Touching Base With All of the Usual Suspects

Ms. Elia's Dog Tiny

Copies of this email and of the charge email went to all members of Section Five of the Special-ed section of the administrative staff. lee


Mr. Nick Cox
Regional Director / Circuit 13 Administrator
Florida Child Protection
9393 North Florida Avenue
Tampa 33612
10/14/2009


Dear Mr. Cox:

Enclosed you will find a Florida Child Protection charge of endemic child abuse by the Special-ed supervisors Area 5 in the Hillsborough County schools.

The administration and board are either too oblivious and incompetent to detect and acknowledge this abuse or know about it but pretend they don't so as to be exempt from dealing with the problem.

I understand that you serve on the County Children's Board.

I fear that this association will present a dilemma for your disinterested response to this charge. The schools' superintendent, a school board member, and one other school official serve on the county board.

Hence, your membership on the County Children's Board may result in your immersion in a clan-ethos that impedes your and others of the board's effectively dealing with my complaint against the schools for child abuse. I urge you to resist being one of the Hillsborough County Children's Board psychological cliques which might cause you to ignore or downplaying this charge. I expect you treat it as a charge divorced from your County Children's Board membership and examined for its Florida Child Protection mandate.

The Bay Area's political and quasi-political participants and groupies make hard a citizen's getting disinterested attention to complaints about problems such as this one. As representative of a state agency, I expect you to surmount that mind-set for the children's sake.

I requested a hearing from Chair Jami before the County Children's Board of which you are member. The Children's Board Web site says the board welcomes visitor participation..
Two teachers and I can bring added data that will flesh out the case were the board to grant us an interview.

May I please hear from you about your plans to deal with my complaint?

Respectfully,

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 22708
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com






Governor Crist's Child Abuse Prevention and Permanency Advisory Council.
Eric Eikenberg, Chief of Staff of Governor Crist
Chair Busi and All Members, Hillsborough County School Board
All Members Hillsborough County School Board

Another Appeal for Help; I Know That Somebody Is Out There in the Far Reaches of Intergalactic Humanism Who Will Sooner or Later Pick Up Our Signals

To: Florida Child Welfare Board

From: Lee Drury De Cesare; citizen, 15316 Gulf Boulevard 802; Madeira Beach, FL33708;727-398-4142; tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Oct. 14

From: lee de cesare [mailto:tdecesar@taMPAbay.rr.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 11:50 AM
To: 'linda.cobbe@sdhc.k12.fl.us'
Subject: Public Information

Ms. Cobbe: May I have the names of the eight (or whatever the number) Special Ed managers such as Mr. Ron Smiley? Thank you. ldd

Subject: Systemic Child Abuse in the Hillsborough County Special Education Department Please consider this a formal request for the Florida Child Welfare Agency to review the patterns and practices of abuse by administrators in the Hillsborough County Special Education Department and in the Personnel and Professional Standards offices.

Practices of administrative child abuse came to light during a false charge of child abuse against a teacher by special-ed administrators Smiley, Morris, and Sosa. Kemp suffered extended punishment.

Teacher Steve Kemp has an education blog that sometimes includes issues that relate to the Hillsborough County schools. The blog is serious and deals with education issues in a respectful manner. It sometimes discusses issues that relate to the Hillsborough County school system.

Reader comments may be flippant, but Editor Kemp's comments are uniformly serious. Nevertheless, the blog caused the Professional Standards office to target Mr. Kemp on any pretext because the administration and board hate blogs because blogs provide information that does not agree with the Community Affairs' sanitized information of board and administration activities and decisions to make them look good.

The problem with Mr. Kemp's blog or any blog comes down to the fact that the administration and board want only information sanitized by the Community Affairs staff to reach the public about their running of the schools.

In a broader sense, the reason for board and administration hostility to teacher blogs has to do with their unwillingness to tolerate Constitutional free-speech discussions about the school system's administrative and board actions. They want to hide from the public what really goes on in administrative and board activities and decisions so that the public will remain ignorant of anything amiss and will believe that the Community Affairs gloss of school matters constitutes valid report of what goes on in the schools.

Innocuous as it was, Teacher Kemp's education blog represented a threat to that public-relations system of sanitizing reporting on the board's and administration's activities and decisions, hence was viewed by the board and ROSSAC administration as a threat that put Mr. Kemp on the administration's troublemaker watch list.

Teachers on this watch list are charged with Professional Standards violations on the slightest pretext to scare them about losing their job so that they discontinue blogs.

Teacher Kemp's class did not make a year ago, so Section 5 Supervisor Smiley and Principal Morris threw him into a classroom of profoundly retarded children whom he lacked training to superintend. He did not know the state restraint laws, for example.

Both Mr. Smiley's and Ms. Morris's job descriptions say that they are supposed to brief teachers before sending them into a classroom. One infers that this administrative obligation especially applies to teachers such as Kemp, who don't know the rules in a new teaching environment. Smiley and Morris ignored their documented duty and injected Steve Kemp into a classroom of profoundly retarded students with no briefing by the two administrators as was their obligation according to their job descriptions. An administrator named Sosa was also involved.

The department's giving seminars in different aspects of special ed testifies to special-ed's teachers' not knowing all aspects of the field. Morris, Sosa, and Smiley should have known that fact and responded by briefing Steve on what he did not know about care rituals of the children whom these senior supervisors put him in charge of .

The state restraint law represented a mystery to Steve. Mr. Smiley and Principal Morris gave Steve no data on restraint policy before putting him into a class room for profoundly retarded students.

Two of the retarded youngsters were large boys of about 175 pounds each who wanted to escape from the classroom by slipping out a door.

Worth noting is that besides the door to the hall, a door to an adjoining classroom was left unlocked. Steve Kemp says this room contained medical substances which if ingested by the wandering boys could have been injurious or worse. Potent evidence of supervisory careless attitudes toward student safety is that the supervisors had put these profoundly retarded children in a storage room instead of a classroom. The storage room--really a junk room-- had large objects with loose articles piled on top. The objects were pushed up against the room's walls. The two retarded boys were especially curious to investigate these insecure piles of materials and could reach to the top of the large objects to dislodge and cause fall the objects scattered atop them The falling objects would endanger themselves and others.



The senior teacher left Steve alone with the class while she went on some errand. The two large boys were in a mood to slip out of the classroom. Steve found a cord (given the inflammatory designation of a "coaxial cable" in the Professional Standards report) and looped it through the back of one boy's bus restraint to keep him from escaping while Steve chased the other escaping boy.

This stationery boy had still worn what apparently was a bus restraint. If I correctly understand the online state restraint guidelines, an attendant should have be removed the bus restraint when the student arrived in the classroom. But the previous attendant had left the bus restraint on the student. One infers that this regular staff person did not remove the bus restraint for staff convenience so that an attendant would not have to go to the trouble of putting the restraint on the boy again at the end of the day.

This dereliction of state restraint rules by regular staff apparently went unadmonished and unreported to Professional Standards by the supervisory staff of Mr. Smiley and Ms. Morris.

After Steve had pulled the cord through the loops in the back of the bus restraint and secured the seated student to the desk, Mr. Smiley and Ms. Morris entered the room.

Ms. Morris told Steve to remove the cord from the back of the bus restraint apparatus, that she "didn't want to lose my job." Steve says she gave the information quietly, but Ms. Morris reported to the Professional Standards investigator according to the investigator's notes that she had raised the roof. Mr. Smiley said nothing. He later maintained that the cord that Steve had looped to the bus restraint in the back went all the way around the boy. A physical-therapy observer refused to confirm this statement of Mr. Smiley. After these scenes, six days later Mr. Smiley went down to the Sheriff's office and filed a felony child-abuse complaint against Steve Kemp. Ms. Morris backed him up and augmented her performance when she had discovered that Steve had looped the cord through the back of the bus restraint's loops.

Why these two administrators left a child abuser teacher in charge of these same children in the same classroom for the next six days after deeming him a child abuser remains a mystery of these special-ed administrative minds.

The sheriff dismissed the charge the same day Mr. Smiley filed it. If one were to ask me why I think Mr. Smiley and Ms. Ross filed a cooked-up charge against Steve Kemp from circumstances that the sheriff found unworthy of a charge as well as a charge with the Professional Standards office, I would say that I infer that they thought lying about a substitute teacher's behavior ranked in their ethics system an acceptable way to call attention to themselves in the administrative hierarchy to hasten their climb up the employment ladder perhaps even as far as an office in ROSSAC.

Despite the Sheriff's throwing Mr. Smiley's charge against Kemp out, the Professional Standards office kept the charge extant for more than a year during which he was put on suspension with all the attendant worries of losing his job.

After a year had elapsed with Steve still on suspension, board member Susan Valdes asked Mr. Valdez, personnel director, how much longer the suspension would be in effect. Mr. Valdez said it was hard to tell because the investigation was incomplete. Ms. Valdes made no follow-up question. Nor did any of the other board members ask a question about this mysterious prolongation of a charge the sheriff had thrown out the day Mr. Smiley filed it.

A rational person would say that the few people interviewed should not have consumed a year's time. So there must have been some other motive unfolding. It is hard not to conclude that Mr. Valdez was foot dragging at the behest of the superintendent to pressure Steve Kemp to abandon his blog and to serve as an example to frighten the district's teachers so that they would not question the board and administration's mess-ups.

I believe a state agency such as yours, Mr. Cox, can get a copy of the Professional Standards account of this charge gratis and make your own judgment about the Professional Standards case against Teacher Kemp based on Mr. Smiley's and Ms. Morris's assertions. I had to pay $73.00 for mine as a citizen.

The fact remains that the board and administration kept Mr. Kemp on suspension for over a year because of this false restraint charge of child abuse while the administrators themselves had committed a series of actions that endangered the welfare of the children. But the Professional Standards office punished no one but teachers. Administrators, no matter how egregious their behavior, are exempt from Professional Standards punishment.

Thank goodness, Steve refused to buckle to administration-and-board coercion and still maintains his blog. That is the only good thing that has come out of this bizarre case. It gave a lone teacher the opportunity to stand up for his individual rights and dignity.

I infer that publicity on the Kemp case by blogs and comments from the public at board meetings effected Steve's being taken off suspension and returned to the classroom after more than a year.

The administration and board are reluctant to have the public know how badly they treat teachers because the public loves teachers of their own school years and reveres the teachers of the present who teach their children. This affection finds expression in John Adams' remark that "teachers affect eternity; you never know where their influence stops."

The administration via Professional Standards added three non-paid days to Steve's punishment from no cause but administration pressure to make him shut down his blog. These were in addition to the more than a year suspension he had already served.

Steve is now back in the classroom this semester, a sadder but a wiser pedagogue, but the board attorney, Mr. Gonzalez, delivered a thinly veiled threat after Steve addressed the board to ask why his case got such different treatment from that of an administrator at King High School who called pubescent boys into his office, ordered them to take off their shoes, ordered them to present him their naked feet, and proceeded to fondle their feet and crack their toes.

Steve pointed out that the sheriff's report on both his and the administrative toe popper got the same assessment from the sheriff but that he had got over a year's suspension while the toe popper administrator had walked away free with the administrative attitude of "He's just a card and a jolly good fellow."

The administration and board did not even order to toe popper to a psychiatric evaluation for the students' safety who would come in contact with him.

Mr. Gonzales had wrongly asserted at a previous board meeting that only Steve's sheriff's report said that further action might be needed by the board. The SPT had reported the accurate information that both Steve and the Toe Popper had gotten the same comment from the sheriff.

Then Mr. Gonzalez disputed with the reporter's accuracy. Mr. Gonzalez makes over $275,000 a year from tax monies. For that kind of excess in salary, the least he could do would be to master the documents that apply to school business and have enough public-relations sense not to dispute a reporter's accuracy, equivalent to waving a red flat before a bull because reporters are sensitive to any disparagement of their accuracy.

Belatedly discovering that he was wrong on this issue when he tardily examined the Sheriff's texts pertaining to Kemp and the Toe Popper, Mr. Gonzalez hastened to dictate to Ms. Kipley, head of Professional Standards, a redaction of the Toe Cracker file to gloss over his wrong interpretation and disguise it.

This feat demonstrates the board's and administration's and attorney's concept of integrity. When Steve Kemp addressed the board, he did not say he was dissatisfied with the disposition of his case; but Attorney Gonzalez switched the subject from Steve's question about disparate treatment of him and the toe-cracker, who got nothing save a mild rebuke and an avalanche of jocular administrative comments about what a card he was. The lawyer delivered a horseback opinion with the sly and threatening suggestion that if Steve were dissatisfied with his settlement, he could reject it and go to a hearing.

This response evaded Steve's question and represented patent attempt to shut Steve up by covert threats because he had demonstrated not the abject acquiescence that the board and administration demand of teachers but the temerity to question the wisdom and fairness of a board-administrative decision.

For the board and administration and their attorney, this defiance was revolutionary stuff, harbinger of when les citoyens refuse to eat cake but mount the barricades to fight.

My judgment says the attorney was trying to coerce Steve with the usual oblique threat of job loss if he didn't shut up and not ever dare challenge the board again in an open meeting. Board meetings are on public TV and can let the cat out of the bag about how the board and administration mistreat teachers.

When I learned of the special-ed administrative child-abuse procedures via the Kemp case, I sent to Linda Kipley, Professional Standards chief, with copy to Mr. Valdez, head of personnel, and board members my own Professional Standards charges against the three special-ed administrators involved in the Kemp case.

La Kipley did not acknowledge their receipt. When I emailed the lady several months later to learn what had happened to my charges against the three administrators, I did not get an answer and had to repeat my question about the status of the investigation of my charges against Mr. Smiley, Ms. Sosa, and Ms. Morris. I finally got a response from Ms. Kipley that displayed a mish mash sentence cobbled from the words of my emails to her in which she violated all the rules of scholarship as well as of courtesy to one of the citizens who pay her salary.

To a job that should have a Master's degree in criminal justice, psychology, or sociology, Ms. Kipley brings a home-ec degree. She is the Poster Child of the administration's and board's hiring of buddies, relatives, and sycophants, cheating the taxpayers of qualified people for jobs that pay sky-high salaries while many teachers must work second jobs to make ends meet.

This ill-qualified woman considers such treatment of a citizen who helps pay her salary her right, and Ms. Elia does not rebuke this uncivilized behavior in an administrator. The conduct coincides with the fact that only teachers get Professional Standards charges; administrators don't no matter how badly they behave.

Copies of Professional Standards Charges Filed Against Three administrators:

To: Linda Kipley, Professional Standards From: Lee Drury De Cesare, citizen 2/11/09

Professional Standards charge against Principal Morris of Special Ed.

Please consider this a formal complaint against Principal Morris of the Special Ed division.

In the matter of the case of Steve Kemp, in which a filing by Mr. Smiley with the Sheriff's office alleged child-abuse by Mr. Steve Kemp, I protest its validity on the grounds that Ms. Morris along with Mr. Smiley and Ms Sosa bear responsibility in the situation for their not providing Mr. Kemp the instruction he needed before he entered the special-ed severely retarded classroom. The three's job descriptions detail those obligations that they they either didn't know or ignored.

Ms. Morris's Job Description:

• Proactivity: Demonstrates readiness to initiate action and take responsibility for leading and enabling others to improve the circumstances being faced or anticipated; • Organizational Sensitivity: Is aware of the effects of his/her behavior and decisions on all stakeholders both inside and outside the organization; • Oversees and is responsible for school’s instructional program and its results; • Oversees and is responsible for the safety and discipline of the school’s students; • Oversees and is responsible for the accuracy and timeliness of school’s records and reports.

Ms. Morris gave Steve Kemp no assistance that coincides with the obligations of her job. The only thing she said when she entered the room with Mr. Smiley and a physical therapist was that she “didn’t want to lose her job for child abuse.”

In fact, Principal Morris gave no instruction to Steve Kemp before she threw him into a classroom of severely retarded children with no debriefing. Steve had no education in or training to serve this student population. Ms. Morris gave Steve no advice or orientation to help him do the job right; she gave no information on state standards restraint rules. In these deficiencies, Ms. Morris shows derelict in her duties as a principal. Thus I file Professional Standards charges against her.

To: Linda Kipley, Professional Standards
From: Lee De Cesare, citizen Date: 2/11/09

Please consider this a formal complaint of breach of professional standards by Supervisor Smiley, Section 5, Special Ed Division.

Mr. Smiley I believe gave false witness to the placement of the cord on a student that forms basis for this charge against Steve Kemp. My comments act refutation of the charge of child abuse against teacher Steve Kemp filed with the Sheriff's Department by Mr. Smiley as well as with the schools' Professional Standards office.

Ms. Morris participated in and sanctioned the assignment of Steve Kemp to the substitute duty of teaching profoundly retarded children without ascertaining his training or giving him a debriefing on things he needed to know to function in a new teaching environment.

Mr. Kemp has no academic credentials in caring for profoundly retarded children. His special-ed education is in teaching children who have trouble reading to read better.

Mr. Smiley's Job Description: • Help teachers develop a strategy for the instruction and assessment of the subject area curriculum so that every student develops to his maximum potential; • Be responsible for assisting the administration in monitoring absences and arranging coverage of classes when no substitute is present; • To insure dissemination of information and subject area supervisors to all members of the department and to insure understanding of all directives issued; • To assist the Principal and Assistant Principal for Curriculum for evaluation of teachers within the department and, when necessary, work with teachers to improve instruction; • To become a trained classroom observer eligible to serve on Preparing New Educator Teams. • To work with teachers within the department to produce the highest standards of teaching (This includes visiting classrooms, making helpful suggestions for improving lesson plans, counseling with teachers within the department, and coordinating the work of the group to achieve departmental standards.

Although Mr. Smiley visited Mr. Kemp’s classroom, he spoke not a word to Mr. Kemp in accordance with the mandate in his job-description directives to educate a new teacher on special-ed protocols for that new job.

Instead after the lapse of a week in which he, Principal Morris, and Administrator Sossa left Steve Kemp in the same classroom with the retarded students he was to be formally accused of abusing, Mr. Smiley went to the Sheriff’s Department and filed felony child-abuse charges against Mr. Kemp for his hooking the harness one student had in place attached by Kemp because he entered the room uneducated in restraint protocols. Kemp had attached the cord through the back loops to the back of the bus restraint's loops with a cord to the chair to immobilize him while Kemp dealt with another child's trying to run away.

The sheriff’s office dismissed the felony charge that Mr. Smiley filed on the day he filed it, but the administration continued its baseless charge for over a year against Mr. Kemp when it is the supervisory people like Mr. Smiley who should have received citations for abuse of Professional Standards.

Principal. Morris's Job Description:

• Proactivity: Demonstrates readiness to initiate action and take responsibility for leading and enabling others to improve the circumstances being faced or anticipated; • Organizational Sensitivity: Is aware of the effects of his/her behavior and decisions on all stakeholders both inside and outside the organization; • Oversees and is responsible for school’s instructional program…and its results; • Oversees and is responsible for the safety and discipline of the school’s students; • Oversees and is responsible for the accuracy and timeliness of school’s records and reports.

Ms. Morris gave Steve Kemp no assistance that coincides with the above duties of her job. The only thing she said when she entered the room with Mr. Smiley and a physical therapist was that she “didn’t want to lose her job for child abuse.” She gave no help to Steve Kemp before she threw him into a classroom of severely retarded children. Steve had no education in or training to serve this new student population.

Ms.Morris gave Steve no advice or orientation to help him do the job right... In this lack Ms. Morris was derelict in her duties as principal; thus I file Professional Standards charges against her.

To: Linda Kipley, Professional Standards From: Lee De Cesare, citizen Date: 2/11/09

Please consider this a formal complaint of breech of professional standards by Supervisor Sosa in the Special Ed division. This charge acts refutation of the charge of child abuse against teacher Steve Kemp.

Ms. Sosa was one of three the Special-ed administrative employees who assigned Steve to the substitute duty of teaching profoundly retarded children without ascertaining his training. Mr. Kemp has no academic credentials in caring for profoundly retarded children. His education is in teaching children who have trouble reading to read.

• Ms. Sosa’s job description says that her duties include the following; • Provide support for ESE teachers at assigned school; • Assist teachers in monitoring the effectiveness of curriculum and materials used in the classroom; • Assist teachers in the pre-referral process of intervention strategies, observations, and conferences; • Provide in-service for general education teachers as needed; • Provide program-specific orientation and training for newly hired teachers; • Assist in developing intervention strategies in regard to behavior management and school discipline; Provide support for parents and function as a liaison to the school, parents, and community agencies.

Supervisor Sosa was derelict in these duties when she and Principal Morris with Area Director Smiley's sanction threw Steve as a substitute teacher in a room the population of which was profoundly retarded children. Neither she nor Ms. Morris nor Mr. Smiley gave Mr. Kemp any orientation or comments on his caring for this unfamiliar client base, not a word.

This behavior represents dereliction of Supervisor Sosas’s written duties. I therefore protest her behavior and ask that she be subject to a Professional Standards charge.

Liable in addition for Professional Standards rebukes are other senior people aware of the situation who did nothing to protect the children. These are Mr. Valdez, head of personnel ; Ms. Kipley, head of Professional Standards; Ms. Elia, superintendent; and all Board members, to whom I had sent emails regarding this situation.

Those cited in the above paragraph knew what was going on or should have known since their constant theme at board meetings is about child safety and their pristine dedication to it. They knew about what one infers to be the habitual derelictions of the Special-ed supervisors charged with responsibility of insuring that the children had safe environments and competent attendants; knew about the disgraceful junk room that the severely retarded students inhabited. These most senior people who constantly invoke "child safety" as their most cherished pursuit sat on their hands did nothing. Knew that Steve Kemp had committed no offense that deserved a year on suspension with an additional three days added to the final agreement in his case after the year elapsed; knew about the Professional Standards office's being used as a punishment and terror device to keep teachers silent and compliant for fear of losing their jobs.

I hope that the fact that this charge involves administrative personnel does not frighten or deter the Child-Abuse Department from treating this case like that of any other child-abuse complaint.

I hope there is no bureaucratic and administrative collusion that excuses the consequences of high-level employees and even board members and the attorney in this case from submitting to investigation and receiving the State Child Abuse professionals' judgment of the situation.

A lack of rigor and objectivity in response to this complaint will continue the injury of children in the Special-ed section of the Hillsborough County Schools, and defeat the mandate of the child protection agency to safeguard children's wellbeing.

I trust that the Child-Protection people will do their job in this case as in any other although my submission involves high-level members of the school system's hierarchy. Their practices of child abuse reflect an attitude of laizzez faire toward special-ed children's lax supervisors that is not acceptable in state employees charged with the safety and welfare of these vulnerable children.

Please let me know if I can provide further data or answer any questions.

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

c: Governor Crist's Child Abuse Council;
Eric Eikenberg, Chief of Staff of Governor Crist; All Members, Hillsborough County School Board; All Members Hillsborough County Children's Board; Random Special-ed Employees

This and That

Picture my NASA engineer son sent me and his father. Isn't it a noble looking piece of artistry as well as rocketry?

I think my readers would like to share the following from a guy who is not a fan. Or maybe it is a gal. He or she is young, I think.

What amazes is how much time he must spend doing explication de texte crack downs on my blog. I wonder why that is so important for him to do. Maybe he hates his grandmother, and I fill in on that obsession.

One does not expect such bitterness from the young mind. I am sad for the boy. I wager he is one of my seven grandsons' age.

May his demons leave him in peace. He is smart. He could write his own blog on a subject other than me which interests him. I think he would do well in linguistics because of his interest in grammar.

This young person is an example, alas, of why Freud's couches will always be a needed piece of furniture in this sad world. lee

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Monday, October 12, 2009 9:04 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Footnote to Use Your Noodle to Advance the Cause.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Footnote to Use Your Noodle to Advance the Cause":

"I may have written the quote you attribute to me about voting for Brand X because 'anybody was better than April.'"

Don't you remember? You wrote that little snippet when Schmidt was running against Susan Valdes in 2008, April was elected in 2006. When you wrote it, you stated that anyone was better than Valdes. Were you "pissy pants drunk" when you wrote this?

The day before the election you emplored people to go to the polls and vote for Schmidt. Thus you didn't change your mind about diddley. You can't keep anything straight.

You don't want to own up to your feeble minded rantings on Susan's $50K travel expenses either do you? You can't keep it straight. It was 5 years not 1. You have previously acknowledged this error and in having done so may well open yourself up to charges of libel. This is just like your Alafia Elementary rantings. You couldn't get pay rate of Smiths mentor right, flip-flopping on the rate of pay with every post.

Jealousy is not an issue here. I would never want to be a drunken, washed up has been who routinely embarasses myself. The only jealousy that is evident is in your envy of any younger woman who achieves a position of importance. As what little beauty you had in your distant youth continues to slip away, your jealousy soars to new levels of insanity. The problem is that you have always been ugly on the inside. Once your external beauty faded, all that was left is an ugly person, inside and outside and no-one wanted you. Not even Patrick. It's funny how quickly he fired you when given the slightest reason.

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

Footnote to Use Your Noodle to Advance the Cause

See comments below responding to first two readers. Further on comments follow to Readers Three and Four. lee

Lee Drury De Cesare

See comments below from readers. I have already responded to Reader One. Now let me respond to Reader Two on the transportation issue.

The first time I heard of the transportation fiasco, a former school-bus driver headed the division. I have nothing against upward mobility but oppose upward stupidity when it involves tax money and schools' well being. The key to climbing the job ladder in the school system is to demonstrate belly-up loyalty to Ms. Elia and the Keystone Kops board. If I mistake not, an administrator named Davis recently got the boot from lack of harmony with Ms. Elia.

The pricey consulting firm that the School Board brings in when there pops up a problem that exceeds the unqualified, meagerly credentialed coterie of dumb-cluck buddies, sycophants, and no-talent family members that the administration and board have hired in their jobs racket with bloated salaries in inverse proportion to their IQ. This choreograph trips ROSSAC's and not-a-clue board members' bringing in the Calvary: pricey consultants, many of whom themselves are dumb but rapacious specimens who set up firms with a shingle on the door and rapacity within also don't know their ass from their elbow. These specimens can't answer a problem that exceeds the lower-quartile brain pans of the resident board-and administration mess-ups. Birds of a feather will flock together.

The transportation-meltdown consultants rode in on their jetliner steeds at taxpayer expense, toured the disaster area of transportation, and composed a recommendation summary that said, in effect, 1. get scheduling software and 2. have more convenient places to park the buses.

These shallow insights were not deep stuff. The head of transportation, had she read industry journals, could have discovered this solution herself.

The price of this consultant Romper-room analysis in an report filled with grammar-punctuation errors cost a bundle: I have forgotten how much, but rest assured it was substantial.

Ignorant taxpayers coughed up funds that subsidized endemic ROSSAC and board stupidity.

Word circulated that the power brokers in ROSSAC advertised--an epochal act--and got a professional guy in the job to head transportation.

I hoped that he was doing ok. Evidently not. He must not have shown sufficient humility to Ms. Elia.

April Griffin claimed to be responsible for insisting on the outside hire, but only whimpered when Ms. Elia claimed credit and said this was an example of how ROSSAC and the board advertised jobs to coincide with its faux equal-opportunity claims.

I thought that buses were running on time after the new guy took over, but your email says that there has been a Saturday Night massacre for some reason that has escaped the somnolent press's attention as usual. I would like to know details if you can provide them.

You are wrong to say that I endorsed the guy you cite for the School Board. I think I asked him to answer a candidate questionnaire, for which I asked all the candidates. The challengers answered. The incumbents did not.

I learned my lesson tardily when I endorsed and gave money to Susan Valdes and April Griffin in their School Board races. That gesture was my own pissing-in-the-wind mistake, which I rue. I won't repeat it.

Susan Valdez signaled the real reason--partying on the taxpayer's dime--why she had run for school board by spending $50,000 in one year flying around the country probably in First Class to pick up the Cracker Jack awards the school national bureaucracies shovel out to each other to signify how swell and important the civic and intellectual pygmies are who bungle the running of schools across the country.

Instead of "cleaning up the schools" as Susan promised, she instead treated herself to $50,000 tax money subsidized travel larks, one trip of which I heard was to Las Vegas, not one of the country's bastions of education. La Valdes did these obscene deeds while the poor children in the county couldn't participate in class activities for lack of supplies supposed to be provided by their poverty-stricken parents.

Meanwhile, La Susan holds forth on the board dais no matter the topic on "saving every penny of taxpayer money" and any other irrelevant, moldy cliché she can dredge up from the shallow store of her understanding.

April Griffin started out with a brave request to have an item's involving no-bid hiring of a former administrator as consultant for some school project. She took the unprecedented step of asking that it be pulled off the agenda for discussion. This pulling off the board and administration conveyor belt the narrative of secretly arrived-at decisions that whiz by on the Consent Agenda on board nights with all the secrets of the gauche deals that board and administration hammer out in secret Star Chamber confabs represented an unprecedented chance for taxpayers to have a smidge of open government for a change and see and hear how their money funnels into the crooked power game that the board and administration play with public tax money.

April's request to see the behind-the-scenes product of board and administration misuse of tax money brought from Carol Kurdell, who has hunkered on the board since the Cretaceous Epoch and who rarely speaks except during election time, a rebuke for April's being "disloyal to the staff."

Ms. Candy Olson, who had savaged Mr. Erwin eighteen years before when he came to the board for help with his discovery of theft and graft in the schools, echoed La Kurdell. La Candy had told Erwin that he had "better have solid proof of his accusations," not that she was concerned about his discovery and move with all deliberate speed to investigate it. She evinced no curiosity about his charges--perhaps because she knew the circumstances first hand. La Olson joined Ms. Kurdell in her condemnation of Griffin's asking for an item to come off the agenda as lese majeste against the power structure in a rare instance of open government in the public choreographed and disguised agenda show biz of the board.

Ms. Olson is noted in the gossip mill for stories about her getting jobs for such people as an exotic dancer for convincing cops to pass up a traffic ticket on one of her family for drunk driving and who struggles for public-servant dignity weighed down by the piteous story of her judge or lawyer husband's email to the Ye Mystic Krewe dingdongs that announced his coming out and "never being happier" before their divorce, consummated in Sarasota, as I recall.

If Ms. Olson were not such a rabid supporter and participant in the corruption that goes on in the crooked purlieus of ROSSAC, one might feel sorry for her.

Griffin has the guts of a butterfly, hence shrank back in terror from these attacks by collaborators Kurdell and Olson, morphed into board Valkyries to protect the corruption corporation they help run. So Griffin slunk away, subdued by two of the dumbest women to pull frocks over their heads in Hillsborough County, to subsequently morph into a roll-over team player that very night. To help protect the corruption franchise, La April later went with Motel 8 Jennifer Falliero on a secret piney-woods diplomatic mission without portfolio to Ms. Smith, of the Alafia principal's debacle's getting bad board-and-administration publicity from an unusually alert press.

These two Disrelis manqué convinced Smith to resign the job with the apparent promise that the board and administration would take care of her. These two savants should take over Indo-China's diplomatic bog to clean things up over there.

Administrators never get fired unless they violate Ms. Elia's lust for constant praise; they just get moved around. Teachers' formula for this racket is "Mess up to move up" in ROSSAC.

I heard Griffin at a board meeting that the Alafia parents attended en masse--about 12 by my count; they gave me one of their Alafia tee-shirts-- sitting in the back of the auditorium waiting to speak out only to have Griffin come from the board dais to the back of the auditorium where they sat to convince these Alafia parents to call off their mike comments before the board to complain about the situation after La Elia's papal visits to Alafia to harangue PTA parents to keep Smith as principal. Griffin said it would injure the schools. La Elia had failed to budge these PTA hearties from their goal of getting rid of Smith, even when Elia pledged to send Smith and her assistant principal to Eckerd for make-over seminars on how to be human beings at $4500 a pop.

Compare that solicitude to the Professional Standards crucifixion of teachers on manufactured or peripheral charges to keep them mute about school affairs' board and administration mess-ups.

Roll-over Griffin succeeded. The Alafia parents didn't speak before the board because of April's pleas that they would harm the school system; they instead deputized an ass kisser spokesperson whom humility overcome at the high honor of presenting himself at the mike to the anointed board and delivered a message of obeisance flavored with flapdoodle to these "public servants" and Ms. Elia.

Board and Elia ate it up and knew they were home free. These are the kind of ga-ga citizens they want at the board during citizen comment time.

I have pledged since April and Susan made a fool of me never to endorse or support school board candidates. They speak bravely about reform on the hustings at campaign events, get elected, and then embrace the ancient patterns of corruption that characterize the board's and administration's running of the schools. April and Susan have done so with a bang.

Lawyer Gonzalez requested to speak and weighed in with a resounding endorsement of no-bid contracts. Demosthenes could not have topped his echoing praise of no-bid buddy-family-collaborator chits. That chance for this member of the bar's chance to endorse the procedure that violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights act comes from Dr. Lennard's giving Le Gonzalez the board-attorney job with a wink and a nod and no advertising six years ago in a no-bid maneuver due to the retiring long-serving attorney's worn-out synapses in the service of writing briefs that provided Jesuitical justifications of board malefactions.

Keep me apprised of the transportation tumult. I think it is representative of the way the board and administration solve their problems with Saturday Night Massacres a la Richard Nixon mode.

My fervent wish is to see the day that people trashed in such explosions of administrative and board cruel and unethical petulance will slough off their fear and come forward to hold press conferences in the lobby of the ROSSAC building and to harangue the board in the three meager minutes the administration and board allow citizens to speak to the public past the board and administration to the Public TV cameras.

Ms. Kurdell has shut down my free-speech rights to comment on agenda items tagged as audience participation. She confiscates my sign-ups. The board and administration don't like what I say, so I must be doing something right.

You are a good writer, a rarity in the ROSSAC panoply of marginal literacy. Best of all would be for you to start an anonymous blog on this area of transportation corruption and lay it all out on a non-stop basis. Suzy Creamcheese, the ur school blogger, is anonymous because she, like most teachers, fears for her job. Teachers note how Steve Kemp was crucified for having a blog. He was the most recent poster boy for the wages of exercising his free-speech rights.

Steve Kemp just survived the Professional Standards gauntlet that included a false charge of child abuse that the Sheriff threw out the day Special-ed Area 5 supervisor Ron Smiley filed it. This false charge gave pretext to the administration's keeping Steve on suspension for over a year. The board and administration have gotten away with such outrages for years, so both were quite nonplussed that somebody challenged their corrupt behavior. They don't have a script for that.

What Hamlet said he was reading when Polonius questioned him--Words, words, words--makes revolutions. If a person can write--and you can--he or she possesses the power to impact the kind of crime and incompetence that characterizes this board and administration.

I am just one little old granny of ten with deficient upper-body strength who ekes out what gains she can effect against the avalanche of corruption that infests the school board and administration.

Blog anonymous revolution is as easy as pie. Go to Blogspot.com and join us slender crew who fight corruption with words and use all the energy we partisan bloggers have while living ordinary lives that include all the things that average people engage in besides revolution.

I bet you want to know what happened to Ms. Smith, the Alafia malignant principal rejected by the school's parents.

Ms. Elia produced her a make-work job in an economic downturn with some gimcrack title and convoluted rationale.

La Smith makes about $60,000 a year for her featherbedding nest, equivalent to her principal's salary and twice that of beginning teachers.

Professional Standards would have crucified and put the ravaged body on display of a teacher in the lobby of ROSSAC for the kind of malfeasance Ms. Smith engaged in had she not enjoyed immunity to punishment that the board and superintendent assured because of her administrative status.

Once more into the breach,

Lee Drury De Cesare

I have not been sitting on my hands. Today I wrote a state legislator who grew up with my children to pittypat over to the FBI office and urge the boys to investigate our case against the school board. I told him to go in person and to be masterful and persuasive. Do the same with your state legislator. If you are afraid of retaliation from the ROSSAC Gang, get your mother to do the job. Mothers will kill to help their children. Helping their children is what mothers live for. lee

Response to reader 3: you are just jealous because I am so smart and cute. Your referring to my drinking cocktails insults a Georgia girl. We drink only from gallon jugs of moonshine until we are pissy pants drunk. It's de riguer in the Georgia outback from whence I emerged. I may have written the quote you attribute to me about voting for Brand X because "anybody was better than April." I changed my mind after I heard Brand X had close ties to Ms. Elia. It's every woman's right to change her mind. And don't try to change the eternal rules of gender privilege or I shall send you bed without your dinner.

Comment to Reader 4. Candy Olson is a puzzle. I have a feeling she has a lot of pain behind her mask and clings to the school board job and its connection to the administration as some kind of life line. That attachment is even more firm now that she is divorced, had to sell her South Tampa Beach Park house, and move into a condo down near the Hyde Park shopping area according to my Beach Park buddies.

News, News, News

See new comment at the end. lee

Tampa FBI Enclave Gathers to Ponder Corruption Charges Against the Hillsborough County School Board; J. Edgar Hoover's Ghost Hovers Over the Group in the Upper-right Ionosphere. He's Wearing a Red Moo-Moo.



I can't copy and paste from my Microsoft Outlook Congressman's email until my number comes from the publisher to authenticate it. So I can't put on my blog the message from Congressman Bill Young saying that he had sent my corruption complaint to the Tampa FBI.

I hope he sent the copy of my email to FBI Director Mueller too, the one saying I wanted Jacksonville or Miami FBI to investigate the charge because the FBI in Tampa was too cozy with the Bay Area power people.

That'll get the Tampa agents defensive. Defensive is good. Defensive agents will give my complaint more attention if they find out I have sent a copy to my congressman and to their director.

Let's set on our FBI eggs and see what hatches out. lee

Reader log-in:

This is wonderful! Maybe you will finally get these crooks! I bet if the FBI really does investigate Hillsborough's schools a lot of people would go to jail, but I bet it is like you say. The local FBI is probably friends with the power people in Hillsborough. Let's hope not. Maybe some of the board members will end up in jail as they should. The fact that they misuse taxpayer dollars to hire friends and family is horrible. That is stealing from children. Are they ashamed? No. They sit on that dais and think they are important when they are nothing but common criminals who belong in jail for ripping off the area's children.

4:08 AM

We mustn't jubilate. My years of experience in working for civil and women's rights attest that moving the government's dormant ability to solve such problems takes patience and persistence.

Follow-up is important. Nudging the bureaucracy along ranks pivotal. I must think of ways to do that chore. Suggestions are welcome. A zillion heads are better than one.

Anything from practical to bizarre gets my attention. Usually nagging is the tried-and-true mode to get the train started. I excel in that. After 53 years of marriage, I merit a Nobel in nagging.

Four women so far have won a Nobel this year: that unprecedented number gives girls growing up today role models to compete with venerable and stinky status of being dingdongs and sex objects. I think of my granddaughters always, always my granddaughters.

Bottom line: let's put this FBI project on our watch list. I shall keep pondering ways to push it along. Pitch in and write me your ideas or enact them yourselves.

Once you get started in this work, you see projects everywhere. Evil is a growth industry.

Meanwhile, I rev up to file with the Florida child-abuse agency for endemic child mistreatment that Steve Kemp's cooked-up case reveals in the Special Ed leadership and board's and superintendent's collusion in this abuse.

The new head of CTA has signed on to my blog readers' list. His name is I forget. His role I don't. He has a lot of flossy degrees, including having graduated summa cum laude. Who hasn't? I did. And I did it with four little children under six hanging on to my skirts in libraries and lecture halls for the usual four years in the challenging academic purlieus of NYC.

I bet Mr. CTA didn't attend a demanding university or college or have children clinging to his pants legs while he got his multiple degrees. Women have to be twice as good as men to achieve anything. So I say to the new CTA administrator, bring it on.

The CTA has lain in bed so long with the administration and board that it has decubitus ulcers on its cowardly hiney. Let's watch this new CTA head dandy to see if he possesses the right stuff to do his job of helping teachers or whether he folds and sucks up to the administration.

Don't be afraid to comment on your findings and conclusions in this new-leadership CTA matter. Mr. CTA Head Guy must prove to us who stand vigilant caretakers of the rights of downtrodden teachers that he possesses the right mind set to deserve this position.

Teachers need somebody in CTA leadership who stands on teachers' side for a change--not another sycophantic ass kisser and power suck-up of the board and administration like the previous head of CTA. lee

Nail Them Before Election: They Become Non Communicado After They Get into Office

Gentle readers, if you are going to send a campaign contribution, now's the time to do it. Even $25 puts you in the database.

I have sent what I have left over from Bergdorf Goodman's to Sink. She had the Siamese twins in her family. I think that is quirky and fun. McCollum calls the legislation to give health care to the 40 million who don't have it "socialism." The guy's all heart.

If you are not scared to, tell these pols that you request that they pledge to clean up the corruption in the Hillsborough County schools. No body will kill you if you do this. I will ask Mr. and Mrs. Irwin to come down from Georgia and be the stars of a fundraiser for your lawyer's deposit and put you in touch with the best First Amendment lawyer in town. He and I belong to Phi Beta Kappa's Bay Area Chapter. lee

10/6/2009

Dear Ms. Sink and Mr. McCollum:

You are top contenders in the governor's race.

Politicians make promises during campaigns that they never fulfill. They especially indulge in gaseous statements about how important the schools are and how they will support the schools.

After observing the Hillsborough County schools for two years after the administration and board manufactured a Professional Standards charge against my gay friend Bart Bartsell, I have become something of an expert on board and administration corruption past and present.

I outline these in enclosed letters to Mr. Mueller, director of the FBI, my congressman, Bill Young, Senator Charles Grassley, patron saint of whistleblowers, Arne Duncan, secretary of education, and Ms. Obama, the husband of whose presidential bid I supported early.

Citizens should not have to listen to pious false promises made by gubernatorial candidates about what reverence they have for teachers, students, schools, etc but that, once elected, the governor ignores.

A citizen should not have to appeal to the FBI to clean up the graft and corruption in Florida's local schools. In Hillsborough County schools according to my inferences from two years' observation of the board and administration, the two chief areas of corruption that need cleaning up are the illegal hiring racket of the board and administration and the savaging of teachers and trashing teachers' and citizens' free-speech rights.

Carol Kurdell, now board chair, confiscates my requests to address board agenda items clearly marked for citizen comment because the board and administration don't like what I say.

The school attorney, Tom Gonzalez, sits mute during this Constitutional shutdown of a citizen's Constitlutional right to approach elected officials for redress of grieviences. He also supports no-bid contracts because he got one from Dr. Lennard with no competition.

The board and administration keep teachers terrified and mute for fear of losing their jobs so that board and administration can continue power hegemony over money and hiring as well as other perquisites of office. A board member recently spent $50,000 in a single year on travel to pick up gimcrack awards in the incestuous award system in which school districts laud each other for their faux virtues.

I request that you provide specific pledges in plain English about what you, Ms. Sink, and you, Mr. McCollum, will do as governor to clean up the corruption of school board and administration in Hillsborough County, especially in hiring and shutting down teachers' and citizsens' free-speech rights.

I was a college English professor for 28 years and am skilled in the forensics of political piffle. So pray say plainly what you will do to take care of this problem. If you plan to continue business as usual, say that. Be honest so that I can make a judgment about whom to support and vote for for governor.

Respectfully,

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

c: Patrick Manteiga

Paul Tash