KNOCK ON EVERY DOOR

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

U.S. Department of Education

Washington, DC 2022

3/26/2009


Dear Mr. Secretary:


When President Obama announced his run for the presidency and said he would improve education, I sent him a thousand dollars and did without new dresses and shoes for a year. That is how strongly I support education.


The news on education has not emphasized what I see wrong with the K12 apparatus. It’s administrators. They are the C and D students streaming out of college with degrees in academic piffle who home in like lemmings to K12 education bureaucracies. Too many bought and paid for a graduate thesis as a forensics of their on-the-job writing shows. If not, theses committees are asleep on the job.


These scholars manqué head for administrations while bright graduates go into teaching. The lemmings are not smart but smart enough to know administration is where the money is. There exists a national cartel of administrators who bloat their salaries and then cite these as the going rate when applying for jobs. These are people who would never go further than the periphery in private industry.


I have observed Hillsborough County’s school board and administration for two years. I got interested in both because a teacher friend had a false charge filed against him by the superintendent through the Professional Standards gulag for using the school emails for private purposes but really because he complained from his home email to the county library about its kicking a gay display out of the county submitted by a University-of-South -Florida graduate student. Superintendent Elia does not want voters in the fens and bogs of Hillsborough County democracy to think the schools are tolerant of gays.


This routine of intimidating teachers with cooked-up charges to keep them quiet and docile and not daring to object to or give opinions on board-and-administration policies because they could thereby lose their jobs in retaliation through a Professional Standards faux charge exists an obscene oppression of teachers. The elected board colludes with this outrage while it goes along with administrative salary bloat. It pretends not to know about savaging of teachers through administration-manufactured charges.


This is the administration and school board that in the early Nineties drove a Mr. Doug Erwin out of the administration for discovering graft, theft, and shoddy building practices remunerated with top tax money by the collusive or somnolent board. Mr. Erwin insisted that the board and administration clean the crime up. They instead tried to run him crazy and convince him and others that he was crazy. He filed and won a whistleblower lawsuit and $165,000 from the taxpayers’ paying for board and administration criminality. He then fled into retirement.


Nobody got punished for the crimes cited by Mr. Erwin in the administration, starting with then-superintendent Earl Lennard, who oversaw the harassment of Mr. Erwin. The administration became potted plants and saw no evil.


This escape established the administration culture of invulnerability to punishment for bad behavior and even crime. Hence, since then dirty tricks have prospered and become a part of administration theology. The technique of using the Professional Standards Office to suppress any teacher unrest with made-up charges against the outspoken is Exhibit One in this shoddy record. Teachers with blogs are particular targets.


The state of Florida K12 bureaucracy practices incestuous hiring and does not advertise jobs while blazoning “We Are an Equal-opportunity Employer,” a flat-out lie. The board has ceded Ms. Elia patronage power of awarding jobs to kin, buddies, and sycophants. The board gave Ms. Elia a pass on the Ph.D. requirement for the superintendent job while advertising it for $35,000 taxpayer dollars to cover their skullduggery.


Ms. Elia was an inside pick because the board was scared that a Ph.D. from Columbia or other good schools would catch on to their incumbency sloth and put them to work.


The board and administration don’t like criticism. They recently convinced the public-education station to cut out my parts of the citizen comment section of school-board meetings. The board members had their fingers crossed when they took the oath of office to protect the Constitution.


Bottom line, Mr. Secretary: you need to scrutinize administrations and not keep harping on only teachers.


I see you got your credentials from Harvard. Good. In sociology: OK, but sociology is not a demanding major. I see you graduated magna cum laude. Fair. I graduated summa cum laude with four children under five clinging to my skirts. Women always have to do better than men to get half the credit. Keep that in mind when you consider the world your daughter faces.


You have an admirable family background bound to produce a winner. Your record as Chicago superintendent ranks stellar.


That you are handsome is a plus. Being cute has worked for me for 76 years. One should pay attention to appearance to the end of life. It’s the first thing people see about you. Looking like a knight of the road or a bag lady will insure your turn-down at the door of opportunity even if you are peddling a cure for AIDS. I infer your basketball playing provided the panache that pushed you over the top in the President’s pick. The national obsession with sports afflicts our Commander in Chief. My husband of 52 years is a sports zombie who’s worn out two Stratoloungers in front of the round-the-clock sports channel. Were I to do it over again, I would succumb to a Sanskrit scholar.


Your success in this job will hinge on your turning your attention to the worst-performing elements in schools: administrations and boards. Send a team of observers down to Tampa to review the performance of the Hillsborough County administration and board C and D students. The tribe of Hillsborough County administrators has only one Ph.D. in its midst. Ms Elia doesn’t want anybody to outrank her and doesn’t like the reminder that she got her job through political mind games, not credentials and experience.



Hillsborough County Public Schools, Florida USA

AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

Oh, sure



Respectfully,

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

leedrurydecesarescasting-room couch. Blogspot.com

c: Ms. Michelle Obama






Ms. Michelle Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C. 20500

3/26/2009

Dear Ms. Obama:

I enclose a letter to the new Secretary of Education, that handsome dog Arne Duncan.


For the good of the schools, ponder it and chat with Mr. Basketball Secretary when the chance arises.



I know you will see him because the President will need to have state Oval Office summits with Secretary Duncan on the NFL or whatever it’s called.


I taught English in a community college close to my home so that I could set my schedule and get home in time my four children’s return from school for 28 years. So I know all about the phenomenon of administrators as crooks. Those who misrun the Hillsborough County schools are the real McCoy. This sad fact does not help the county children’s education. That the teachers manage to teach well and get students’ scores high enough to make this school system look good is a miracle.


The superintendent takes credit for what the teachers do despite negative working conditions imposed on teachers by her and the administration sanctioned by the board.


Board members are obsessed with the éclat of their position that gives them opportunity to strut around town to non-stop political luncheons and dodahs. They care as much about education as my youngest of ten grandchild cares about the lore of runic interpretation. This circuit of chow-downs has made the board members so overweight that they can’t offer obesity training for children in the schools because the board is in terror of invidious comparison.


Get the president’s ear on this situation, pray, Ms. Obama. Curtain lectures explain how I have prospered in a 52-year marriage.


Tell your mother hello for me and that she has an admirer in Florida. And keep on wearing those snazzy turquoise boots. Wear them to the next ball. Don’t let those anal-retentive fashion dictators wear you down. You are a breath of fresh air for fashion aficionados after the librarian couture of Mrs. Bush and the eclectic wackiness of Hillary Clinton. Ms. Clinton has finally adopted a uniform of chic pants suits that disguise her fire-hydrant legs so that one can concentrate on her beautiful face. I bet those pants suits are bespoke and cost a fortune. I am glad that President Obama was large-minded enough to give her that job. Now she can wear those pants suits in every color all over the world.


Fashion advice: don’t go cowardly and wear any Chanel. Chanel reeks of Republican insecure women’s retreat to the safety of the past. Republican women excel in fashion frumpiness.


Sincerely,

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

When You Are Being Deprived of Your Rights, Go to the People Who Are Supposed to Protect Them

Jeffrey Tignor
Consumer Inquiries and Complaint Division
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street SW
Washington, DC 20554
3/25/2009

Dear Mr. Tignor:

The Hillsborough County School Board has a program on the Education Channel that televises the board meeting including a citizen comment at the end.

The accompanying letter will outline what the problem is: This Education Channel is editing out my appearance in the board’s public meetings. I believe that the board members do not like my criticism of them and have instructed the station to edit me out.

Please considedr this a formal complaint objecting to abridgement of my free-speech rights. I believe that the Hillsborough County School Board, which members took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution, bears chief responsibility for the unconstitutional act as public officials.

Please keep me apprised of the progress of my complaint.

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

c: Governor Crist
Senator Mel Martinez
Senator Bill Nelson
Congressman Bill Young

In the End, the Feds Are the Rescue Team Against Third-world Suppression of Our Free Speech

http://www.e2buh2k.com/SDHC/index.html Public Education Broadcast

Public TV Gentlepeople:

I see you have cut out Citizen's Comment section again.

This makes three recent meetings in which I made a comment in the citizens' section that you have edited out of public broadcast; in the first instance of this practice, you deleted my comment section and resumed it with the next citizen. This practice of selective elimination threatens the First Amendment.

I pulled up the public-education site last night after attending the board meeting and saw that the citizens' comment section was on the tape. I was the only citizen to comment. Overnight citizens' comment section disappeared.

I suspect you have responded to the school board and Superintendent Elia's directions to cut my comment off the tape because they don't not want criticism of the administration and board, which is a citizen's right and duty. It's mine.

The board members took an oath of office to protect the Constitution, not to maul it. And Ms. Elia's orders to you gives the lie to the board's policy of honoring the United States Constitution.

I called after the first program which cut the citizens' comment section. The woman to whom I spoke assured me that it was still on the tape, that I probably had some technical problem. I now believe that she lied. I believe that the cutting was deliberate and remains deliberate and that the school board and superintendent instigate it and that you follow their orders and not the dictates of the First Amendment.

This cutting of citizens' comments violates citizens' First-Amendment rights and endangers any government funding you enjoy.

I ask that you restore the original three tapes with the citizens' comment sections intact.

Alternative to restoring citizens' comment to the three tapes you have abridged and a promising not to abridge citizens' comments in the future, please send me a copy of your sources of government funding so that I can file with the agencies for a compliance review of your station to ensure that you are not violating citizens' First-Amendment rights. I can also ask the help of the FCC and our elected officials to guard citizens' First-Amendment rights at Tampa's public-broadcast TV station.

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
tdecesar@tampabay,rr,com
LeeDruryDeCesaresCasting-RoomCouch.blogspot.com

c: Governor Crist
Senator Mel Martinez
Senator Bill Nelson
Congressman Bill Young
Jeffery Tignor, FCC
All members Hillsborough County School Board

Posted by twinkobie at 10:40 AM 0 comments

Getting Help from the Academic Pooh-bahs, My Old Chums

Dr. J. Bernard Machen
Office of the President
University of Florida
226 Tigert Hall
PO Box 11350
Gainesville, FL 33611
3/21/2009

Dear Dr. Machen:

Dr. James Hamilton got his Ph.D. at the University of Florida.

That he did I find disturbing. Such persons’ extracting Ph.D.s from Florida’s flagship university does not reflect the care the university should show in awarding this highest academic degree.

When Dr. Hamilton acted assistant superintendent at the Hillsborough County School Board, his email revealed that he did not know the difference between “your” and “you’re.” A piece of his writing instructing new board members on how to conduct themselves featured slapdash grammar and punctuation, lack of structure, and entire absence of rhetorical felicity. These deficiencies do not assure that his writing comes up to that the University of Florida should accept in its doctoral recipients.

Citizens have a right and a duty to question this situation.

Dr. Clayton Wilcox, who just departed Pinellas County School system as superintendent, got the Pinellas job soon after completing his doctorate at NOVA. Dr. Wilcox apparently didn’t know how bad his thesis was and gave a copy to a St. Petersburg Times reporter who passed it on to me. It was so ill done that I wrote the NOVA president and inquired how NOVA could award a doctorate for such slovenly work. The NOVA president didn’t answer me of course. You can view my corrections of Dr. Wilcox’s NOVA thesis here: http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6520837584997793196&postID=1354884959835335138

I believe a forensics of Dr. Hamilton’s unassisted writing would show a marked difference compared to that of the thesis that he submitted for his University-of-Florida doctorate. I believe that he bought and paid for that thesis. The committee that did not detect the fraud was asleep at the switch or, worse, on the take.

Such slipshod oversight of a Ph.D. candidate’s terminal thesis means the state's most prestigious university cooperates in loosing Ph.D.s who don't know grammar and punctuation much less other refinements of literacy. These scholars manqué head like lemmings to the education state bureaucracy. Presiding over the budget from their administrative perches, they bloat their salaries and perquisites and degrade Florida’s public education. Education of the state’s students does not concern these poorly educated administrators nor the political board members.

They are interested in turning the administration of school systems into rackets in which these scholars manqué extract from the budget hypertrophied salaries and other giveaways including the payoffs revealed in the Erwin case of the early 90’s. These greedy administrators’ take comes before a penny gets to the schools. The board wants not excellence in education but blow-up of personal éclat to preen around town at the pile-up of luncheons and galas that characterize the activities of the political class.

Such administrative and board specimens lower the intellectual status of Florida's state school system with negative results for its students.

The state network of K12 bureaucrats indulge in incestuous hiring practices that assure the habitués of the system never go outside the K12 administrative good ol’ boy network to advertise for talent. That system shows in the state-board clients Dr. Hamilton assembled with a phone call. They gave him the job with no advertising is my assessment. This hiring entropy guarantees the dumbing-down of the K12 bureaucrat hordes. Yet logos plastered everywhere say “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” That false, ubiquitous legend appears throughout school board and administration buildings. It does in Hillsborough County. Every piece of board stationery bears the legend to which practice gives the lie.

These fallacious logos have not prevented the board’s allowing Hillsborough County Superintendent Elia to turn the school system into a jobs program for buddies, sycophants, and kin. The superintendent does not advertise her patronage jobs. She hands them out. The board agrees to these unfair appointments; they roll by complicit board members on the consent agenda. Board members punch the green lights for them to sail by unquestioned. I have heard a board member question one of the Elia patronage appointments: a no-bid contract to a recently retired administrator. That a former administrator got a no-bid contract did not disturb the rest of the board. What rankled them was that a new board member ignored buddy money politics and questioned the fairness of the award. Veteran board members jumped on her for being disloyal to the staff. That experience quelled this board member, and she has since remained silent and dutifully complicit with the administration...

The only thing I have seen the Hillsborough County board get exercised about is the diminution of its travel funds, on which one board member spent $50,000 in single year while poor children in the county can’t afford supplies to participate in class work unless their ill-paid teachers buy the supplies as they often do.

Retired, double-dipping Dr. Hamilton has signed up a number of Florida school districts for his lobbying firm. They hired him despite his marginal literacy and poor ethical conduct while in the Hillsborough County administration. This included helping to torture under Superintendent Dr. Earl Lennard’s tutelage one Mr. Erwin until he finally departed the schools.

Mr. Erwin’s infraction was that he had discovered widespread graft, theft, and board-remunerated shoddy contractor building practices. Mr. Erwin insisted that the administration and board put a stop to these criminal behaviors. He gave up after a two-year onslaught of harassment led by the superintendent and condoned by the board to shut him up. Mr. Erwin filed a Whistleblower law suit, won it, and departed with a $165,000 settlement taxpayers, ponied up to pay for the board’s and administration’s criminal behavior. Only taxpayers got punished; none of the crooks did. This legacy means that the administration and school board of Hillsborough County think that crooked behavior is just another management option and still engage in it.

A second example of Dr. Hamilton’s untoward ethics was his insisting on the hiring of then protégé Connie Mileto, kindergarten teacher, to job of government-relations officer in Tallahassee. The administration passed over other candidates of more appropriate education and training. Also shoddy ethics also was Dr. Hamilton’s accepting a job last year created for him at the end of his departure into retirement by Superintendent Elia for $140,000 a year. She attached his name to the position before it appeared in the employment log and did away with the job when Dr. Hamilton left about $70,000 into the contract. One infers that this featherbedding job on the taxpayers’ dime gave him leisure to sit in his replacement’s office and cold-call school districts to assemble his client list.

This louche ethical behavior coincides with Dr. Hamilton’s faking writing his thesis at Gainsville I submit.

That you are a dentist surprises me, sir. I would have never envisioned a dentist as the president of Florida’s most prestigious university. But nothing prevents a dentist from augmenting his academic luster to act president of the state’s premier university by reading the classics. Lincoln read himself to sleep every night with Shakespeare. And there is also an advantage to a citizen of a UF dentist president. It makes possible the consulting of him on the mysteries of teeth as markers of antiquity in fossils if one is a paleontology fan as am I. Teeth are big in paleontology. There are knock-down-drag-out fights on mammalian teeth in scholarly journals. Recall that the Piltdown man’s undoing was his teeth didn’t match his skull. I bore my dentist to death about pale ontological-teeth mysteries every time I go into his office. I can now add you to my list of recruits to educate me on the lore of fossil teeth. .

On Dr. Hamilton’s case: If you can't it back, which would be best, I suggest that Dr. Hamilton's case demands that you insure academic rigor in the thesis committees. They should turn loose no more marginally literate Dr. Hamiltons to stroll out of the University of Florida with ill-gotten degrees. To my mind NOVA’s status of known diploma mill ranks better than a state university revered as a center of scholarship’s allowing a man of Dr. Hamilton’s writing deficiency to exit with a Ph.D.

Pray look to this matter, sir. The school’s reputation is in jeopardy if many more Dr. Hamiltons exit the university with Ph.D.s they did not compose because they cannot write the English language.

Respectfully,

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708;
727-3984142
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch. Blogspot.com

All Members Florida Board of Governors
Governor Crist
Commissioner Smith
All Members Hillsborough County School Board

3/22/2009

Dear Ms. Machen:

I was delighted to read in your online biography that you are a nurse. So am I. I hold licenseses in three states and reciprocity in the others. I let my license go into abeyance reluctantly years after I started teaching college English. But I know I can take just one renewal seminar and am back on the wards again. It was always a good feeling to know that no matter where I was in the United States, I could walk into the nearest hospital and get a job. Nurses are always in short supply. I think that's a measure of how special the career is.

I nursed for fifteen years before I decided I was tired of seeing people die and brushing false teeth. I started taking course work at Columbia University to get a literature degree with four little children under five hanging on my skirts.

But I still acted float nurse on occasion at the local hospital because we were poor and needed the money to buy the children shoes.

Your biography says you were the first in your family to graduate from college. I am not sure that is true of my Georgia family, but going to college in my generation was rare in the farming families that make up my Georgia clan. The boys, of course, were favored over the daughters. I note with pleasure when I go back each year to the family reunion that many of the young people are going to college.

Seeing your biography and picture reminded me of my writing to the wife of the CEO of Xerox years ago. I had founded the local chapter of NOW, and we got a lot of sexual-harassment complaints. A young woman and her male friend came to my office saying that sexism was rampant in the Xerox local office and asked me to help. Title VII had ensured that young women finally had access to jobs as sales reps, but too many of the men thought the women should not do their jobs but serve as in-house prostitutes.

I called up the local manager of Xerox and told him that sexual harrassment was gross and violated Title VII. He gave me a jocular "Little Lady" brush-off and said, in effect, that “boys will be boys.”

I knew how hard a Title VII charge was to process and how long it took, so I decided to take a shortcut and write to Mr. Xerox CEO. I just knew a woman would be as appalled as I was at this behavior.

I poured out the whole story to the lady.

Lo! Xerox shot a team of lawyers down to Tampa. The lawyer squad fired several of the satyrs, sent a few to Coventry, and gave the lot a lecture on equal employment opportunity and non-sexist behavior.

Years later the mother of a young woman who was of the group harassed came up to me in the vegetable department of Winn Dixie and thanked me for my help to her child. She said her daughter had done well in the company after the central-office intervention and moved to another company and up the ladder of success.

I don’t know if you can do anything to cure the problem I outline to Dr. Machen. It’s like a nurse getting her license without knowing how to give an injection or getting oxygen set up for a cyanotic patient. I have been married for 52 years and can usually get in a word or two to my husband about things that concern me. And he listens because I am a nurse. Everybody has great respect for nurses.

Welcome to Florida. It is fine horse country in the middle of the state especially around Ocala I believe. I wouldn’t ride a horse under any circumstances because I would be scared to try. But I am proud that you do. I am always glad to hear about women’s achieving in any area of life.

Sincerely,

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

Keeping in Touch with the Academic Pooh-bahs

Dr. J. Bernard Machen

Office of the President

University of Florida

226 Tigert Hall

PO Box 11350

Gainesville, FL 33611

3/21/2009

Dear Dr. Machen:

Dr. James Hamilton got his Ph.D. at the University of Florida.

That he did I find disturbing. Such persons’ extracting Ph.D.s from Florida’s flagship university does not reflect the care the university should show in awarding this highest academic degree.

When Dr. Hamilton acted assistant superintendent at the Hillsborough County School Board, his email revealed that he did not know the difference between “your” and “you’re.” A piece of his writing instructing new board members on how to conduct themselves featured slapdash grammar and punctuation, lack of structure, and entire absence of rhetorical felicity. These deficiencies do not assure that his writing comes up to that the University of Florida should accept in its doctoral recipients.

Citizens have a right and a duty to question this situation.

Dr. Clayton Wilcox, who just departed Pinellas County School system as superintendent, got the Pinellas job soon after completing his doctorate at NOVA. Dr. Wilcox apparently didn’t know how bad his thesis was and gave a copy to a St. Petersburg Times reporter who passed it on to me. It was so ill done that I wrote the NOVA president and inquired how NOVA could award a doctorate for such slovenly work. The NOVA president didn’t answer me of course. You can view my corrections of Dr. Wilcox’s NOVA thesis here: http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6520837584997793196&postID=1354884959835335138.

I believe a forensics of Dr. Hamilton’s unassisted writing would show a marked difference compared to that of the thesis that he submitted for his University-of-Florida doctorate. I believe that he bought and paid for that thesis. The committee that did not detect the fraud was asleep at the switch or, worse, on the take.

Such slipshod oversight of a Ph.D. candidate’s terminal thesis means the state's most prestigious university cooperates in loosing Ph.D.s who don't know grammar and punctuation much less other refinements of literacy. These scholars manqué head like lemmings to the education state bureaucracy. Presiding over the budget from their administrative perches, they bloat their salaries and perquisites and degrade Florida’s public education. Education of the state’s students does not concern these poorly educated administrators nor the political board members They are interested in turning the administration of school systems into rackets in which these scholars manqué extract from the budget hypertrophied salaries and other giveaways including the payoffs revealed in the Erwin case of the early 90’s. These greedy administrators’ take comes before a penny gets to the schools. The board wants not excellence in education but blow-up of personal éclat to preen around town at the pile-up of luncheons and galas that characterize the activities of the political class.

Such administrative and board specimens lower the intellectual status of Florida's state school system with negative results for its students.

The state network of K12 bureaucrats indulge in incestuous hiring practices that assure the habitués of the system never go outside the K12 administrative good ol’ boy network to advertise for talent. That system shows in the state-board clients Dr. Hamilton assembled with a phone call. They gave him the job with no advertising is my assessment. This hiring entropy guarantees the dumbing-down of the K12 bureaucrat hordes. Yet logos plastered everywhere say “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer.” That false, ubiquitous legend appears throughout school board and administration buildings. It does in Hillsborough County. Every piece of board stationery bears the legend to which practice gives the lie.

These fallacious logos have not prevented the board’s allowing Hillsborough County Superintendent Elia to turn the school system into a jobs program for buddies, sycophants, and kin. The superintendent does not advertise her patronage jobs. She hands them out. The board agrees to these unfair appointments; they roll by complicit board members on the consent agenda. Board members punch the green lights for them to sail by unquestioned. I have heard a board member question one of the Elia patronage appointments: a no-bid contract to a recently retired administrator. That a former administrator got a no-bid contract did not disturb the rest of the board. What rankled them was that a new board member ignored buddy money politics and questioned the fairness of the award. Veteran board members jumped on her for being disloyal to the staff. That experience quelled this board member, and she has since remained silent and dutifully complicit with the administration.

The only thing I have seen the Hillsborough County board get exercised about is the diminution of its travel funds, on which one board member spent $50,000 in single year while poor children in the county can’t afford supplies to participate in class work unless their ill-paid teachers buy the supplies as they often do.

Retired, double-dipping Dr. Hamilton has signed up a number of Florida school districts for his lobbying firm. They hired him despite his marginal literacy and poor ethical conduct while in the Hillsborough County administration. This included helping to torture under Superintendent Dr. Earl Lennard’s tutelage one Mr. Erwin until he finally departed the schools.

Mr. Erwin’s infraction was that he had discovered widespread graft, theft, and board-remunerated shoddy contractor building practices. Mr. Erwin insisted that the administration and board put a stop to these criminal behaviors. He gave up after a two-year onslaught of harassment led by the superintendent and condoned by the board to shut him up. Mr. Erwin filed a Whistleblower law suit, won it, and departed with a $165,000 settlement taxpayers, ponied up to pay for the board’s and administration’s criminal behavior. Only taxpayers got punished; none of the crooks did. This legacy means that the administration and school board of Hillsborough County think that crooked behavior is just another management option and still engage in it.

A second example of Dr. Hamilton’s untoward ethics was his insisting on the hiring of then protégé Connie Mileto, kindergarten teacher, to job of government-relations officer in Tallahassee. The administration passed over other candidates of more appropriate education and training. Also shoddy ethics also was Dr. Hamilton’s accepting a job last year created for him at the end of his departure into retirement by Superintendent Elia for $140,000 a year. She attached his name to the position before it appeared in the employment log and did away with the job when Dr. Hamilton left about $70,000 into the contract. One infers that this featherbedding job on the taxpayers’ dime gave him leisure to sit in his replacement’s office and cold-call school districts to assemble his client list.

This louche ethical behavior coincides with Dr. Hamilton’s faking writing his thesis at Gainsville I submit.

That you are a dentist surprises me, sir. I would have never envisioned a dentist as the president of Florida’s most prestigious university. But nothing prevents a dentist from augmenting his academic luster to act president of the state’s premier university by reading the classics. Lincoln read himself to sleep every night with Shakespeare. And there is also an advantage to a citizen of a UF dentist president. It makes possible the consulting of him on the mysteries of teeth as markers of antiquity in fossils if one is a paleontology fan as am I. Teeth are big in paleontology. There are knock-down-drag-out fights on mammalian teeth in scholarly journals. Recall that the Piltdown man’s undoing was his teeth didn’t match his skull. I bore my dentist to death about pale ontological-teeth mysteries every time I go into his office. I can now add you to my list of recruits to educate me on the lore of fossil teeth.

On Dr. Hamilton’s case: I suggest that it demands that you insure academic rigor in the thesis committees. They should turn loose no more Dr. Hamiltons to stroll out of the University of Florida with ill-gotten degrees. To my mind NOVA’s status of known diploma mill ranks better than a state university revered as a center of scholarship’s allowing a man of Dr. Hamilton’s writing deficiency to exit with a Ph.D.

Pray look to this matter, sir. The school’s reputation is in jeopardy if many more Dr. Hamiltons exit the university with Ph.D.s they did not compose because they cannot write the English language.

Respectfully,

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708;

727-3984142

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch. Blogspot.com

All Members Florida Board of Governors

Governor Crist

Commissioner Smith

Bio of Ms. Machen. Don't underestimate nurses. Many talented women who today would be doctors or university presidents went into nursing because society steers women into such fields. Ms. Machen sounds like a stand-up gal. I am counting on her help in the project of neutralizing ther malignant Hamilton's influence on the K12 system. He's a loser and a lout. ldd

A former nurse and an avid horse enthusiast, Chris Machen became the first lady of the University of Florida when her husband, Bernie, became the university's 11th president in January 2004.

The former Chris Ackerman was born in St. Louis and became interested in nursing at a young age, working as a nurse's aide. She attended St. Louis University and graduated with a degree in nursing, the first person in her family to earn a college degree. It was also at St. Louis University that she met Bernie, who was studying dentistry.

Her first job was in what then was known as the "sick nursery" at Cardinal Glennon Memorial Hospital for Children in St. Louis. She then taught nursing at the University of Iowa, followed by a 12-year stretch working in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's University Hospital. When Dr. Machen accepted a job as dean of the School of Dentistry at the University of Michigan in 1989, Mrs. Machen switched from the NICU to pediatric home health nursing.

When her husband became provost at Michigan in 1996, Mrs. Machen left nursing to spend more time with the couple's daughter and two sons.why not before The family moved to Salt Lake City in 1998, when Dr. Machen was named president of the University of Utah.

Today, Mrs. Machen uses what little spare time she has for walking, reading and horseback riding. Known for her ability to bring people together for a common cause, she is active in health-related community activities, such as Healthy Gator 2010, part of the nationwide Healthy Campus 2010 initiative for students, faculty and staff. She also serves as a member of UF's Sustainability Committee and as honorary chair of the Zero Waste Task Force, both part of the university's efforts to reduce its impact on the environment.

Additionally, Mrs. Machen serves with the Harn National Arts Council, the Performing Arts Board, the Fine Arts Advisory Board, the Friends of Music Board (honorary member), the Child Advocacy Board, the Boys and Girls Club Board, the Florida 4-H Board, the Florida Folklife Council and the Western Folklife Center Board in Elko, Nev.

3/22/2009

Dear Ms. Machen:

I was delighted to read in your online biography that you are a nurse. So am I.

I nursed for fifteen years before I decided I was tired of seeing people die and brushing false teeth. I started taking course work at Columbia University with four little children under five hanging on my skirts.

But I was still float nurse on occasion at the local hospital because we were poor and needed the money.

Your biography says you were the first in your family to graduate from college. I am not sure that is true of my Georgia family, but going to college in my generation was rare in the farming families that make up my Georgia clan. My ancestors got a land grand holding from Queen Anne and immediately put in crops of cotton. I used to pick cotton for my grandmother in the summertime.

I note with pleasure when I go back each year to the family reunion that many of the young people are going to college.

Seeing your biography and picture reminded me of my writing to the wife of the CEO of Xerox years ago. I had founded the local chapter of NOW, and we got a lot of complaints about sexual harassment. A young woman and a male friend came to my college office saying that sexism was rampant in the local office. Title VII had ensured that young women finally got jobs as sales reps, but too many of the men thought the women should not do their jobs but serve as in-house prostitutes.

I called up the manager of Xerox and told him that such behavior was gross and violated Title VII. He gave me a jocular brush-off and said, in effect, that “boys will be boys.”

I knew how hard a Title VII charge was to process and how long it took, so I decided to take a shortcut and write to Mr. Xerox CEO. I just knew a woman would be as appalled as I was at this behavior.

So I got the librarian to get me the address. I poured out the whole story to the lady.

And lo! Xerox shot a team of lawyers down to Tampa. They fired several of the satyrs, sent a few to Coventry, and gave the lot a lecture on equal employment opportunity and appropriate behavior.

Years later the mother of a young woman who was of the group harassed came up to me in the vegetable department of Winn Dixie and thanked me for my help to her child. She said she had done well in the company and moved to another company and up the ladder of success. It's important for us to make these oddyseys of our young women easier than in our time.

I don’t know if you can do anything to cure the problem I outline to Dr. Machen. Getting a Ph.D. without being able to write is like a nurse getting a license without knowing how to give an injection or getting oxygen set up for a cyanotic patient. I have been married for 52 years and can usually get in a word or two to my husband about things that concern me.

Welcome to Florida. It is fine horse country in the middle of the state especially around Ocala. I wouldn’t ride a horse under any circumstances. I would be scared to try. But I am proud that you do. I am always glad to hear about women’s achieving in any area of life.

Sincerely,

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708