey consultants will tell him to pay the bus drivers a decent salary, buy buses, and hire mechanics.

Ms. Elia created and awarded Dr. Hamilton a job not advertised; and the Board rubberstamped the award of the job to Dr. Hamilton job before it formulated the job description. The new position, of course, got no advertising despite "Equal Opportunity Employer” fibs one sees festooning the Web site.

And how much money do hapless taxpayers fork out for such administrative talent as the Hillsborough County School Board foists upon it?

A quarter of million goes to Ms. Elia, recently raised by $12,500 even after Board potted plants learned she presided over the real-estate scam that cost taxpayers thousands of dollars, and she overbuilt classrooms in Westchase, which led her to reshuffle boundaries to cover up this mistake—a move that left a thousand children weeping and clinging to their mothers’ skirts in terror of leaving their familiar schools.

Steve Hegarty, who snagged his job despite not having the ad’s credentials, acts ghost writer supposed to help Ms. Elia with her writing deficiency. But Le Hegarty can’t punctuate himself yet shakes down taxpayers for $91,000 and growing.

Dr. Hamilton for whom Ms. Elia and the Board invented the Bus Tzar job out of thin air and taxpayer kitty named him to it before the job description went on record. Dr Hamilton sucks up $132,000 plus perquisites, not to mention handing out flossy consultant deals to tell him how to do his new job of bus czar.

Linda Kipley, head of Professional Standards, whom the administration inserted in the job without advertising it and who savages teachers in her Abu Gharib cell block with no outside control, gets $120,000 for playing the administration’s Lucco Brazzi to terrify teachers with losing their jobs if they protest anything.

Kipley told one teacher she could not reveal what occurred in her punishment, demolishing the teacher’s free-speech rights. Kipley also would not let this teacher attend her students’ graduation. And what had this teacher done to merit Professional Standards sadism? She had taken her students on a field trip with parental oks. For $120,000 tax payers underwrite sadistic treatment of teachers from a woman whose original credential is a home ec degree and no further academic achievements on the record.

Connie Mileto is the kindergarten degreed knock-off Mata Hariette who inveigled promotion to district lobbyist with the sponsorship of Le Dr. Hamilton. La Connie pulls down $120,000 in tax dollars. She has no degrees or training relevant to this pricey job.

Meanwhile, the bus drivers make $10,000 a year; drive buses that break down often; and don’t have enough mechanics to fix them. And the administration says it has no money to raised their salary ten percent. Elia’s raise would cover over ten of these exploited drivers.

The Number One school system in the country is that of Massachusetts. By state law, administrators must pass the same language tests as teachers. I have campaigned so far unsuccessfully to have our local legislative delegation pass such law for Florida to screen out illiterate administrators. Although, I have not been successful, there is nothing to prevent voters from demanding that local School Board members use a language-screening test to weed out administrators who don’t demonstrate literacy. There is also no reason why voters should not demand that the Board advertise high-level jobs (more than 20 administrators make over $100,000 a year) to leaven the current across-the-board mediocrity and often illiteracy of the top-heavy gang of administrative parasites.

Administration salary bloat reigns nationwide. There is never an administrator shortage, just a teacher shortage. The reason: administration is where the money is.

Beginning teachers in Hillsborough County make $32,000, often working two jobs to survive. CTA union charges $500 a year from these meager salaries for bloated union officials’ bloated pay. These union honchos won’t reveal their salaries and are in bed with the administration. I was union president at HCC, so I know union sell-out phenomenon when I see it. The pious consensus that a good teacher is a treasure does not reflect in his or her or his paycheck. The rascals in administration get the big paychecks because they shape the budges, rubberstamped by somnolent boards.

Hordes of administrators nationwide have promoted salary bloat in a cartel of locusts that gobble up tax dollars that should support the whole school family. When job shopping amongst complicit school boards, these administrative throngs cite each other’s bloated salaries as the going rate.

There is nothing, however, to prevent the Hillsborough County School Board from rebelling against this extortion and setting sensible salaries for administrators. The administrator glut means candidates will line up. And citizens should remember that in Hillsborough County, no teacher makes over $100,000 a year as does the most obtuse administrator.

And the so-called ten percent raise this year was merely catch-up for the raises the teachers should have gotten in the recent past while the administrators’ salaries didn’t miss a beat in their inexorable rise and rubberstamped by a complicit Board.

Voters can demand that this practice of administrator salary bloat stop in Hillsborough County. All they have to do is lay down the law to School Board members. Voters pay the bill.

That Ms. MaryEllen Elia is the third-highest paid superintendent in the nation and can’t use commas correctly is a scandal and a blot on the County’s commitment to literacy for its children.

There are parents in Hillsborough County who know that their children’s getting in to good schools depends on their mastery of language. The entrance essay that good schools require is, on one level, a literacy test of one’s child. The Dartmouths, Princetons, Yales, and Browns don’t accept students who can’t make subjects and verbs agree and who can’t handle commas. Parents should refuse pay a quarter of a million dollars a year to a superintendent and her staff who display marginal literacy.

These parents must hold a flaccid Board’s feet to the fire to turn this situation around.

For further comments on the Hillsborough County school system, go to http://www.leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspotcom.
For grammar-punctuation critiques of the press, go to http://www.grammargrinch.blogspot.com

Ken Allen-April Griffith Run-off for District 6 School Board

Allen Web-site statement: KEN WILL FIGHT FOR:

• Efficient use of tax dollars – It is vital that we account for every tax dollar and that school funding be used in the most cost effective manner to ensure increased student achievement.
• http://leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Mr. Allen, if you have been working inside the schools for thirty-five years, you have already had a chance to save tax dollars by increasing the quality of the personnel in the administration by advocating equal opportunity in hiring.

Cite specific instances of what you have done about the school administration’s corrupt insiders' buddy hiring that marks administrative employment practices. Cite also how you have opposed the Board-administration creation of featherbedding jobs for mediocre insider pets. What would you do if you were Board member to change these malignant practices so that students and taxpayers get the best product for the money in personnel choices? Be concrete, please.
Or do you see nothing wrong with extant hiring practices and would continue those that you must have observed during your thirty-five years in the system?

Comment on the following instances of corrupt hiring practices that do not feature the equal opportunity cited by the administration and Board on the system’s website and on their literature:

Corrupt Hiring Practices; The administration for years has distributed like M&M’s jobs in musical-chairs buddy hiring with no outside advertising to attract the most qualified candidates.
For example, 1. the administration inserted Linda Kipley as head of Professional Standards with no competition. The job pays $120,000 a year, a salary that would attract top-notch talent in a national search. Ms. Kipley’s degree is in home ec., not fitting academic background her for this important job that deals with the ethics of punishment and the psyches of the teaching staff. Since appropriating the job, Ms. Kipley has become notorious for her abusive treatment of teachers whom the administration charges with unprofessional conduct. The teachers don’t get even a handout to outline their right to appeal her behavior when entering the gauntlet of Kipley’s sadistic punishment protocol. Despite repeated requests—I have made many-- to the Board and administration, these practices continue.

2. The administration with the urging, one hears, of Dr. Jim Hamilton, awarded the $120,000 lobbyist job to Connie Mileto with no advertising for candidates with more appropriate academic credentials than Ms. Mileto’s training as a kindergarten teacher. I understand Dr. Hamilton’s wife divorced him coincidentally during this personnel saga.

3. The administration recently created a job out of thin air for Dr. Hamilton to be system-wide enforcer as Bus Czar. He gets $132,000 and perquisites for this featherbedding job out of tax monies that could go for real educational needs.

Instead of dealing with the bus problem forthrightly by 1. awarding the drivers a living wage and treating them like human beings, 2. by buying new buses to replace ones with chronic breakdowns, 3. by hiring more mechanics, and 4. by putting a monitor on buses to keep rowdy students from distracting the driver and causing an accident, the administration, rubberstamped by the potted-plant Board, created the Bus Czar manufactured perch for Dr. Hamilton, who does not know the difference between “your” and “you’re” according to his in-school email output and who immediately hired a pricey outside consulting firm for $232,000 to tell him, no doubt, what I have cited above as the solution if its practitioners have any sense.

That Dr. Hamilton couldn’t arrive at this solution by himself bespeaks his shaky managerial ethos. Or the consulting firm may come up with a gimcrack rigmarole of prescriptions to justify its outrageous fee that rips off taxpayers, accompanied by Power Point presentations and Disney graphics in giant fonts. The education-administration world is famous for such pricey, ineffective bells-and-whistles solutions from small minds for little problems.

The Bus Czar job, as usual, got no advertising for outside talent despite the board’s and administration’s robotic mantra of “equal-opportunity employer” on all administration stationery and Web site.

If you sat on the Board, Mr. Allen, would you question the need for this job and ask what job the Bus Czar slot replaces? The job description was still in the works when Dr. Hamilton’s name appeared beside the job. Is this hiring scam so customary that the administration doesn’t bother to hide it? Would you insist on wide-spread advertisement for the most talented candidate if you sat on the Board? And would you specify that the winning candidate be able to distinguish between the homophones “your” and “you’re,” a skill that evades Dr. Hamilton?

A footnote to Dr. Hamilton’s cozening is that he for a long time occupied the tandem position in which Dr. Otero replaced Dr. Hamilton. There they sit--two of them--on the Board website with Otero’s handwritten name superimposed over Hamilton’s. The Board didn’t object. I did—several times. One got the impression that the Bus Czar make-work slot emerged to give Dr. Hamilton an ersatz position so that he would consent to vacate Mr. Otero’s office. The back story on this job featured the gloss that Ms. Elia can’t make a decision without Dr. Hamilton’s Wizard-of-Oz imprimatur, so he has to stay around to guide her through more disastrous management decisions.

Would you have consented as a Board member to paying two salaries out of taxpayer monies for one job because Dr. Hamilton refused to leave and Ms. Elia can’t make decisions without him? How would you have handled this situation? In addition, would you have remained silent on the Board during the Bus Tsar obvious feint as the present Board did? The current Board either colluded in or ignored this corrupt job choreograph like potted plants, its usual posture.
4. The hiring of the superintendent as the inside candidate continues a Hillsborough-County scandal that cheats students and taxpayers of superior talent at the helm. I reviewed finalists’ files. All were superior to Ms. Elia in credentials and experience. The Board reduced the national ad’s PH.D. to Ms. Elia’s master’s degree so that she could qualify.

The choreographed alacrity with which the Board hired Elia revealed that all members’ knowingly wasting $35,000 tax money on a “nationwide” search to find the most qualified candidate in-house in a manner that gave scant credence to their repeated promise of equal opportunity and hiring the best personnel.

Ms. Elia’s supervisory experience was parochial: she had presided over the local building-department real-estate scam that cost taxpayers thousands of dollars. The St. Petersburg Times exposed the putatively criminal behavior that went on under Ms. Elia’s nose, which she claimed herself unable to detect even though a reporter walked in off the street, spotted the scam, and detailed it in a Times series. Ms. Elia also overbuilt classrooms in Westchase as building-department supervisor that she scrambled to cover up after she became superintendent by relocating one thousand weeping children, torn from their schools and friends, in a boundary scramble without appropriate parent input.

In contrast, several of the competing candidates for the superintendent position that Ms. Elia appropriated as favorite of the inside cabal had Ph.D.s from prestigious universities and rich experience including publishing in their fields.

They could also write literately and evade punctuation errors (http://grammargrinch.blogspot.com). These candidates contrast invidiously with Ms. Elia’s undistinguished academic background with bachelor’s degree from a third-tier college and parochial supervisor experience marred by the mishaps catalogued above.

Double Standard Treatment in Professional Standards: Tolerance for Big People; Punishment for Little People

Did you or anybody in the schools lodge a Professional-Standards inquiry against Dr. Hamilton for the unorthodox hiring participation that ROSAC scuttlebutt speculated he engaged in? The administration uses the threat of job loss and professional-standards charges against teachers and other staff to terrorize them into silence for fugitive or for manufactured offenses claimed against them to keep them quiet, but administrators get a tut tut and no more for serious ethical lapses. Did you ever object to this immoral use of the power to hire and fire by the administration? Would you on the Board?

(a) Media Specialist Bart Birdsall, for example, got hauled in for exposure to Ms. Kipley’s dubious mercies after Ms. Elia ordered an email fishing expedition of Birdsall’s school account shortly after her assuming superintendent status. She did so to accommodate the pique of one Joe Stines, head of the county library system, because Birdsall, gay, sent Stines, gay, complaints from Birdsall’s home computer about Stines’s reinforcing of Ronda Storms First-Amendment deprivation of full library access for local gays .

(b) Professional Standards trumped up a charge against Shawnree Miller, teacher, invoking a fugitive professional-standards infraction after she took her students on a field trip with parents’ permission. Nonetheless convicted of this Kafkaesque charge, she received as punishment degrading conditions imposed on her by Kipley, including the Free-Speech infraction of Kipley’s order that she not tell anyone what was going on in Shawnree’s punishment protocol and that she could not attend her students’ graduation. Shawnree Miller sorted pins in the punishment center as Kipley dawdled sadistically over the conditions for releasing her.

Ms. Miller still suffers from the trauma of this experience as does Birdsall. I am sure they felt like the wretches in Abu Gharib. The union, in bed with the administration, helped neither despite its collecting $500 a year from teachers to support CTA honchos’ hefty salaries that come out of the pittances that teachers get paid in the corrupt-pay-standards administration/Board lottery.

What would you do as board member to intervene in this malignant practice of hiring inside candidates, no matter how mediocre their credentials and deficient their experience, no matter that a candidate can’t write simple essays that feature correct punctuation?

Would you insist, instead--despite the campaign of the administration cabal to flatter and appropriate you--on hiring the superior superintendent candidate after a national search who could best serve the needs of the children of the school system, not adhering to the malignant tradition of inside cabal hiring? Or would you continue the status quo of hiring the 3rd-rate inside cipher coincident with the procedure operative during your years of school employment?

Salary Bloat for Administrators, Pittances for Teachers

Ms. Elia allegedly is the 3rd highest paid school superintendent in the country—a quarter of a million dollars yearly including perquisites.

Yet the Board gave her another five percent increase recently despite this circumstance and despite her mediocre background and deficient supervisory performance, past and current. This raise came from the Board charged with watching citizens’ tax dollars despite Ms. Elia’s having made a mess of the Westgate boundary struggle with that community with its children as hostages. Her clumsy performance has made a long-term enemy of that community.

You give this pledge on your website to voters: “Working with individual communities to solve local concerns – It is imperative that school board members listen to and communicate effectively with all interested community partners when proposing new initiatives.”

As a candidate for the Board with this pledge in mind, one is sure you attended that infamous meeting in which heartbreaking testimony of the parents to protect their children revealed an administration and Board—except for Faliera and Valdez—indifferent to parents’ pleas for more time to discuss changes since, said they, Ms. Elia had tricked them out of a chance to be heard. I would be interested in your assessment of that meeting as paradigm for the Board’s “listen[ing] to and communicat[ing] effectively with all interested community partners when proposing new initiatives,” another pledge on your campaign Web site.

Ms. Elia’s $12,500 raise exceeds a bus driver’s 3rd-world $10,000 yearly pay check for driving broken-down buses with insufficient mechanics to repair them while children in the bus make so much racket that the driver can’t attend to his driving. Dr. Hamilton sits in a new $132,000 faux job Bus Tsar with his perquisites sure, his ability to sign up needless flossy consultants a certainty. Do you consider such use of tax dollars to coincide with the promise you make to “ account for every tax dollar and that school funding be used in the most cost effective manner to ensure increased student achievement”?

Lavish administrative pay bathes the top-heavy administrative horde and siphons scarce tax dollars. This favored group features over twenty administrators’ making $100,000 or more while beginning teachers get $32,000, meaning many work a second job to survive. The so-called teacher pay raise this year merely made up for the raises the Board and administration denied teachers in the recent past while upping administrator salaries like clockwork. Do you see any fiscal sense or compensation immorality in this situation?

What is your salary plus perquisites now for your administrative job in the school system, the salary priorities of which you need to reform right now, Mr. Allen? What is the salary of the highest- and lowest-paid teachers in your school if you still manage a school? Have you ever protested to the ROSAC administration the disparity between teachers’ and administrators’ salaries?

What would you do specifically, Mr. Allen, as a Board member to intervene in the incestuous in-house superintendent hiring racket that deprives the students of stellar leadership by literate superintendent and administrators, rips off taxpayers, and mocks the ideals of education which features the best of the best as leaders? No gauzy generalities, please: specifics are what I require.

Finally, do you have the force of character and the dedication to excellence to speak out on the Board even if you are the lone voice to combat the problems listed above—if you consider them problems?

And why have you spent twenty-five years inside the system that sponsors such outrages against education as those listed and have mounted no protest? If you have ever protested anything, anywhere, may I have a copy for proof? Or have you been afraid of losing your job if you do? What specifically made you afraid of losing your job if you did have that fear? Or, instead, have you seen nothing wrong in the way the administration runs the schools, including the problems cited above, so that you have marinated as a happy-camper bureaucrat in the ongoing skullduggery of the system?

In short, Mr. Ken, do you have the daring to become a Board member who speaks up for the children, the community, and the taxpayers, not for the exploitive bureaucracy of a school system that now benefits rapacious, mediocre administrators at the expense of all others in the schools’ family as well as taxpayers?

Or does becoming a Board member provide a place for you to park after retirement to continue the bureaucratic mode of going along to get along that distinguishes most if not all of the administrative apparatchiks that now clog the school system, all paid bloated salaries compared to meager teacher compensation?

School Board member is the most important position up for political capture in this election season. Not many people understand this reality. The swarming Bay-Area political community ignores the School Board races; the print newspapers treat them as a boring sideline to the main political show.

But Henry Adams said that “a teacher affects eternity.” So does a School-Board at one remove. I want to determine that you are worthy of the job of affecting eternity by your not signing on to the current School Board potted-plant indifference to its exalted role.

I will publish your response on my blog:

www//Leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Literacy Finds No Fans at ROSAC

I was a professor of English at Hillsborough Community College for twenty-eight years. The students who appeared in my freshman English classes had passed their English classes in the local high schools, many with A averages. Many could not write a declarative sentence with correct grammar and punctuation. A literate paragraph or well-structured essay lay beyond their ken. I taught them remedial English--grammar, punctuation, and paragraph-and-essay construction—before I could lecture on Shakespeare and Yeats.

If one examines the sentences below from the Hillsborough County education establishment, one sees what the problem is. The students’ poor performance in language—basis of education since 6th –century classical Greece—reflects the administration and Board lack of performance in and indifference to basic literacy.

We have here a case of the blind’s leading the blind. I believe if taxpayers knew about this malignant state of affairs, they would demand that administrators demonstrate enough capacity in language to demonstrate basic literacy themselves in order to be able to recognize that young people receiving diplomas from county schools demonstrate it as well. There are some parents who want good colleges and universities to accept their children, and those require literacy when the applicants submit their various letters in applications. There is a reason why institutions require these essays: they are literacy tests.

Dr. Earl Lennard retired with a golden parachute filched from taxpayers with Board collusion. He adhered to the superintendent illiteracy tradition throughout his career. He ascended onto superintendent perch after the de rigueur search costing 30,000 tax dollars. Some of the Board members who colluded in this charade of equal opportunity still sit on the Board today and repeated the travesty with Elia’s hiring: Olson, Lamb, Kurdell, and Bricklemeyer. They plucked Dr. Lennard from the bowels of local vo tech, not a hotbed of scholarship, not a locus of literacy. They selected Ms. Elia from the building department, where she had presided over the real-estate scam and over-built classrooms contretemps.

Dr. Lennard:

“With me this morning is [sic] Dr. Howard Sinsley, Superintendent of County Schools; John Long, Superintendent of Pasco County Schools….”

“Is” should be are: the subject is compound.

Lack of Literacy: Cost $250,000 a Year, Raised to $262,500 Next Year and Rising
From MaryEllen Elia’s online biography:

“Mary Ellen Elia received her B.A. degree from Daeman College and her M.Ed. from the University of Buffalo. In 1983, she added masters [sic] of Professional Studies in Reading from the State University in New York at Buffalo, [sic] received certification in Educational Leadership in 1989.”

Correction: “Masters” should be lower-case and possessive: “master’s” for elliptical possessive “master’s degree.” No comma after “Buffalo”: it splits a compound verb.

MaryEllen is married to Albert Elia and has two children, a son Albert and a daughter Tara.

Commas should enclose “Albert” and “Tara” as nonrestrictive appositives since they are sole son and daughter according to the biography.

I asked Ms. Elia to edit these illiteracies; she didn’t. I asked Board member Ms. Ethridge twice to put pressure on whoever could change them to do so. Ms. Ethridge is a former English teacher. This request finally got results.

Neither the administration nor Board considers literacy important—especially not for the overpaid administrators. These are above the professional-standards requirements that teachers and others must observe; these are above the need to be literate—even as heads of the tax-supported civic enterprise to make our children literate. As Leona Helmsley said, “Taxes are for the little people,” so MaryEllen Elia says, “Literacy is for the little people, not for us Olympians who lead the school system despite of our inability to punctuate and make subjects and verbs agree.”
tp://www.daemen.edu/faculty-staff/index.php

From: Ms. Elia’s 9/13/06 Daemon College alma mater Web page:

"You do not need to make an appointment, [sic] just drop by!"

The comma after “appointment” should be a period: comma splice, a grammar felony.

"Please write the best time slot into your calendar, [sic] and join us for some fun…."

No comma after “calendar”: it splits a compound verb.

Join us for a free pedometer, [sic] and logs that you can use to track your activity.

No comma after “pedometer”: it splits a compound object of the preposition “for.”

Elia’s salary is now $250,000, rumored the third highest in the nation; the Board has recently bestowed on her a $12,500 raise in addition, more than the 3rd-world wages of schools’ bus drivers, who drive buses that break down without mechanics to fix them and who fear they will wreck the buses due to the distraction for lack of a bus aide to keep the children quiet.

Dr. James Hamilton: Salary $132,000 plus perquisites; the Board just created a new job for him and did not advertise it.

From a school-district email:

“Well [sic] fans I am happy to report that Ca’pin has survived the failure of the Dilithinum crystals. While atomized across the vast reaches of space between Margaritaville and the Starship Enterprise [sic] I encountered two Klingon birds of prey lying in wait in cloaking devices. I even [sic] had a photon torpedo fly through my parts while I was waiting for Mr. Spock to reassemble my parts.

A comma follows “Well” for mild interjection. "Cap'in" should be "Cap'n." A comma follows “Enterprise” for introductory adverbial clause. “Even” is a misplaced modifier: it goes before “a photon.”

And don’t tell them it’s them [sic] SO and SOs [sic] downtown because my phasers are not on stun, Mr. Spock.

The second “them” should be “those.” This lapse represents a solecism of such gaucherie that it places its author as suffering from Dogpatch illiteracy, hardly a recommendation for a pay of $132,000 in a school system charged with curing such ungrammatical afflictions in students. “SO and SOs” should be “so-and-sos: a hyphenated compound that does not get capitals.

Cap’in I think that you’re [sic] molecules are spread across the universe, [sic] ‘cause the transporter is jammed!

Dr. Hamilton can’t distinguish between homophones “your” and “you’re.” The comma after “universe” is redundant, cutting off a trailing restrictive adverbial clause. Perhaps this fellow has spent too much time in Margaritaville.

The error below comes from Board member Candy Olson’s online biography. She voted to raise her salary for attending several meetings a month to that of a full-time veteran teacher with a master’s degree: $37,500:

Candy Olson has served on the Hillsborough County School Board since 1994, [sic] and has chaired the board twice.

The comma after “1994” separates a compound verb.

All correspondence [sic] including email sent to School Board members or School District staff [sic] are [sic] considered public records, per Florida Statute 119

This grammar-punctuation disaster adorns the first page of the district’s Web site. It features a grammar felony: subject-verb agreement; three comma errors; and no end punctuation. The “including…” present participial phrase is nonrestrictive; the “are” should be “is” to agree with the subject “correspondence.” There should be a period at the end of the sentence.







.

September 12, 06: Be sure to read the comment and my reply to it at the end of this entry. ldd


Mr. Hegarty:

There is always a warning message on Board that emails to and from the schools are public information. I assume all emails inside and outside the schools are public information.

How does a member of the public access these emails?

lee drury de cesare




Larry, Tiger Bay President, here is an article with an idea for a future program. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/09/AR2006090901079.html?nav=hcmoduletmv When the elections are over and the speaker choices are in the doldrums at Tampa Tiger Bay as they have been for the past year for some reason, consider having a program on negative advertising.

There must be some experts in the area. They dig up stuff for the Dirty Tricks part of campaigns.

Now a request: Bart Birdsal asked me how one got to be one of the people on the Tiger Committee. I said I didn't know but inferred picking people is random and casual. Bart said he would like to be on the committee.

I said I would ask you. Bart is the first openly gay candidate locally I believe. He ran for the School Board to emphasize the need for protection of gay children from harassment in the schools.

I call Bart's run a form of higher politics. When my Republican husband has asked me over the years when I was fighting some women's rights issue in unorthodox ways that did an end-run around the sexists, "What in the world are you up to now?" I always answered him, 'I'm practicing higher politics."

Bart and Jane Boles, the mother of a gay boy at HHS, tried for years to get the schools and Board to attend to this problem without any success. The Board and the administration either strung them along or ignored them.

I contributed to their effort by cajoling Dr. Earl the Pearl Lennard after a Tiger Bay meeting to pledge to hold teacher training on the issue.

I first had to run him down in the hall as he was making a speedy escape to avoid me. I caught up to petition the creature despite my wearing a pair of spike Manolo Blahniks. He promised the administration would hold such seminars and didn't.

This run-a-round represented the customary school-superintendent lie in Hillsborough County. I think the Board hires people for superintendent able to tell bald-faced lies with a straight face.

The first contact I had with Candy Olson involved my emailing her several years ago to complain about a gay boy's being proselytized by one of his teachers with a Bible on the teacher's desk. He told the boy that he would go to hell according to the Bible if he did not quit being a homosexual. Here's an email account of that exchange:

Ms. Olson's response: "It's been my experience that there are usually at least two sides to a story, and I'm not sure what the student requested from whom. Last time I looked, though, we didn't forbid people to quote the bible - or to express themselves in other ways."

My response to this comment from La Olson: Ms. Olson: Bart Birdsall allowed me a copy of your response about the gay boy whom a teacher proselytized with the Bible on school grounds. Otherwise, I would have secured it through the Superintendent’s office. What do you mean, ma’am, by the following statement in this email? "Last time I looked, though, we didn't forbid people to quote the bible [sic] - or to express themselves in other ways."

Bart said that the teacher harangued the gay boy with the Bible. Does one understand your response to mean that such activity on school property is innocuous quoting of the Bible? That the principal made the teacher quit this proselytizing a student with the Bible says that she must have seen it as inappropriate activity. She was right: Bible thumping should not be part of school curriculum.

Your breezy comment, however, suggests that you do not disapprove the situation. I do.

If a Bible quote, a quote from the Koran, or a quote from the Torah comes in a comparative-religion class, that use is a fine teaching tool for religious quotes.

If a teacher uses the King James version in English class to demonstrate the style and poetry of the book that taught Shakespeare to write his masterpieces, that is an admirable class use of the Bible.

If an English teacher uses the Douay Bible to compare its style to that of the King James Version, that too is a perfectly legitimate use of the Bible for tax-paid educational purposes.

Or if a sociology class uses the Bible to investigate such questions as the status of women in the Old Testament, that is an imaginative use of the Bible or any other religious text.

I would applaud students in sociology class’s comparing treatment of women in the Bible to treatment of women in the Koran. However, I submit that in the present instance we do not talk about education but of indoctrination of a student by a teacher with a particular religious view.

If a teacher corners a student on school grounds--or even off school grounds--to convert him or her with Biblical quotes to the teacher's brand of religion, particularly if the teacher’s covert purpose is to shame the student for being gay, that is not educational but homophobic religious indoctrination. I believe psychologists would call that religious coercion harmful to the child’s psyche.

Religious indoctrination is not legal on public-school grounds. The Constitution says we must separate church and state. Especially must we do so when it concerns a teacher’s purveying a particular religious view to a student vulnerable to the teacher's power.

It’s a good thing for the fiscal state of the school system that this boy doesn’t want to “make trouble” for the teacher or to name his school. He’s a good kid, and he’s scared to buck grownup authority.

If he were willing, the School Board and the school administration would have one hell of a lawsuit on their hands. Sooner or later, a gay student fed up with ignored cruelty on school grounds and not loathe to fight through a lawsuit will come along who wants to sue the school system for his mistreatment with Board and administrative sufferance.

I hear that the School Board and the administration now piously claim that they do not want to interfere with the autonomy of individual principals.

This represents either torpor or cop-out. Isn’t this the Board that recently passed a rule with only Ms. Reddick dissenting that the TV cameras be shut off during citizen comment at Board meetings? When the Board’s amour propre and convenience are involved, its members can bestir themselves to abridge even the First Amendment for the sake of their vanity and convenience, but these same people have no interest in the mistreatment of a portion of their charges—gay boys and girls--in the school system.

Something is out of whack with Board priorities, I submit.

Bart also emailed me the following: He [whether the boy in question above or another is not clear] said the teacher in charge of the yearbook did not want the GSA's picture in it. The gay student had to struggle to get his club’s picture in the annual. Does that situation not concern the Board? Or is it, too, open to benign interpretation, Ms. Olson? Isn’t the Board at least in investigating the situation? What's your exegesis of this quote?

How would you gloss this gesture on the teacher's part: as an instance of free speech and not discrimination against gay students? Would you cite it as an example of teachers' right to express themselves “in other ways"? There is a limit to self-expression. One, could not, I submit, tap dance on the desk during class. And “self-expression” should not include the sort that makes a gay student miserable.

Reading your response to Bart confirms Dr. Johnson's truism: "Let me hear the man [or woman] speak, so that I may know his [her] mind."

Your answer to Bart does not suggest that you take gay children's bullying by teachers or other students as a problem that concerns you. You appear to see it as part of the range of behavior that demonstrates acceptable conduct if only one interprets it as innocent or ignores the situation in a deliberately obtuse manner.

I expect better of a member of the School Board. Everyone should. I understand that you ran for the Board on gay tolerance, that your opponent blasted you for moral turpitude for this attitude, that you won the election by spending $50,000 in the most expensive School-Board race ever, and that you have distanced yourself from gay tolerance ever since.

This information is apocryphal. But if it is correct, I urge you to show more courage post-election. What good is it to win election and then to consent to give up any enlightened beliefs because you might lose a few bigots’ votes If you stick to your guns?

That’s not the behavior of a role model of integrity, Ms. Olson. The children are watching you.

Lee Drury De Cesare

Larry, Notable at the last Tiger Bay seminar with the Board candidates--the one at which you tried to tackle me in a harangue about time limits for the bus-driver question, which amounted to your savaging a sweet, helpless little old lady: me, one noted that Candy joined all candidates-- except one--to pledge that gay children needed the teacher training in the schools to ensure their protection from the savaging of harassment.

So Bart's run for that purpose was a triumph if they carry through.

Bart doesn't attend Tiger Bay often--just for important issues in which he is especially interested-- because he works for the school system and doesn't have the time off when Tiger Bay holds its meetings.

So the next time he shows up, let him sit on the Tiger Committee, pray. It would be the first openly gay fellow on the Tiger Committee. Then I could harangue Suncoast Tiger Bay over here on this side of the bay with, "Tampa Tiger Bay had a gay fellow on its Tiger Committee. When are y'all going to do that?"

By the way, here's some invidious information: Suncoast beats Tampa coming and going in running its Tiger Bay. I don't know why, but I know it does: bigger crowds, more prestigious guests, smoothness of operations.

You should go to couple of its meetings to see how its done. I think they had that old Pooh-bah publisher Andy What's His Name on the Board. That has more éclat than having the Dali Llama on the board for the local political consumers, I wager. This fellow's stalking around SP now in retirement dispensing blessings to the throngs of his awe-struck admirers but, one infers, lamenting bygone days in the glory position of publisher of the SP Times, when he conducted candidate interviews that scared office aspirants out of their scant wits.

If you won't put Bart on the Tiger Committee, then tell me up front so that I can rev up my rhetorical engines and launch into Phase II against Tampa Tiger Bay's hillbilly homophobia.

With all due respect,

lee drury de cesare

PS: Bart was one of those lucky gay kids not to have parents who kicked him out into the street upon learning of his gay status. His mother told him he had to be who he was. Even so, he says today he bears the emotional scars of growing up thinking he was dirty because he was gay. His being on the Tiger Committee may do something to assuage that feeling.

From:Leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Mr. Hegarty:

3. [Provide] The name of the person(s) in the administration who "never shared [the school-generated] prediction with the community."

This is the construction in my previous email about the Board’s petitioning the county for money based on invalid projections of enrollment that you said “makes no sense.”

My four-year-old grandson would understand its meaning.

That you don’t means you must come by my office for a chit for an MRI of your brain. The X-ray guy shall send the results to me for forensic diagnostics on which parts of your grammar primer you must review.

Before I review your brain pathology, however, I can advise that you start with a chapter in any reputable grammar book called “Sentence Sense.” You must also diagram the above construction and identify all the parts of speech in Study Hall.

The reason you allege not to understand the meaning is that it points to your dereliction in providing the public accurate information. You forget that you work for us citizens, not as spin doctor to gloss over the Board’s and administration’s mistakes and chronic incompetence.

We taxpayers pay your salary, not the Board or administration hoo-hahs.

Keep that fact in mind, young man, and keep a civil tongue in your head when addressing one of your taxpayer bosses.

We will meet in the School Board parking lot for more homework assignments when I have sent your MRI to the CDC for further analysis. I hope the results are not dolorous for you. I wouldn’t trust any Florida state agencies with this task. Those issue sloppy trend prognostications based on the ephemera seeping from the bureaucratic minds that batten off taxpayers in those faux jobs.

As you were,

lee drury de cesare




Mr. Hegarty:

Thank you for your unwonted prompt reply to my public-information request.

The recent trip-up on the local School Board’s request to the county for more money via increased impact fees presents a paradigm for the slovenly administrative review the School Board and administration give its business. It echoes the Board’s flatfooted puzzlement at the crooks' running the real-estate division while the Board and Ms. Elia, then head of that department, remained in La La Land.

Both Olson and Faliero in their recent appearance at Tiger Bay’s candidate forum averred that the Board or administration could have not in a million years diagnosed the crooked maneuvers in the real-estate caper. They averred that to do so would have been a feat that escaped the abilities of human intelligence—theirs, to be sure.

But then there exists the refutation of a St. Pete Times reporter’s walking in off the street and discovering the real-estate money heist costing tax payers thousands of dollars that the on-scene somnolent school watchdogs immured in bureaucratic ennui had not noticed right under their noses.

And God forbid that the Potted-Plant board ever ask relevant questions about administration conduct in this or any enterprise in which it performs its too-frequent choreograph of tax-subsidized incompetence.

The Board and Elia don’t hire people for intelligence, training, and competence. They hire them for mindless obedience to the administration overlords, besotted with power and not about to give it up, to look the other way, to cook the books, and to deny accountability when the chickens come home to roost.

The print press, slowly sinking into the maw of history as blogs supersede them, conducts editorial candidate reviews not knowing diddly about what’s going on in the schools. With their reporters’ expose of the real-estate scam on their desks in their editorial aeries, they endorsed Ms. Olson, saying that she “keeps up with national trends in education.”

What about Ms. Olson’s keeping up with local trends, indeed, with on-site trends slap dab in her purview on the Board? What about her and La Faliero's keeping up with the trend in the school real-estate department under Ms. Elia to rip off taxpayers while the Board and the administration continue its tinsel-power extravaganza in the ROSAC redoubt and to hell with the nitty gritty of school business—criminal or otherwise?

And what about the Board and administration’s crafting a careful statistical justification for a change to justify its hitting up the county for more money for the School Board and Elia to squander in incompetent performance?

lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
727-398-4142
www://grammargrinch.blogspot.com
www://leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Ms. De Cesare,

Below are the answers to your questions.

1) The district's chief business officer, Gretchen Saunders, mentioned in a meeting with other district business officers that she thought enrollment might be lower than projected this year. In that same informal conversation the representative from Broward County guessed that Broward's enrollment might be a little above the projection. The Broward official was quite wrong. Enrollment in Broward is significantly below projections. Ms. Saunders' off-the-cuff estimate appears to have been pretty accurate.
Those informal conversations came well after the state's enrollment and budget projections had been made.

2) Projections are made by using historic and trend data in the state's computer model. It relies heavily on trends, not on recent developments. Because of the great weight given to trends, the state originally projected that Hillsborough County would grow by about 7,000 students. We disagreed and convinced the state to adjust the growth projection downward to about 5,500. It appears the numbers will come in even lower. Enrollment projections, which usually are accurate, are the result of a team effort involving the Florida Department of Education, the FTE Estimating Conference and individual school districts. I know you asked for a name but, as you see, projections are not made by one person, or even by one organization.

When the School Board asks the County to up the impact fee from $200 to $4000 (I believe those are the figure I read), I suggest that the state’s “trend” figures should get further scrutiny from an expert. Ms. Saunders' “off-the-cuff” estimates that “mention” that she guesses the figures to be inaccurate do not serve in this instance.

If the school administration doesn’t have one on its top-heavy staff--which recently added a discretionary featherbedding School Bus Tsar sinecure for Dr. Hamilton instead of paying the drivers a living wage and buy new buses-- amongst all those bloated-pay executives that throng ROSAC--then the Board needs a consultant to fill in for the lack of staff competence. The New School Bus Czar, Dr. Hamilton, has already one lined up draw pictures to tell him how to get the buses to run on time. Surely the enrollment projection is a more important matter than Dr. Hamilton’s inability to figure out bus schedules. ldd



3) The question makes no sense. I didn’t save the email. Please resend me a copy so that I can determine if I need a brain scan or if you lack the ability to thread your way through subordinate clauses in a sentence. ldd

You had one other question about who was responsible for conveying the information to the public. That's my job. When asked by reporters and others how many students we expected this year, I provided the official state projections. Those are the numbers we used in conversations with county officials and anyone else who wanted to know about our growth projections for this school year. It also has been my job to provide the actual student enrollment counts, which have come in lower than expected.

Did you not think to ask your School Board bosses any questions about their methodology at arriving at the flawed figures on the off-chance that the print press would pose more probing questions in this area?

The trends method sounds like a ho-hum dart-throwing approach. An Ouija board could have given the same prognostication.

When the school system asks for a whopping bump-up in money from the county, it ought to exercise some imagination about what data are needed to convince. If more exact analysis lies beyond Ms. Saunders’ competence of analyzing county data to test against the gauzy “trends” suggestions, why can’t she get some outside demographic help for analysis of these data in the name of accuracy?

If any local press were astute enough to ask you that question, wouldn’t you have to have admitted that the Board did not require more statistical accuracy for its money petition to the county and that the School Board and administration counted on the County’s being patsies because of the political-propaganda poison of the its denying the children classrooms and blah, blah, blah? ldd

Stephen Hegarty
Office of Communications
School District of Hillsborough County
901 East Kennedy Boulevard
Tampa, Fl. 33602-3507
office: 813-272-4060
fax: 813-272-4510




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From: Stephen Hegarty [mailto:shegarty@sdhc.us]
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 7:42 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Cc: Joan Gentry
Subject: School District Response


ot.com







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Stephen Hegarty [mailto:shegarty@sdhc.us]
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 7:42 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Cc: Joan Gentry
Subject: School District Response