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

Allen Web-site statement: KEN WILL FIGHT FOR:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salary Bloat for Administrators, Pittances for Teachers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will publish your response on my blog:

www//Leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Literacy Finds No Fans at ROSAC

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

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

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

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

Dr. Lennard:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a school-district email:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The comma after “1994” separates a compound verb.

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

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







.

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


Mr. Hegarty:

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

How does a member of the public access these emails?

lee drury de cesare




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lee Drury De Cesare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With all due respect,

lee drury de cesare

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

From:Leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Mr. Hegarty:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As you were,

lee drury de cesare




Mr. Hegarty:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ms. De Cesare,

Below are the answers to your questions.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


ot.com







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

Who's responsible for the monkey biz? Who made these numbers up? Who hid them?

From: Lee De Cesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 7:50 AM

9/6/06 Tampa Tribune

The district sold the need for increasing the school impact fee on projections that enrollment was growing by about 6,000 students a year, requiring five new schools a year to keep up. Just three days after the commission's vote, a Hillsborough schools official told a state official that significantly fewer students were expected this year - a prediction never shared with the commission or the community. And on the first day of school, it became clear this year's enrollment projections were off. Now it appears enrollment growth might be only one-third of what was projected.

Scott, the swing vote in July, is encouraging the district to come back before the commission, take its lumps on the flawed projection and refine its numbers. District officials should heed that request because they currently have a credibility issue when it comes to projections.

The public and its elected officials need accurate information to make decisions regarding taxes and fees. If the process of projecting enrollment is flawed, as it appears to be, it should be refined to prevent more surprises.

Mr. Hegarty:

I ask for the public information of 1. the name of the "Hillsborough schools official [who] told a state official that significantly fewer students were expected this year---a prediction never shared with the commission or the community."

2. The name of the administrators responsible for making the projection.

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

I cannot imagine why the Tribune reporter didn't elicit this information in the name of the public's right to know with what competence the administration and School Board made this enrollment projection and with what degree of candor it published this public information. I also want to know which person(s) was responsible for conveying these data to the community.

Was your office responsible for conveying this information to the community, sir?

This is public information. Please don't delay sending it and make me ask for the information repeatedly.

lee drury de cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

grammargrinch@blogspot.com

leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com

Congressman Davis:

Below follows an email to Mr. Crist protesting his bad grammar and punctuation when he was Commissioner of Education.

The barbarism of the Education Commissioner's abusing the English language in a press release savaging gays, academic freedom, and the First Amendment offended me then and offends me now.

People who can't write Basic English and punctuate it correctly following the rules they should have learned in the 9th grade should have the humility to admit themselves unfit for public office.

They especially should not head the schools and contaminate the education of the young as is the present case in the Hillsborough County school system, in which Superintendent Elia continues the tradition of illiteracy of Hillsborough County school superintendents perfected by her predecessor, Dr. Earl the Pearl Lennard. Dr. Lennard, after a career in education beginning in a vo-tech classroom and continued to his retirement on an opulent golden parachute of tax money awarded him by a Board that supports illiteracy in superintendents couldn't punctuate.

Ms. Elia, also plucked from the mediocrity of the in-house candidates that always get the superintendent job despite the pretense of a "nation-wide" search costing the taxpayers $35,000, continues to mispunctuate sentences on the schools' Web pages with the Board's blessing. Students are not supposed to graduate from high school making such basic errors, but the Board gave La Elia a big raise the other day. They would have probably added her own nuclear deterrent if she could punctuate.

The highest-level administrators in Ms. Elia's administration practice barbarous illiteracy. Dr. Jim Hamilton, her Edgar Bergan in this administration, does not know the difference between the homophones "your" and "you're."

When you are governor, I expect you to confirm your stated dedication to education by passing a state law identical to that in effect in Massachusetts, the Number One state in education in the nation--as compared to Florida's 29th. That law says that school administrators must pass the language exams teachers must pass to get a job.

Those would have weeded out Mr. Lennard and Ms. Elia and would weed out the illiterate administrator candidates in Florida as it does in Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, you should ask Mr. Crist in the general election to meet you at the OK Grammar Corral to shoot it out with commas, semicolons, and apostrophes. I pray that as the Democratic candidate, you can punctuate while shooting straight, sir.

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

Remedial English 101

By Lee De Cesare Dear Commissioner Christ:

I have reviewed your press release below on the play Corpus Christi. You condemn it as an insult to Christianity because it portrays Christ as gay.

You condemn the university that allowed its performance. You condemn the Palm Beach Post for praising the performance. You condemn academic freedom as a license for arrogant professors to pursue vulgar ideas on campuses offensive, if not to the entire community, at least to sensitive, "thinking" persons such as you.

I do not challenge your magisterial mastery of the ethical limits for dramaturgy, the abuses of academic freedom as practiced by arrogant Florida professors, or the First Amendment excesses of the Palm Beach Post in printing its opinion.

Your reputation in pre-emptive homophobia is impeccable and appears intact in this criticism of the play's premise of Christ as gay. The gay community of Florida and even many in its straight community are well aware of the implications of this homophobic hostility on your part.

What I do challenge, sir, is your grammar and punctuation. This press release shows that you need Remedial English 101. You will find my interpolated corrections in red--the signature color of English professors who abuse academic freedom daily in Florida institutions of higher learning while flagging errors in crimson on student essays.

I apply the grade standards that I used for twenty-eight years for Freshman 101 essays: 50 percent for grammar and punctuation and 50 percent for grammar and punctuation.

I regret to report that you have five grammar felonies in this essay: three fragments, one subject-verb agreement error, and one spelling error.

I understand that the first press release misspelled "Taliban" but corrected it in subsequent press releases when someone from the teachers’ union pointed out the error. You get docked for that misspelling nonetheless; this essay is not a make-up essay. These serious errors count five points each: 25 points off. You have fifteen less serious errors in italics, comma use, capitalization, and pronoun-antecedent agreement. These cost you two points each: 30 points.

The 25 points plus the 30 points give you a dismal 55 minus points for grammar and punctuation. Since this error score totals more than the 50 points possible, you earn a zero for grammar and punctuation. I don't count more off than 50 points in this area; to do so would be like shooting somebody and then going over and kicking the body. The content part of your grade involves the essay's intelligence, originality, organization, and style.

You must trust your teacher in this area. I would be glad to send you my transcripts and academic honors if you doubt my competence. I grade your essay a C for content: you earn 35 points out of a possible 50. If we add your grade of zero in grammar and punctuation to the 35 you earn in content, your score for this essay is 35.

This grade flunks you.

My advice is to repeat it to improve your basic writing skills to a level that we citizens in Florida have a right to expect from Education Commissioner Charlie Christ. You say at the end of your press release that the legislature has the "ability to take almost any action without fear of limitation or consequence."

I wonder if this unbridled power makes possible this body’s passing corrective legislation that your press release demonstrates is urgent: a law making obligatory education commissioners’ passing a basic grammar and punctuation skills test as the price for being sworn into office.

With all due respect,

Lee Drury De Cesare

Original Message ----- From: Higgins, Deborah To: 'lee' Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 1:09 PM Subject: RE: Here is the statement you requested. April 12, 2001

Here is the statement you requested.



April 12, 2001
Remedial English 101


Original Message -----
From: Higgins, Deborah
To: 'lee'
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 1:09 PM
Subject: RE:
-----Original Message-----
From: lee [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2001 8:45 PM
To: edcomm@popmail.firn.edu

Subject:

Please email me the press statement that Commissioner Crist made on "Corpus Christi."

Thank you.

Lee De Cesare


Here is the statement you requested.



April 12, 2001

Desecration 101

By
Charlie Crist

Dear Editor:

A few weeks ago the world watched in stunned disbelief as Afghanistan’s extremist Taliban (I understand that your first press release misspelled this word and that you corrected it after it earned a "sic" from literate person.) government ordered and then carried out the destruction of two ancient Buddhist statues that stood at the crossroads of the Great Silk Route. To all civilized cultures, it seemed an act of unfathomable callousness, wiping away in an instant irreplaceable artifacts that had stood for more than 1700 years.

To Buddhists the act had an added dimension of cruelty, for it represented (The comma after "cruelty" is redundant; "for" is not a coordinating conjunction in this sentence but a subordinating conjunction equivalent to "because" and introduces a dependent adverbial clause.) not just the destruction of objects but the desecration (You have an incomplete correlative in this phrase. It should read "not just [equivalent to "only"] the destruction of images but also the desecration....") of images held sacred by that religion. Appropriately, the media voiced its ("Media" is the plural of "medium"; your pronoun should be "their" to agree with its antecedent.) outrage at a governmental act so profoundly insensitive to the religious beliefs of others that it took on the flavor of a violent personal assault.

You can imagine my confusion, then, when a few weeks later a Palm Beach Post (italics for title of a newspaper) staff writer praised Florida Atlantic University for funding an event that desecrates the accepted image of Jesus Christ. FAU sponsored a play called "Corpus Christi" in which (I infer this play to be more than one act; multiple-act plays get italics, not quotation marks.) Jesus is depicted as a homosexual who surrounds himself with a cast of lecherous and profane disciples.

As with the destruction of the great stone statues, the sponsorship by government of this enormously disrespectful act should appall any thinking person who honors the religious beliefs of others. (Logic: Let me get this straight: you compare the destruction of the ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan to a little play presented by students in Florida?)For Christians, it is a personal attack, (Superfluous comma: the present participial phrase is restrictive: it modifies the general noun preceding it, "attack.”)defiling the accepted image of the Son of God.

How could administrators at FAU have shown such poor judgment in spending taxpayers’ money for this purpose? Reflexively, they cite "academic freedom" as the rationale. Of course (A comma should follow this transitional "of course," a sentence modifier.)"academic freedom" is the final refuge in which professors hide when confronted with the absurdity and arrogance of their decisions. It is a wasteland entirely unmoored from standards, (Superfluous comma: the "where" clause is a restrictive adjectival clause modifying the general noun "standards.”) where any activity can be justified if it exceeds our "comfort level" by "challenging" our preconceptions.
Unfortunately, "Corpus Christi" (Use italics, not quotation marks for a play of more than one act.) does not illuminate our understanding of divinity. Stripped of its shock value, it is simply a sophomoric treatment of the Crucifixion. And in the end, all it "challenges" is this: Our (Don’t capitalize the first word after a colon unless it begins a sentence.)"comfort level" in the leadership of FAU.

Perhaps these leaders should have considered who would not sponsor the play before they decided to enfold it in the cloak of academic freedom.

First, no private organization in Florida was willing to pay to have the play presented to an audience. Why? Because the play is so ferociously unappealing that it would never turn a profit. (Treating an adverbial dependent clause as a sentence is a fragment, a grammar felony.) Surely, in spending taxpayers’ money, universities have some duty to reach the broadest possible audience with information.

Second, no newspaper would bring the play to the masses by printing its script because the language is so foul. If the Palm Beach Post (Italicize the name of a newspaper.) thinks "Corpus Christi"(Use italics for a play of more than one act.) shows great literary merit, why doesn’t it print the text for its readers? Because if it did, it would lose part of its readership, and therefore its revenue. (This is your second dependent adverbial clause treated as a sentence. You have a problem recognizing a sentence.) Instead, the newspaper encourages the university to do it. (Vague pronoun reference: you have no antecedent noun for "it" to point back to in the preceding clause.) With your money. (This is a third fragment: a prepositional phrase treated as a sentence.)

If this bit of hypocrisy were not enough, the Palm Beach Post (Use italics: title of a newspaper.) then rails against the Florida Legislature for threatening to withhold money from FAU in response to "Corpus Christi."(Use italics.) Apparently the newspaper hasn’t heard of "legislative prerogative." It’s a phrase that acknowledges the Legislature’s (No matter how important you consider the legislature of this state to be, it does not merit a capital in Standard English.) ability to take almost any action without fear of limitation or consequence. In that sense, it’s a lot like academic freedom.

Maybe FAU had a point after all.

Sincerely,


Charlie Crist
Florida Education Commissioner
The Capitol
Tallahassee, FL 32399
(850) 488-9968

September 1st School-Board Candidate Review at Tiger Bay

In Bart Birdsall's statement at Tiger Bay, he emphasized that he was running on a gay platform because he wanted to help gay children gain acceptance and feel less negative about themselves. His opponent, Candy Olson, incumbent, has resisted Bart's efforts for years to make the schools a place less toxic for gay children. She appears to show signs of reluctant acceptance of the concept of protecting gay children from savaging in the schools, I believe, because Bart and mother Jane Boles of a gay son never gave up in their proslytizing the homophobes on the School Board. Birdsall's second opponent, Logan Cobb, stated that he accepted the need for teacher training in this area.

In a message dated 9/1/2006 7:48:17 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com writes:

Bart, Andrea asked me about why you didn't include other issues in your spiel. I said, "He's following his soul. He knows his role is to educate these people about the suffering of gay children. Practical politics is not his mode now."

I did it [emphasize the gay issue] on purpose, and probably a lot of people didn't "get" what I was doing. I did it for the following reasons:

1) Children are watching what we adults do. I know being gay as a child makes you feel very, very alone from personal experience. You don't even want to share it with your parents at first. You think you are evil, disgusting, vile, etc. And I was not raised religiously. I was raised by liberal parents, yet I still had those feelings. Imagine children growing up in conservative households! It's doubly worse. You think if everyone actually knew the true you, they will reject, despise, hate you. I did it for those children. I want them to see an adult who is openly gay, who is unapologetic, who is successful, etc. I carried a "Gay School Librarian" sign in the downtown gay pride march in summer 2005 for that reason also.....for the youth who are suffering to see someone who does not give a shit what others think or if he will lose his job, etc. Children are "out" in school now. These issues are in the schools whether people want to accept it or not, and the children are tired of teachers who are obviously gay but not helping them and not "out" and not being role models to them. They view these teachers as hypocrites. The teachers are scared to death to be out.

2) I want other openly gay candidates to run for office and not be scared to be openly gay. I hope young people will hear about what I have done and follow my lead. Sometimes all it takes is one person to do something like this and others will follow. Even if one person follows my lead, THAT person might be more charismatic and cause others to follow him/her, etc.

3) I want to normalize the discussion of gay issues in local politics and take the negativity out of the issue the way Ronda Storms and Brad Swanson have tried to tie negativity to the issue. I stand up as openly gay and running on a platform to help gay children with absolutely no repercussions (I have received no hate mail, no phone calls cursing me out, etc.) That's important. Notice what Brad Swanson attempted to do to Rose Ferlita. It backfired, but when you are not "out," people try to harm you. When you are "out" I think they don't know how to attack you.

4) I want the school board members to see me speak publicly about the issue so that they will finally do something about it and see that it is not taboo, and they will not lose their constituents on this issue. I want them to gain courage from what I do and say. Jack Lamb told me I did a good job as I was leaving. Candy claims there is training. Jennifer Faliero admitted it is just for new teachers. What about the thousands of veteran teachers? Notice how Candy won't even say the word "gay" when she talks about it. She doesn't want a quote tied to her with that word in the sentence.

5) I want gay teachers out there seeing me work alongside them or from a distance at other schools as an openly gay man who also talks publicly about it to give them courage to be more open about it. I know many teachers in the system (and administrators) who are gay, yet they are SCARED TO DEATH to be "out." Some people think there is no place for your private life in the schools. Well, those people should leave their wedding rings, all talk about their children, their wives, their husbands, pictures of their spouses and children at home then. It has to be the same for everyone. Either we all should have to leave our private lives at home or we all get to talk naturally about our lives. It should not be a double standard. I guarantee that when you sit in a lunchroom you will hear everyone talking about their personal lives at work EXCEPT for gays. We are the only people who actually play by the rules and keep our mouths shut about our personal lives at work. Everyone else flaunts his/her sexuality, even in the classroom, "Last night my husband and I went to a movie....." etc.

I don't talk about this to students, but they hear about it through newspaper articles, tv appearances, and they have all complimented me. They have told me, "I read the article in the Tribune about you, and it was great!" Children can often handle these things better than adults can. Basically, I'm tired of the fear in Hillsborough County. Everyone is so damn scared to be who they are (and I'm not talking about just gays), everyone is scared to voice their opinions. When I came out to my mother she did not blink and said simply, "You have to be who you are. You can't be anyone else." and I keep that in my head like a mantra.

6) I want Candy Olson to address these issues that she has run from for years. Ever since she was attacked back in 1994 for answering Equality Florida's questionnaire and responding somewhat positive about gay issues, she has run away from the issues. At least that's how it has appeared to me. She has said and done some really crappy things to me that I will never forgive or forget. Out of everyone I have ever met in my life I consider her a complete coward and a horrible, horrible human being. I actually respect Ronda Storms more than Candy Olson, b/c Ronda at least has an opinion. Candy simply says what everyone wants to hear. I don't know how she lives with herself. From my years of dealing with her I am actually revolted by the woman. I couldn't even eat my whole lunch at Tiger Bay with her across from me. I just ate the asparagus and the cake, and I only got those items down by turning so I could not see her. I believe Candy to be the type of person who would have helped the nazis round up Jews for the concentration camp in WWII and the entire time she is leading Jews into the trains, she would say, "I'm so sorry I have to do this to you, but hurry up before I get in trouble!" That is my assessment of the woman, and I doubt it will ever change.

If this were the 1950s no one would question why a black candidate is running mainly on black issues. Well, I am a gay candidate trying to make gay issues more acceptable, especially after Ronda Storms' ridiculous slap-in-the-face policy. I know so many SCARED gay teachers, scared gay students, scared gays who have no hope of being able to be "out" or open to their family and friends. I don't think that's how life should be. I'm doing my part to make Hillsborough County a better place to live.

I may have dumped my capaign in the trash can yesterday at Tiger Bay, but I did it as a gift to the gay community. Whether they appreciate it or not is another thing.

I believe there are many other issues I am concerned about, but I have been straitjacketed to 1 minute or 30 seconds, etc. wherever I have gone. This time I could speak for a whole 3 minutes, and I decided to speak about an issue that was important to me and many others, an issue very few people want to discuss: gays and schools....I could have discussed nutrition in the schools, but in the end, others can and will talk about that issue. I wanted to talk about an issue that many people ignore or maybe don't even think about.

Anyone who wants to know what it's like to grow up gay and go to public schools and the arguments for forging ahead with this issue should read Kevin Jennings's book *Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son: A Memoir* He is the founder of GLSEN and a personal hero and friend of mine. He will go down in history as a great man, for he began the discussion of gay issues and the schools back when nobody would discuss the issue. He went from living in a trailer park as a boy to Harvard and then to advising President Clinton in the White House on gay issues. This is someone with vision. I have no time for people without vision or passion in life like Candy Olson. I want to surround myself with people with strong passions and a vision of making this a better world. Someone who knows from personal experience about age or fat discrimination can and should take on those issues. I have to carry on with the gay issue, especially since it is still an unpopular topic.

That is the short version, believe it or not, why I did what I did at Tiger Bay yesterday.

Bart

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

I can't translate this email but I can give it an airing. It's from a financial consulting firm, doubtless the bloated fee for which the taxpayers paid unawares so that the local school officials could rip off the Westchase community. It appears to be the financial firm's output about the Board's and Elia's tearing up Westchase and scarifying the children there. It relates to the administration and Board's skullduggery with the land deals in Westchase.

The back story of that mucked-up event is that La Elia et al--always abetted by the Board of Potted Plants-- created the Westchase debacle with a thousand little kids crying and clinging to their mothers' skirts when the Board and Elia and shunted them to new schools. Rumor says that this scramble was to cover up Elia's overbuilding of classrooms when she was mishandling the building department prior to the Board's hiring her after a "nation-wide" search for $35,000 only to discover that the inside candidate, sitting in the building department immersed in a real-estate scam,was the in-locus incompetent for the job. Ignoring or participating in real-estate scams, covering up mistakes by jerking children around, being unable to punctuate all made La Elia irresistible to head a school system that requires children to master punctuation, not to cheat on tests, not to engage in real-estate rip offs, or not to engage in boundary flim flam.

I love the periodic dire warning in this firm's document dump purloined from the IRS that any person who discloses this information will be hung by the thumbs from some meat hook in ROSSAC. This is a hoot as a scare tactic, analogous to anyone in the school system's getting booted out of a job if he or she ask questions.

As villains, these Yahoos are Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern on speed.

Jim Hamilton's greasy thumbprint is on this document; that fact means it's a public project paid for--overpaid for--by tax money and hence public information. Imagination anybody's launching something on the WWW and saying it's a secret.

In any event, I am ready for martyrdom for the First Amendment. I will take my needlepoint and needlepoint away on my granddaughter Danielle's wedding rug in the slammer.

Following this document dump, I print Tish Dietrich's commentary--she's a mother martyr in the Westchase community-- on how the Board and administration--especially La Elia--ripped the Westchase community apart for the Board and Elia's convenience and delusions of grandeur, not to mention from their incompetence.

lee drury de cesare

Hi.

My name is Tish and I, my husband, and my 5 & 7 year old daughters live in Northwest Hillsborough County. This school district staff announced plans this past spring to utilize my children and approximately 1,000 others (otherwise termed by district staffers as “student stations”) as pawns in order to fill seats at schools that were undercapacity so more funding could be requested for building new schools. On April 18th the School Board members, with the notable exception of Members Susan Valdes and Jennifer Faliero, who seem to be the only two board members that actually hold strong to the belief that there should be a partnership between families and education, voted to accept the district staff suggestions for the massive reboundary plan after having provided our families just over 1 months notice to “provide community input”.

Our story begins when our children entered the 2005/2006 school year at Westchase Elementary School. Westchase Elementary sits in the heart of the Westchase community of approximately 4,000 homes. It sits on property that was donated by the developer of the Westchase community as part of mitigation for being a development of regional impact. From the time of entering the school year, until February of 2006, none of the families of children at this school were ever informed that our school was at over-capacity level, let alone the inflated over-capacity number derived from implementing the final requirements of the Class-Size Reduction Act.

In February, the first inkling of impending trouble was provided to us by the editor of our neighborhood magazine that a meeting was being held at Mary Bryant Elementary school to discuss their overcrowding situation and the possible siting of a new Elementary (Elementary “I”) school in the Northwest. We were informed, and it was confirmed by news media staffers, that a task force had been created at Mary Bryant to get community input on how they should change the boundaries of the Mary Bryant school. As part of these discussions, the task force and district staffers, without having invited Westchase Elementary parents into the discussion, discussed also moving children from Westchase Elementary, specifically from two neighborhoods, into the new school as part of the redistricting process. Needless to say the Westchase community was angry at not having been invited into these discussions and we showed up, uninvited, to a meeting that was scheduled at Mary Bryant to voice our concern. We were told in no uncertain terms by the district staff that this was a meeting for the Bryant parents and did not concern Westchase. This caused a rift between our community and many of our Northwest neighbors because we were so outraged that task force recommendations were being allowed that affected us without our being invited. This was just the begin of a setup of monumental portions of pitting communities against communities and parents against parents. We were told that we would have our turn to speak at an upcoming meeting regarding the siting of the property only.

However, against state law, the school district staffers never gave formal written notice to the Westchase Community Association of the possible siting of a school site (Elementary “I”) within immediate proximity of two Westchase neighborhoods. When we went to this meeting in order to express our concern against rumors of reboundarying two Westchase neighborhoods to this new school we were told the only “input” the district was interested in hearing that evening was with regard to the school site, and nothing else. So, being concerned that our community would be split without our input, the residents fought the only way they were allowed to at that time, by writing statements of concern about the siting of the school right in the middle of two other elementary schools when the clear need for a location was much further north. Well, the district had already purchased land in an attempt to build Elementary X at North Mobley in the Northwest and had been halted by legal action by the surrounding communities against that siting, so they NEEDED this site to go through unopposed. Therefore, in an effort to quiet our voices, and to have our community association not begin legal action about improper notice of a school siting, a “comfort letter” was sent to the homes of all Westchase Elementary families as follows:

February 3, 2006

Dear Parents,

After a thorough analysis and input from parents, school district staff has concluded that children attending Westchase Elementary will not be transferred to the new school (Elementary School “I”) planned in the area.

The new attendance boundaries for next school year have not yet been finalized. The proposed boundary maps will be available for public input soon. None of the boundaries under consideration involve moving children out of the Westchase attendance area.

Though it is becoming more and more difficult in high-growth areas, the School Board and school staff try to avoid moving students when possible. We appreciate your input and concern.

Sincerely,

Joyce Wieland
Principal

After receiving this letter, needless to say, parents backed off of their high alert status, as any other parents would have after having read this letter. To our surprise, a little over a month letter, and only a couple days before spring break, we received another letter, this time SENT ONLY TO 144 FAMILIES AS OPPOSED TO THE ENTIRE SCHOOL, telling of us the school districts intent to move our families to Lowry Elementary school. We were told that a “community meeting” would be held shortly after spring break to provide an opportunity for us to have our comments heard and delivered to the school board members. We believe this was a deliberate attempt by school district staffers to “quiet the large voice of Westchase” in their false expectation that the entire community would not be concerned with the move of a few, and also to provide a very short turnaround time for community input given that many families vacation during spring break. They could not have been more wrong!

Over 500 people were in attendance at this “community meeting,”, with the majority of attendees unbelievably being residents of Westchase from “non-affected” areas showing their support for their neighbors that were proposed to be moved. The message could not have been more louder or clearer that this was a hasty decision that had the ability to wreak havoc on childrens, families and the , well-bonded, tightly knit, community that has provided exhaustive resources in our partnership with our neighborhood school. The lone Board Member to attend that meeting was School Board Member Jennifer Faliero – who actually cared about what was happening at Bryant and Westchase Elementaries, despite representing a district from the other side of Hillsborough County.

Incredibly, after hours of heartfelt and impassioned speeches that were turned over to district staffers, and massive media attention, our “community meeting” to provide “valuable input” was provided to School Board members in a highly sanitized two or three page summary with attachments of only 3 speeches. Were we given an opportunity to create our own task force to hash out possible solutions with CHOICES to our overcrowding situation? NO!

The only opportunity we had to appear before the School Board prior to the fateful School Board Meeting on April 18th to seal our fate was to show up at a special Board Workshop called by the school board on April 12th, to discuss ONLY the possible closing and repurposing of Dickenson Elementary school, the only other school to receive as much press as we because they were an under-priveledged, highly achieving school that was slated to be closed in the proposal because they were severely undercapacity. Why did the school board deem to tackle this situation in an isolated manner in a specially called workshop? Because the ire of the community that the district had not found ways to attract more attention to this school and create programs at a school that should have been held up as a shining example of success to others was overwhelming. In fact, the Dickenson situation, grew to be the focus of the proposal, to the detriment of all the other 1,000 students being shifted in the boundary proposal and helped to diminish the voices of the families and parents that were expressing their dismay at the arrogance with which they were treated. At the very end of the meeting the school board members deemed to spare some of the Westchase residents an opportunity to speak, since we SHOWED UP, but there was no opportunity given for interactive discussion. We were given just two short minutes each to speak and a “thank you very much, you can leave now.”

So, what was a community to do to fight such a certainty without any significant information? We did what we could do, over the short period of time falling between the end of spring break and April 18th. We sent hundreds of emails imploring school board members to delay and work with us, we made public records requests seeking information that we did not have, including supposed “town-hall meeting” asking for input on school overcrowding, and we spent countless hours doing our own research into the issues which became necessary due to delay tactics on the part of district staffers in replying to our public records requests.

What little we were able to piece together from information provided by district staff proved that there was an unbelievable lack of forethought, or planning or homework or statistics and minimal actual public input. These “town-hall” meeting had provided a mere handful of comments in reply to a questionnaire asking parents if, in the event of overcrowding situations, would they prefer double sessions, year-round schooling or splitting boundaries. Well, maybe its just me, but being given those options, without the benefit of knowledge of the ramifications of such options, could, kind of be equated to the state of Florida putting a class-size amendment on the ballot without thought for the need for massive amounts of funding to provide for more classrooms and a thorough analysis of the changes that would result from passage of said amendment.

We found that, unbelievably, each of the schools that were being toted as needing to be filled due to undercapacity was because the previous school district facilities manager had added federally funded wings to schools that were already under-capacity. How did the facilities manager get the funds? Easy, the government set it aside to add class-room space in preparation of class-size amendment fulfillment. Who was the THEN facilities manager in charge of adding the wings? It was none other than School Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia. Then the district indicates it is in dire need of funds to keep up with county growth and the need for school and may need to ask for ½ cent sales tax increase. Well, what else can Ms. Elia do but responsibly fill those empty seats that she planned in places where there was no need, by shifting poor helpless children away from their neighborhood schools. One school that was slated to be closed, Dickenson Elementary, which received much press, was originally planned to be spread amongst three or four other schools that were undercapacity………. Because they had brand spanking new wings added to them when there was no need for wings. No one had done their homework on what happens when communities begin to age and schools are built one after another within a couple of mile radius (as in Town and Country). Why were larger additions not undertaken at schools that desperately needed greater capacity?

We also found, through a common bound of mistreatment with our disgruntled neighbors from the reboundaried families of Bryant Elementary, that the same developer that built Westchase Elementary, also built Highland Park off Racetrack Road in the Mary Bryant attendance zone, and OFFERED to donate land for a school, which the school district TURNED DOWN, supposedly due to not wanting to work with developer on ensuring the façade of the school fit in with the community surrounding it. However, can anyone be sure that it wasn’t instead because accepting a donated land site undoubtedly would have taken money out of the pockets of those brokering overinflated prices for land acquisitions made by the school district?

Well, the residents of Westchase worked around the clock – and I mean literally around the clock - staging marches; corresponding and coordinating efforts with media, including editorial boards (who came out strongly against the reboundary on behalf of all communities); writing speeches; creating marketing campaigns; making calls to School Board Members; sending emails to School Board Members; setting up conferences with School Board Members that might be willing to spend a moment of their time with us; emailing our governor, congressman, state representatives, and county commissioners; and generally doing anything and everything we could to get this decision delayed until communities had more opportunities to provide input. I lost 15 pounds in two weeks from the stress of the one-sided negotiation process, in addition to trying to run a business and shield my children from the devastating news that they might have to switch schools. I, did to my children the same thing the school board did to my children…….I IGNORED THEM, in my ceaseless effort to protect them.

Unfortunately, as we all know, children are wise. They quickly woke up to what was happening after seeing mom on television many times, from being taken to marches with Westchase United signs in front of their school, and from having to sit quietly in a corner while parents utilized non-working hours to strategize a campaign to save their children from being ripped away from their neighborhood school.

I remember distinctly the question my daughter asked me when, after the School Board made the fateful and flawed decision to send our children elsewhere, I told my daughter that she would be going to a new school but that it would be okay because all of her neighbors and friends would be going there with her. She asked the heartbreaking question of whether her best friend, Lauren, who lives, of course, in an “unaffected section of Westchase” would be with her at her new school. My heart broke in a million pieces for her.

Because, what the majority of the school board members failed to take into account in our situation – again with the notable exception of Valdes and Faliero – was as a community we are unique in our close-knit nature despite our size. Parents begin meeting each other from all corners of Westchase the minute their children are born through stork clubs and mommy and me clubs. The mothers bond while children from all corners of the community play together at two parks centrally located with the community. The preschoolers seal fast friendships when attending the centrally located preschools, Kids R Kids and Primrose. The parents begin their learning process on the way to elementary education through these associations with parents of elementary aged children. Everyone in the community is aware of everything that happens at the Elementary and Middle School through our community news magazine that is delivered monthly to our doorsteps. Three and more generations have come over time to live in this community because of the sense of family – wanting to be closer to the grandchildren, the sense of community and the common thread of education and betterment for the children. And, after my first daughter entered elementary school, and after having lived in the community for 12 years and having been involved in many good volunteer works, I could count on running into community mom’s at least once or twice a week at local grocery stores, shopping and community venues that would report to me about having spent time with my daughter in school this week for any number of reasons from parent volunteering, ready readers, a play or production, through the music program, being a lunch room helper, or just helping with morning and afternoon bus patrols. Volunteering in this community fostered volunteering. Visit the school and ask the teachers, the PTA, the SAC Committee and the Principal. The school was a well-oiled machine due to invaluable gift of time and funds, and it was OUR SCHOOL.

But, I digressed. The morning of our April 18th meeting dawned bright and early, although many of us hadn’t slept a wink the night before for preparing our arguments and cases against our reboundary, when what should begin flooding our emails with the force of a tidal wave, but the responses by district staffers to all of those public records requests which we made repeatedly in our quest to actually try to present accurate information. A deliberate attempt to ensure that our information was inaccurate and could that our arguments could easily be defeated by information presented by district staffers that had been armed in advance with the “tough questions” that would be “thrown at them” by School Board members with a goal of getting at the truth and having the “best interest of children” at heart?????? You do the math.

I made mention of two notable exceptions in our dealings with the School Board members. I would like to expand on that.

In a school board largely comprised of arrogant and out-of-touch board members that would do well to have term-limits imposed on them, and largely seem to be dictated to by district staffers rather than the other way around, I put before you the efforts of two valiant, in the minority School Board Members – Ms. Valdes and Ms. Faliero.

At our fateful decision meeting on April 18th, Ms. Valdes made the first step when she called for a “Split of the question” allowing for the Dickenson group to be removed from the rest of the “lump-sum” boundary proposal, and a second question requesting that a delay be made until community, stakeholder and task force input could be sought. She said that “we had proven that our community came together through adversity, and that all of Hillsborough County should be viewed as one LARGE community for the betterment of the children” – Valdes. She said she heard the outcries and she felt they needed to be addressed.

Miss Faliero, the only board member to actually make the effort to tour the Citrus Park portables with the parents affected in the reboundary of Mary Bryant, and actually came to the Westchase Community meeting, made a very brave and impassioned speech. She stated, and I quote, that the School Board based on “GUIDING PRINCIPLES in our literature, MUST make decisions based on improving student achievement. We must encourage open dialog. In order to build a level of confidence in our decision making, we must encourage open dialog. This decision is not in the district’s best interest and goes against our principals of high student achievement and the democratic process. This Justification to fill empty seats in under-capacity schools in and of itself is not sound.” Miss Faliero further railed against a curriculum and program that had not been adequately put together district staff, and no concrete data to show how the reboundary would increases academic performance. She stated, “If filling empty seats is only to achieve numbers, then argument must be made that we might hurt student achievement.” She pointed to success being attributed to by principal, teacher, and involved community, and that Dickenson being below capacity and being extremely successful was because of these reasons. She firmly stated that there was no looming impending immediate deadline and that the district district was already in compliance with class size amendment, which was confirmed later in the meeting by a district staffer with specific regard to Westchase and the upcoming school year. She asked, “Why the rush with only 24 days of school left. This is completely unfair to parents and teachers. Working parents need to make day-care reservations. These people’s lives will be adversely impacted. Our deadline is unnecessary and meaningless.”

Contrast that with the three worst offenders in arrogance, as follows:

Member Kurdell, who continued to state emphatically that the School Board Members needed to “stay strong, and have courage” in ramming these decisions quickly down the throats of the affected families. Because, what would more time or effort buy. She compared our situation to a band-aid when needing to be taken off, and how ripping the band-aid off quickly is less painful.

Dr. Lamb took a few seconds of his time to expound on his experience with “how successful kids become quickly after change.” He continued by ensuring we knew that the district had never made such an early effort to get principals assigned way early in the year for parental preparation and early planning. Interestingly enough, many principal appointments came at the very end of summer, such as at Alonso High School, as usual.

And, worst of all Member Candy Olson, presiding over the highly expensive and exclusive South Tampa community, with the only two public private schools in existence, Gorrie Elementary and Plant High – where parent patrols go home to home to confirm that all children enrolled truly do live in the attendance zone. Miss Olson stated arrogantly that our representation that they gave us only 2 minutes of time to speak and that they didn’t allow our input despite having to spend so much of their precious time reading emails and taking phone calls was willful misrepresentation on our part. She accused us of being negligent of suggesting any alternatives, and held it against us that we WERE UNWILLING TO SPECULATE ON ALTERNATIVE SUGGESTIONS because we had very little time to put together plans given the difficulty we had in getting district staff to actually turn over information.

Then to add insult to injury, Miss Olson continued by painting the picture of driving through the charming Westchase and Countryway neighborhoods and noting how clean and orderly we in Westchase were and that her doctor told her that his daughter lived in Westchase and got cited for having dirt on her doorstep. To the started gasps of the audience Miss Olson continued by stating, “I think one of the values of public education is that children get to see OTHER KINDS of people.”. What an insult to not only Westchase, but the strongly affluent and in some areas, more expensive Countrway community!

Member Olson concluded, however, by being very emphatic when she stated that she hoped the, “NEXT TIME time we will have a lot more information farther ahead. I hope we look more carefully at choice or special assignment.” And, essentially use these unfortunate people as a learning experience.

You all know the ending to the story. The Board voted 5 -2 in favor of the massive reboundary proposal, and IN FAVOR of tearing children that pleaded with them along with their parents away from their neighborhood school. The Board sent a firm and ARROGANT message that communities DO NOT MATTER, that the wellbeing of children DOES NOT MATTER, that community task forces are largely a waste of time, that their district staffers are beyond reproach and that Ms. Elia was simply doing what was asked of her when she was hired. The district staff and School Board, led by newly appointed Superintendent Elia, made many enemies during the time frame of March 16 – April 18, a crucial time in the Elia administration. And, they are just arrogant enough not to care.

Unless more families and parents wake up and realize that this treatment is coming soon to an area near them, they will continue to get away with it. It is time for five of these Board Members, some of whom appear to have been around since some of our parents were in high school, to retire, and thankfully one of them, Ms. Bricklemeyer has announced her retirement. Let’s help nudge the rest of them along.
Hi Lee.

I just changed my ending of my blog with one sentence – if you have not put it up yet – to indicate that some of the school board members and Elia clapped at the end of the meeting.

You all know the ending to the story. The Board voted 5 -2 in favor of the massive reboundary proposal, and IN FAVOR of tearing children that pleaded with them along with their parents away from their neighborhood school. The Board sent a firm and ARROGANT message that communities DO NOT MATTER, that the wellbeing of children DOES NOT MATTER, that community task forces are largely a waste of time, that their district staffers are beyond reproach and that Ms. Elia was simply doing what was asked of her when she was hired. And, then, at the every end of the meeting………THEY CLAPPED THEIR HANDS.

The district staff and School Board, led by newly appointed Superintendent Elia, made many enemies during the time frame of March 16 – April 18, a crucial time in the Elia administration. And, they are just arrogant enough not to care.

Unless more families and parents wake up and realize that this treatment is coming soon to an area near them, they will continue to get away with it. It is time for five of these Board Members, some of whom appear to have been around since some of our parents were in high school, to retire, and thankfully one of them, Ms. Bricklemeyer has announced her retirement. Let’s help nudge the rest of them along.


Tish Dietrich
Dietrich Consulting Group, LLC
813-333-1921
813-333-1926 Fax
813-244-8474 Cellular




Hi Lee,



Here are the email from the “email dump” by the district the day of our vote (they are too old to forward so I cut and paste):





Email 1



Just in from the district. Matt-this is your baby. What can we use from this?



Mark







IRS Circular 230 Notice: We are required to advise you no person or entity may use any tax advice in this communication or any attachment to (i) avoid any penalty under federal tax law or (ii) promote, market or recommend any purchase, investment or other action.


Confidentiality Statement: This electronic message contains information from the law firm of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP, and may be confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is prohibited. If you have received this electronic message in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail or telephone at (813) 229-7600.




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From: Kristin Waskiewicz [mailto:kwaskiewicz@sdhc.us]
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 9:46 AM
To: Connolly, Mark
Subject: Re: Public Records Request

Mark -- Please see the Fishkind agreement attached. I will forward you two correspondence emails between the district and Fishkind as well.

Thanks.

Kristin Waskiewicz
Office of Communications
Hillsborough County Public Schools
813.272.4055

Kristin Waskiewicz on Monday, April 17, 2006 at 4:34 PM -0500 wrote:
Mark -- I pulled the agenda item from November 8, 2005 when the Fishkind professional services recommendation went before the Board, but am still working to get the actual agreement, as it was not part of the agenda item. Just wanted to give you an update.

Thanks -- Kristin

"Connolly, Mark" on Friday, April 14, 2006 at 1:53 PM -0500 wrote:
Kristin-

Thank you. Does the District have any other records responsive to the public records request that my wife sent to you last Wednesday? Also, though you previously told me that the District does not have any report from Dr. Fishkind's firm yet, I would appreciate receiving a copy of the agreement between the District and Mr. Fishkind as well as any documents provided to his firm describing the scope of services expected by the District.

Thanks again.

Mark Connolly




IRS Circular 230 Notice: We are required to advise you no person or entity may use any tax advice in this communication or any attachment to (i) avoid any penalty under federal tax law or (ii) promote, market or recommend any purchase, investment or other action.

Confidentiality Statement: This electronic message contains information from the law firm of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP, and may be confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is prohibited. If you have received this electronic message in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail or telephone at (813) 229-7600.





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From: Kristin Waskiewicz [mailto:kwaskiewicz@sdhc.us]
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2006 1:39 PM
To: Connolly, Mark; Mark and Linda Connolly
Cc: Steven Ayers; Barbara Leon
Subject: Re: Public Records Request


I guess I'm going to have to refer you to Steve Ayers. He would be the one to provide that backup information, or at least explain it. He can be reached at 272-4091, and his secretary's name is Barbara.

I'm sorry this has been a tedious process. I hope you get the information you need.

Thanks -- Kristin

"Connolly, Mark" on Friday, April 14, 2006 at 12:25 PM -0500 wrote:
Kristin-

Thank you for sending the document via email. I am writing because there is no way for us to perform any meaningful analysis of the information you sent to us without the backup information used to prepare the document to determine (1) where the numbers set forth in the document came from, and (2) why the person who prepared the document did not use the specific "adjusted student generation rates" that are published in the Hillsborough County Comprehensive Impact Fee Study dated July 12, 2004 as compared to simply using the more general average multiplier of .185 that does not take into account what housing type is involved in the construction.

Do you have any of that information in writing? If not, is there someone at the District that we can speak with to obtain the information verbally. This is important as the April 18 date fast approaches.

Thanks.

Mark Connolly




IRS Circular 230 Notice: We are required to advise you no person or entity may use any tax advice in this communication or any attachment to (i) avoid any penalty under federal tax law or (ii) promote, market or recommend any purchase, investment or other action.

Confidentiality Statement: This electronic message contains information from the law firm of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP, and may be confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is prohibited. If you have received this electronic message in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail or telephone at (813) 229-7600.






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From: Mark and Linda Connolly [mailto:connolly88@earthlink.net]
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2006 12:14 PM
To: John McKay; Connolly, Mark
Subject: Fw: Public Records Request


This is the District's real estate analysis for the Lowry boundary.
Linda

----- Original Message -----
From: Kristin Waskiewicz
To: Mark and Linda Connolly
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2006 11:11 AM
Subject: Re: Public Records Request


Linda -- Steve Ayers provided the attached information and said it answers questions one and two below.





1. All documents memorializing, reflecting or relating to the analysis of residential development within the geographic boundaries for Lowry Elementary that have been performed during the last 12 months by or on behalf of the School District.








2. All documents memorializing, reflecting or relating to the analysis of residential development within the geographic boundaries for Westchase Elementary that have been performed during the last 12 months by or on behalf of the School District.




Thanks.

Kristin Waskiewicz
Office of Communications
Hillsborough County Public Schools
813.272.4055












Email 2



They sandbagged us. I have not even looked at this stuff yet.







IRS Circular 230 Notice: We are required to advise you no person or entity may use any tax advice in this communication or any attachment to (i) avoid any penalty under federal tax law or (ii) promote, market or recommend any purchase, investment or other action.


Confidentiality Statement: This electronic message contains information from the law firm of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP, and may be confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is prohibited. If you have received this electronic message in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail or telephone at (813) 229-7600.




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From: Kristin Waskiewicz [mailto:kwaskiewicz@sdhc.us]
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 9:47 AM
To: Connolly, Mark
Subject: Fwd(2): Fw: Upated forecast and power point


----- Original Message -----

Save Reply Forward Print Delete Attach Send

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 8:55:55 AM
Message
From: James Hamilton
"Hank Fishkind"
Subject: Fwd: Fw: Upated forecast and power point
To: Kristin Waskiewicz
Attachments: Hills forecast.ppt 299K
Hills_Fcst(2-15).xls 184K
revenue forecast.xls 423K


----- Original Message -----

Save Reply Forward Print Delete Attach Send

Tuesday, February 21, 2006 12:47:51 PM
Message
From: "Hank Fishkind"
Subject: Fw: Upated forecast and power point
To: "Matt Anderson"
James Hamilton
Attachments: Hills forecast.ppt 299K
Hills_Fcst(2-15).xls 184K
revenue forecast.xls 423K


----- Original Message -----
From: "Hank Fishkind"
To: "Matt Anderson" ; "James Hamilton"

Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 12:41 PM
Subject: Upated forecast and power point


> Jim
>
> Here are the updated forecasts and power point.
>
> Matt
>
> Please keep copies for yourself and forward copies to Gretchen.
>
> Regards,
>
> ->Henry Fishkind, Ph.D.
> ->Fishkind & Associates
> ->12051 Corporate Blvd
> ->Orlando, FL 32817
> ->Tel: 407-382-3256
> ->Fax: 407-382-3254
> ->E-mail: Hankf@fishkind.com
> ->Web Site: WWW.fishkind.com





Email 3



more from the District.







IRS Circular 230 Notice: We are required to advise you no person or entity may use any tax advice in this communication or any attachment to (i) avoid any penalty under federal tax law or (ii) promote, market or recommend any purchase, investment or other action.


Confidentiality Statement: This electronic message contains information from the law firm of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP, and may be confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is prohibited. If you have received this electronic message in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail or telephone at (813) 229-7600.




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From: Kristin Waskiewicz [mailto:kwaskiewicz@sdhc.us]
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 9:47 AM
To: Connolly, Mark
Subject: Fwd(3): Fishkind Presentation Materials and Enrollment Model


----- Original Message -----

Save Reply Forward Print Delete Attach Send

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 9:00:16 AM
Message
From: James Hamilton
Gretchen Saunders
"Hank Fishkind"
Subject: Fwd(2): Fishkind Presentation Materials and Enrollment Model
To: Kristin Waskiewicz
Attachments: Hills forecast.ppt 409K
revenue forecast.xls 423K
Hills_Fcst.xls 146K


----- Original Message -----

Save Reply Forward Print Delete Attach Send

Monday, February 6, 2006 10:56:35 AM
Message
From: Gretchen Saunders
"Hank Fishkind"
Subject: Fwd: Fishkind Presentation Materials and Enrollment Model
To: James Hamilton
Ken Otero
Cathy Valdes
John Bowers
Lorraine Duffy-Suarez
Lewis Brinson
Steven Ayers
Attachments: Hills forecast.ppt 409K
revenue forecast.xls 423K
Hills_Fcst.xls 146K



Gretchen Saunders
Business Division
School District of Hillsborough County
Telephone: 813-272-4383
Fax: 813-272-4007

----- Original Message -----

Save Reply Forward Print Delete Attach Send

Monday, February 06, 2006 8:27:30 AM
Message
From: "Hank Fishkind"
Subject: Fishkind Presentation Materials and Enrollment Model
To: Gretchen Saunders
Attachments: Hills forecast.ppt 409K
revenue forecast.xls 423K
Hills_Fcst.xls 146K

Gretchen

I have attached a number of files for you and for distribution as you may
see fit.

The power point is my presentation. The excel files contain the enrollment
forecast and the revenue forecast respectively.

Please give me a call with any questions that you may have. The revenue
forecasts for items other than those related to ad valorem are my best
estimates.

Regards,

->Henry Fishkind, Ph.D.
->Fishkind & Associates
->12051 Corporate Blvd
->Orlando, FL 32817
->Tel: 407-382-3256
->Fax: 407-382-3254
->E-mail: Hankf@fishkind.com
->Web Site: WWW.fishkind.com

Hello Ms. Olson.



As you are currently campaigning for another term in office, and one of your repeated platforms is that you DO care and you DO listen, I would love to know why something is not done about the following items?



1) Why do I have to receive a letter from a PTA parent pleading for volunteers to run the media center at Lowry Elementary because the Media Specialist has to do an inventory, due by September 15th, of all big ticket items belonging to the school. The PTA parent says, and I quote, “If he does not have relief, students will not have access to checking out books for AR, projects, homework assignments, etc.”. Why do we not have enough staff for a backup/backups to the media specialist? Where is the district money going? Not having access to these basic things is going to hurt my students ACHIEVEMENT.

2) Why is there no help in the lunchroom? There is one or sometimes two ladies working the lunch lines. Children, especially those in Kindergarten, have no help making their lunch decisions and moving swiftly through the line, and then only have 3-5 MINUTES TO GULP it down. Poor NUTRITION, including inability to have enough time to digest their meals, is going to hurt my students ACHIEVEMENT. There are only approximately 3 individuals assigned to lunchroom duty/assistance – far too few to wipe tables, assist with trash and ensure an actually semi-peaceful lunch environment. A planned trip to the cafeteria to have lunch with your child should not result in a Migraine Headache for the rest of the day due to the noise levels. We are in a school now that was supposedly way under-capacity, so why are the children still rushed through lunch and some 5th grade children are eating lunch at 10:00 in the morning? Because we have an ineffective use of space and a lunch line that is WAY too small to accommodate the pupil population at the school. Where is the district money going? And please do NOT attempt to place all blame on the Principal, who already has to wear far too many hats to be effective in all areas, and who is provided a very meager budget with which to get all things done.

3) Why are children being scraped up on their arms and legs just pulling up to their lunch tables in the cafeteria? The tables and chairs are a hazard. I was with a Kindergartener when an incident happened. Where is the district money going?

4) Why are the teachers in the new wing still awaiting technicians to hook up their computers and fix televisions in the classroom? Teachers are told that the priority goes to the new schools first. Why are the new schools and schools that are scheduled to be built getting all the money and all the others are being left to fall to pot with the exception of big ticket items (like paint, air conditioning, electrical work, etc).?

5) Why are the lists of school supplies so incredibly long that parents have to spend hundreds of dollars at the beginning of the year not only buying uniforms, but also supplementing supplies desperately needed in classrooms? The lists this year were incredibly large, and many families have 2 or more children they need to provide supplies for. Where is the district money going?

6) Finally, I would like to know what will be done about the fact that Mary Bryant and Westchase Elementary schools are both still overcrowded. The families in those areas deserve to know now, not within a month or two of a change, what to expect. It seems an East vs West boundary line for Mary Brant is not going to be adequate to keep Mary Bryant within class-size amendment. And, as for the Westchase Community, the answer should certainly not be to split the community into yet a third slice and have the children attending THREE different schools (Westchase, Deer Park, and Lowry). Somehow, I’d find it hard to believe if Mr. Person doesn’t have that split already drawn out – as he has been chomping at the bit to make that split at the Shires and Radcliffe for a very long time (since before Bryant opened). Please give a community a BREAK! Ask the parents NOW so we can all stop worrying about it and focus more on our good works of earning a salary and volunteerism at our children’s schools.



All of the residents of Hillsborough County pay school taxes, although the amount they pay may differ, including the elderly with grown children, families with children in private school, families with children that are toddlers, and families with NO children. If all of these people without children are paying in, why can’t the district find an equitable way to apportion the funds so the burden is eased more across the board? It seems there must be some more equitable way of splitting available money among schools so that it doesn’t only benefit the communities that are slated for new schools.



It seems to me that the correct decision was made to keep Dickenson together, because as you said they were a “unique” dynamic and they had overcome many obstacles on their way to such a high rating and high student achievement. You said they should be made an example and the district should try to duplicate what they did. Well, schools in large communities such as Tampa Palms, Meadow Point, Fishhawk Ranch and Westchase also have “unique” dynamics. Look into how well these schools fared in the category of PTA fundraising efforts and community/business/family donations and volunteerism versus at those schools that are surrounded by smaller disassociated neighborhoods. Maybe then a dynamic can be applied to schools across the county and true partnerships in student achievement can be formed EVERYWHERE.



The reports are in that the student enrollment is below projection. Perhaps district staff and the Superintendent can relook at the budget now and find some more money for the schools that are in need of upkeep.



I would very much appreciate a written answer to my questions, as I am unable to be at the Tiger Bay function tomorrow afternoon to ask these questions of you directly.





Tish

Tish Dietrich

10620 Chambers Drive

Tampa, FL 33626

813-854-5653 or Cellular 813-244-8474










Tish

Tish Dietrich

813-854-5653 or Cellular 813-244-8474



Please Vote Stephanie Georgiades for School Board - District 6 - At Large

For the Students, For the Teachers, For the Communities!

Vote: September 5, 2006

http://www.vote4stephanie.com



Thank You!

Hello Ms. Olson.

As you are currently campaigning for another term in office, and one of your repeated platforms is that you DO care and you DO listen, I would love to know why something is not done about the following items?

1) Why do I have to receive a letter from a PTA parent pleading for volunteers to run the media center at Lowry Elementary because the Media Specialist has to do an inventory, due by September 15^th, of all big ticket items belonging to the school. The PTA parent says, and I quote, “If he does not have relief, students will not have access to checking out books for AR, projects, homework assignments, etc.”. Why do we not have enough staff for a backup/backups to the media specialist? Where is the district money going? Not having access to these basic things is going to hurt my students ACHIEVEMENT.

2) Why is there no help in the lunchroom? There is one or sometimes two ladies working the lunch lines. Children, especially those in Kindergarten, have no help making their lunch decisions and moving swiftly through the line, and then only have 3-5 MINUTES TO GULP it down. Poor NUTRITION, including inability to have enough time to digest their meals, is going to hurt my students ACHIEVEMENT. There are only approximately 3 individuals assigned to lunchroom duty/assistance – far too few to wipe tables, assist with trash and ensure an actually semi-peaceful lunch environment. A planned trip to the cafeteria to have lunch with your child should not result in a Migraine Headache for the rest of the day due to the noise levels. We are in a school now that was supposedly way under-capacity, so why are the children still rushed through lunch and some 5^th grade children are eating lunch at 10:00 in the morning? Because we have an ineffective use of space and a lunch line that is WAY too small to accommodate the pupil population at the school. Where is the district money going? And please do NOT attempt to place all blame on the Principal, who already has to wear far too many hats to be effective in all areas, and who is provided a very meager budget with which to get all things done.

3) Why are children being scraped up on their arms and legs just pulling up to their lunch tables in the cafeteria? The tables and chairs are a hazard. I was with a Kindergartener when an incident happened. Where is the district money going?

4) Why are the teachers in the new wing still awaiting technicians to hook up their computers and fix televisions in the classroom? Teachers are told that the priority goes to the new schools first. Why are the new schools and schools that are scheduled to be built getting all the money and all the others are being left to fall to pot with the exception of big ticket items (like paint, air conditioning, electrical work, etc).?

5) Why are the lists of school supplies so incredibly long that parents have to spend hundreds of dollars at the beginning of the year not only buying uniforms, but also supplementing supplies desperately needed in classrooms? The lists this year were incredibly large, and many families have 2 or more children they need to provide supplies for. Where is the district money going?

6) Finally, I would like to know what will be done about the fact that Mary Bryant and Westchase Elementary schools are both still overcrowded. The families in those areas deserve to know now, not within a month or two of a change, what to expect. It seems an East vs West boundary line for Mary Brant is not going to be adequate to keep Mary Bryant within class-size amendment. And, as for the Westchase Community, the answer should certainly not be to split the community into yet a third slice and have the children attending THREE different schools (Westchase, Deer Park, and Lowry). Somehow, I’d find it hard to believe if Mr. Person doesn’t have that split already drawn out – as he has been chomping at the bit to make that split at the Shires and Radcliffe for a very long time (since before Bryant opened). Please give a community a BREAK! Ask the parents NOW so we can all stop worrying about it and focus more on our good works of earning a salary and volunteerism at our children’s schools.

All of the residents of Hillsborough County pay school taxes, although the amount they pay may differ, including the elderly with grown children, families with children in private school, families with children that are toddlers, and families with NO children. If all of these people without children are paying in, why can’t the district find an equitable way to apportion the funds so the burden is eased more across the board? It seems there must be some more equitable way of splitting available money among schools so that it doesn’t only benefit the communities that are slated for new schools.

It seems to me that the correct decision was made to keep Dickenson together, because as you said they were a “unique” dynamic and they had overcome many obstacles on their way to such a high rating and high student achievement. You said they should be made an example and the district should try to duplicate what they did. Well, schools in large communities such as Tampa Palms, Meadow Point, Fishhawk Ranch and Westchase also have “unique” dynamics. Look into how well these schools fared in the category of PTA fundraising efforts and community/business/family donations and volunteerism versus at those schools that are surrounded by smaller disassociated neighborhoods. Maybe then a dynamic can be applied to schools across the county and true partnerships in student achievement can be formed EVERYWHERE.

The reports are in that the student enrollment is below projection. Perhaps district staff and the Superintendent can relook at the budget now and find some more money for the schools that are in need of upkeep.

I would very much appreciate a written answer to my questions, as I am unable to be at the Tiger Bay function tomorrow afternoon to ask these questions of you directly.

Tish

Tish Dietrich

10620 Chambers Drive

Tampa, FL 33626

813-854-5653 or Cellular 813-244-8474