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Send comments to tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com for posting either signed or anonymous. If Lee thinks they are Deepthroat-worthy, she will post them for the delectation of all. ldd
Friday, December 08, 2006
Friday, December 01, 2006
Board Gentlepeople: Dr.
Hamilton's reflex hiring of a $240,000 consulting firm to get County school buses to run on time constitutes admission of incompetence from the serried ranks of $100,000-plus-perquisites-featherbedding administrators.
I suggest that Board common sense do an end-run around Hamilton's likely looming consultant passing-the-buck for Board information needs. One does not have to be an efficiency expert to suggest the following plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face solution.
Go through the Public-Affairs-Office-information system. Nobody can ask you why you want public information. You don't have to endure the three-tier process as laboriously and lovingly detailed in Dr. Hamilton's New-Board-member protocol, hatched by this wunderkind after a mere year's incubation. The Sunshine law says that requested information goes to the citizen in a timely fashion. Like the rest of us, Board members are citizens and due this service. You don't have to trudge through the protocol rigmarole of the Hamilton three-step misery with the "You-may-go-to-start" labyrinth that Board members must now trudge through according to the scheme that Dr. Hamilton took a year to produce.
I make this suggestion after reading the botched orientation document that Dr. Hamilton gave birth to a year late. It is illogical in structure; irrelevant in content, and maladroit in style. It contains a lengthy section on a three-tier-tedious obstacle course for Board members' securing information. The covert object of this tiresome protocol is, I infer, to discourage Board members from pursuing information and leaving the administration free to wheel and deal without Board interference. Information is power, so the administration aims to hog information for the administration's eyes only with the implicit power that situation produces. The three-step rigmarole for the Board to get information is, I believe, administration data control.
Ms. Elia shows scant impulse to share vital information with the Board. I cite, first, the real-estate scam data that she sat on and then claimed not to know about even though the skullduggery went on right under her nose and despite a Times reporter's discovering it with no background in school data structure; second, her overbuilding desks in schools without Board knowledge; third, her reboundary putsch to cover up this overbuilding mess-up; and fourth the cooked enrollment figures she had Steve Hegarty send to the County Commission for augmented impact fees that enriched her coffers so that she could indulge in more profligate waste of taxpayer money. The Board needs data to do its job. Members will get it fast through the Public-Affairs Sunshine inquiry process.
Don't ask Steve Hegarty. Every time I go to the Public-Affairs office, I see him flitting about like Tinker Bell to look busy. Any request that goes to him suffers long delay and obtuse replies if ever they come. Mr. Hegarty did not have the credentials for this job but got it, I infer, because he gave the school system stenographic-press during his time as reporter for the Times when he covered the schools and played sycophant to certain administrators during a sabbatical from this stenographer duty. All Le Hegarty's competitors' resumes showed them better qualified.
Add to these data the fact that Mr. Hegarty has trouble with the English language, including using basic punctuation with aplomb, and you have another dead-wood administrator paid $91,000-plus out of taxpayers' pockets. If he were Ms. Elia's pick, the Board should have done a better job of grilling her on why she picked him and not the better-qualified people the resumes of whom the Board should have reviewed. If the Board wants to evade the three-tier gauntlet that Dr. Hamilton details in the orientation protocol, it shouldn't overwork a good employee; it should direct La Elia to send a couple of those young bureaucrats who now are in charge of the three-tier labyrinth for information to Linda Cobbe in Public Affairs. With two assistants, she should be able to get the info you need pronto.
If Cobbe needs another assistant, check the melee around Ms. Elia's office and pick one with an intelligent aura. Otherwise, you can refer your complaints to the Board attorney. I bet he takes the Sunshine law seriously as lawyers are wont to take all laws seriously to keep their licenses. This Board can do an end-run around the punishing three-tier information gauntlet that the administration dictates that the Board submit to by Hamilton-Elia fiat presently if it has the courage and the will to do so. Or the Board can hire a consultant. Dr. Hamilton has a list. lee drury de cesare
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Alqonquin Bar NYC--Where The Round Table MetFrom: Lee De Cesare [mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 2:39 AM
To: April Griffin (april.griffin@sdk12.fl.us); edgecomb (doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us); faliero (jennifer.faliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us); Jack Lamb (Jack.Lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us); (maryellen.elia@sdhc.k12.fl.); valdes (susan.valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us); 'tgonzalez@tsg-law.com'; 'michael.grego@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Cathy.Valdez@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'connie.mileto@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jack.davis@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'ken.otero@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'dan.valdez@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'lewis.brinson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'michelle.crouse@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'gretchn.saunders@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'lewis.brinson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'gretchen.saunders@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'cathy.valdez@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'fjack.davis@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'gwen.luney@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'james.hamilton@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'maryellen.elia@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'linda.cobbe@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'gwen.luney@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'steven.hegarty@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'michael.grego@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Cathy.Valdez@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'connie.mileto@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jack.davis@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'ken.otero@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'dan.valdez@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'michelle.crouse@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'gretchn.saunders@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'lewis.brinson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'fjack.davis@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'gwen.luney@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'james.hamilton@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'maryellen.elia@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'linda.cobbe@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'gwen.luney@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'steven.hegarty@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'helenhuntley@sptimes.com'
Cc: Dabonich@aol.com; Edith A Tobul (edt@ncweb.com); Frank Sanchez (pacojs1@aol.com); KPerezhsb2004@aol.com (KPerezhsb2004@aol.com); luisp@hses.com; Margie Jean (Margie.D.Jean@chase.com); montolino (montolino@aol.com); rich (richbradburytampa@gmail.com); Tiger Bay Club of Tampa (tigerbay@tampabay.rr.com); Warren Rachels (WRACHELS@tampabay.rr.com); 'rosemarygoudreau@tampatribune.com'; 'ptash@sptimes.com'; 'jhill@sptimes.com'; 'tisch@sptimes.com'; 'troxler@sptimes.com'; Patrick
Subject: Monkey Biz as usual
Working Document Defines Board-Administration Relationship
Background: A year ago, the Board requested new-member orientation statement. Board members Valdez, Edgecomb, Faliero, and Kurdell met twice and passed suggestions to Dr. Jim Hamilton for the document.
The tardy “working-draft” only recently emerged from Le Hamilton’s office as School Board Members Orientation and Board Procedures.
The product failed to please all the Board. Candy Olson called it “preachy”; Susan Valdez recorded her objections to the inaccuracy of Hamilton’s representation of her committee advice. In response, Le Hamilton--aka as Lord of Administration Orcs-- stalked from the room in high dungeon. Such appears big-baby behavior that Hamilton considers entitlement— even from Board members, who put up with it.
This working document adumbrates the Board’s and administration’s emerging tense relationship. Heretofore, the administration dictated and the Board obeyed. But stirrings of feeble Board resistance have surfaced, causing sub rosa panic amongst administration bedwetters. This production of Hamilton Board protocol presents symptoms of administration unease over loss of power.
Board members Valdez and Faliero objected to the Westchase-boundary debacle that uprooted weeping children and caused parental rebellion against Board and administration. Faliero’s and Valdez’s protests were inadequate, but any slight Board demur sets off alarm bells in the administration as threat to its power over the purse.
The administration had sloughed off an earlier Elia real-estate mess-up when she headed the building department, maintaining that Ms. Elia couldn’t take responsibility for that of which she was ignorant, even though she should not have been ignorant. A Board with backbone would have pushed back and required data for why the serially incompetent Elia didn’t know about the real-estate scam’s costing taxpayers thousands of dollars when a Times reporter had walked in off the street and discovered the scam with ease. It certainly wouldn’t have hired her as superintendent over all the better qualified candidates who could keep abreast of what was going on under their noses.
The administration aimed to quell this two-Board-member and parents’ rebellion because the Board’s examination of the superintendent’s overbuilding of desk space might start a Board trend of demanding administration accountability. Heretofore, the administration has bungled ad seriatim with impunity.
Valdez’s feeble objections met with a leak to the press of her travel budget for conferences and workshops. The administration uses such leaks to swat any Board member who falls out of line and declines to act as a Potted Plant. Carol Kurdell has never had an administration swat-down via a press leak because she does zilch on the Board—her performance’s being near catatonic. Catatonic Board members are administration favorites.
Catatonic press members find administration favor as well. Administrators expect press cooperation in retaliatory leaks on any Board member who dares question an administration screw-up. Any real press scrutiny of the administration comes from across the bay from the SPTimes. Tribune editor Rosemary Goudreau is Elia girlfriend. This sorority guarantees Tribune school coverage as mere stenography for administration talking points and insures a ready weapon with which to slap a Board member who may buck the administration: the editorial blast. All it takes to trigger Board-member editorial rebuke is a call beginning, “Hello, girlfriend.”
Overkill administration response to mild Board resistance reveals the administration’s nervous hold on power and its fluster at the least confrontation from the Board.
For many years the administration has run the show at ROSSAC: bloating its salaries—Elia’s now at $262,000 and rising despite her administrative blunders and inability to punctuate; dispensing contracts in lordly patronage; and using the Professional Standards office with Lucco Brazzi Kipley’s sadistic ministrations to terrorize any teacher who lets out a timid peep of disagreement. But so uneasy lies the crown that any trifling Board mutiny puts this administration on high alert and catalyzes its retaliatory routine.
This working document from Hamilton’s office ranks maladroit maneuver to tie the hands of the Board and shut it down.
Hamilton’s fiat comes off as clumsy, ill-written blunderbuss for the administration’s attempt to whip the Board into line. He doubtless wrote it as the superintendent’s Rasputin with Elia’s looking over his shoulder. This pair of mess-ups now runs the schools with the Board’s lackadaisical complicity, to hell with taxpayers.
But Board bubbles have begun to surface.
Presently Jennifer Faliero’s priority is to up her salary to five percent so that she can move from Wal-Mart to Dillard couture while the buses break down regularly and bus drivers’ salaries are Third World. But there looks to be hope that other Board members will not be supine. Citizens pine for a Board champion to emerge.
Scrutiny of ROSSAC politics suggests that Hamilton lusts for primary superintendent power himself but that some psychological hang-up prevents his seizing it by going for the job directly. Instead, he lurks in the background as puppet master, running the show with a third-rate puppet superintendent out front.
Hamilton manipulates the Board superintendent selection despite better national candidates presenting themselves for hire than the in-house political designate. Since the Board has never manifested much enthusiasm for superintendent excellence, Hamilton’s political-picking campaign does not rank arduous.
A teacher heard Hamilton and Lennard’s bragging years ago in some outlying school where they then both toiled in obscurity that they would run the schools sooner or later. They made good that boast. Earl the Pearl Lennard was Hamilton’s first superintendent power vector; now it’s Elia. Both are in-house incompetents that defy the Board slogan of Excellence in Education.
Ms. Olson’s complaint at the Board meeting after Hamilton’s ukase on Board behavior that the working document sounded preachy speaks to its tone.
Tone in writing refers to the writer’s attitude toward the reader and to the subject of the message.
La Olson’s nose detected Hamilton’s tone as imperious, condescending, and insolent. What she didn’t catch was the underlying panic of a bunch of C students running scared because the Board might rouse itself from years-long acquiescence and accept the power that the voters placed in its members’ hands to run the schools for the community’s benefit, not for the profit of deadwood management minions who suck up school dollars meant for classrooms while botching administration of the schools.
Dr. Hamilton’s ham-fisted document betrays intentions to quell the Board throughout for anyone who bothers to detect them.
Its style is wordy. This Working Document never uses one word when it can cram in a dozen. It never calls a fax anything but a facsimile transmission. The facsimile transmission ranks red-light for an anal-retentive obsession for cramming in as many meaningless words as possible to stupefy the reader.
Wordiness acts cover-up of the document’s purpose and attempts to make the writer’s product seem important by piling verbiage higher and deeper.
Behold a sample paragraph:
The School Board is the government body of the School District of Hillsborough County and is responsible, [sic] with the Superintendent as the Chief Executive Officer, [sic] for the control, operation, organization, management, and administration of public schools in Hillsborough County pursuant to the provisions and standards prescribed by Florida Statutes and State Board of Education Rules [sic]. The School Board may exercise any power except as expressly prohibited by State Constitution or general law. 72 words
The condescension in this bloated paragraph implies Board members are too dumb to know basic information. Boiled down to plain English, the blowsy two-sentence, 72-word paragraph reduces to this:
The Board implements Florida laws and Board-of-Education rules. 8 words
A wise editor would omit the paragraph as insulting Board’s intelligence.
Signature basic-writing errors adorn Dr. Hamilton’s product throughout. In his past infamous system-wide email in which he makes fun of teachers’ paycheck-delivery trouble due to administration computer mess-up, he portrays himself as lounging on a bar stool in Margarittaville whilst mixing up the spelling of “you’re” and “your.”
Far from being a gentleman scholar, Le Hamilton not only does not know homophones but also shows faint grasp of commas or even capitals that the students over whom he presides should know to graduate. For these deficiencies, taxpayers fork over $132,000 and perquisites to a fellow who would have a tough time getting a job in the paint department of Wal-Mart because he couldn’t handle the register.
Passive verbs signal deception. If I could cut and paste the PDF file of this essay into Word, I wager that a run through the grammar checker would reveal an unusually high percentage of passive verbs.
Passive verbs make even people who know nothing about rhetoric justly suspicious. Sneaky passive verbs hide the actor to evade responsibility; hence, politicians love them. Political double-speak says, “It was decided to spend a bazillion dollars,” not “I decided to spend a bazillion dollars.”
Flatulent verbiage exacerbated by passive verbs: Changes that would affect the residence qualifications of any incumbent member so as to disqualify the incumbent member during the term for which he or she has been elected shall not be made.
The document uses passive verbs when referring to Board members to insinuate that they don’t act but are objects of action. The above specimen features two passive verbs. Who is the agent to disqualify an incumbent? The passive verb hides that datum. I supply it: the mighty administration. The administration acts active hammer; the Board reposes passive anvil.
Helplessness drenches passive verbs. In Hamilton’s document, passive verbs immure Board members; but La Elia gets active verbs. The message: Elia rules; the Board obeys. I doubt Dr. Hamilton could explain the psychology of active versus passive verbs and could not differentiate them if his life depended on it. But he, like most people, sense active-passive implication and its impact on the reader.
A bizarre aspect of the tone of this document involves its attempt come off as lofty. It reaches for what linguistic experts call acrolect style. I wager Hamilton would not in a million years be able to define acrolect style without flash cards, but he attempts it nonetheless to augment the gravitas of his pamphlet. My Georgia family calls this pitiful spectacle “Tryin’ to get above your raisin’.”
Acrolect style defines prestige utterances—solemn rituals, formal addresses at political gatherings, speeches before the courts, religious expostulations. The Book of Common Prayer demonstrates sustained acrolect. In Dr. Hamilton’s straining for the majestic in his working-document pamphlet, he makes a risible stab at high rhetorical style. One expects him to lapse into “thou” address ritual of ecclesiastical prose, rhetorical adornment he would have invoked if he had only known about the device.
Unintended slapstick accompanies Dr. Hamilton’s attempt to dignify his piece with the prestige of legal parlance. He resorts to the modal auxiliaries of legal language “shall” and “may” passim. The poor fellow deems this, that, and the other. He, in short, shows himself ridiculous with his stilted, gimcrack legalese that appears unconscious parody of lawyer prose.
I, for one, felt sorry for the old bowser in his loopy attempt at aping the heft that legal argot would give his outpouring. He doesn’t know how to sing that song. His display reminds me of the Geeche and Gullah dialects that emerged in the coastal regions of my home state of Georgia, where past slaves deprived of education by law imperfectly aped the speech of their white masters, emulating sounds that they thought they heard and passing these dialects down to their children. One still hears them. I had a cleaning woman who spoke Gullah. The children didn’t understand a word she said. I did. I had heard the dialect as a child.
Dr. Hamilton lacks the sophistication to approximate legal language. The poor man would drink from the finger bowl if he encountered one at a sit-down embassy dinner.
So threatened was Dr. Hamilton and so bereft of adroit political defense against resistance to his pronouncements that he stomped out of the meeting at which Valdez registered objections to her misinterpreted input into this document. The Board should have underwritten therapy for Dr. Hamilton, not socked another superfluous salary to taxpayers by creating him one more make-work job to justify his hanging around ROSSAC, his glory days behind him.
The kindest thing to do for Dr. Hamilton would be to send him kicking and screaming out to pasture, where he won’t need to reach for erudition that he lacks. Muscular enforcers should tie him to a sapling in Wimauma until tranquility descends on this little Napoleon’s disturbed soul. Rest, rest perturbed spirit.
Meanwhile, Dr. Hamilton intends to throw his weight around and menace the Board with dire vague punishments for violating unnamed rules and regulations.
Consider the language of a section of Dr. Hamilton’s little fiat called “Compliance with Board Procedures.” He doesn’t cite the procedures, leaving them terrifyingly vague.
In the event an individual Board member is not in compliance with Board policies, the alleged noncompliance shall be reported to the School Board Attorney.
OmaGod! Now the noncomplying Board member is in for it. The Reign of Terror has kicked in. The diabolic School Board Attorney will exact punishment for noncompliance with fugitive amorphous rules, with court summonses, with show causes, and with even tsarist-deposition ukazati.
This rigmarole sounds like what teachers face in Linda Kipley’s Professional Standards Abu Gharib. Chain the wretch to the wall in a freezing, damp cell. Bring out the hoods and slavering dogs. Pile up the bodies in a triangle. Desecrate the Koran before the horrified eyes of the naked prisoner.
It gets worse: The School Board Attorney shall investigate any such allegations and if appropriate contact the individual Board Member [sic] and provide advice and counsel as to how to come into compliance with the School Board policies.
Lo, those terrifying modal auxiliary “shall’s” and that blood-curdling “advice and counsel” scarify the accused. Such verbal bomblets mean business. Here comes the knock-on-the-door-in-the-middle-of-the-night a la the Chilean disappeards; the icy presentation of the sealed-and-stamped arrest warrant; the weeping farewell to hysterical family as slobbering School-Board-attorney’s letter-de-cachet thugs pop up to snatch a Board member for a ride through the back roads of Lutz or, worse, Turkey Creek, from whose bourne no targeted Board member ever returns.
If the individual School Board Member [sic] fails to “come into compliance” with these [unnamed] policies, the School Board Attorney [sic] shall send a written memorandum to the Board member advising the Board member of the alleged non-compliance with the explanation of exactly what policy is involved and how the non-compliance occurred. Copies of the memorandum shall be provided to all other Board members.
Oh, that chilling pile-up of passive verbs’ rendering the Board member helpless object; alas, those terrifying words “come into noncompliance” of the pitiless Board attorney’s legal gauntlet thrown at the trembling Board member not “come into compliance with policies” not named; alack, the blood’s in the wretched malefactor’s veins turning to water; and weladay this pitiless whole nine yards,’ making his or her knees knock in abject terror as did Kurt’s in Heart of Darkness,” leading the caitiff to groan, “The horror, the horror!”
There lurks the Working Document circulating amidst Board members the horrific indictment of not “being in compliance” to ensnare a Board wretch with an amorphous standard that ever flies before imperiled members. When a Board member gets cut off from the herd and succumbs to the quicksand of the Working Document, untouched Board traitors, of course, yuk it up in obscene displays of shadenfruede. Some buddies they turned out to be.
Then there are the leaks to the press—the slavering, dreaded Fourth Estate, red in tooth and claw. Elia’s girlfriend Tribune La Goudreau writes scathing editorials, condemning the culprit to the wasteland of never again getting elected to even a seat on the Water Board much less dog catcher. The ectomorphic, chachetic editorial vampire Paul Tash of the St. Petersburg Times pulls his bony being up to his CRT screen’s Kafkaesque light, poses his dripping claws over the keyboard, and pecks in a damning pronuciamento on the not-in-compliance Board wretch’s deficient character and despicable hygiene. It runs as lead editorial for maximum humiliation. Even roly-poly sweetie pie publisher Patrick of La Gaceta goes over to the Dark Side of Grub Street fiends to render a stronger-than-the-usual-pussyfooting rebuke to the targeted Board member in “As We Heard It.”
Oh, the shame, the shame! The fall in social status! The not getting a good table at Bern’s.
At the regularly scheduled meeting of the School Board at least 21 days after the written memorandum, the individual Board Member [sic] who has received the memorandum of non-compliance from the School Board Attorney [sic] shall be afforded an opportunity to explain his or her position to the rest of the Board members. After hearing the explanation, the remaining members of the Board shall vote on the explanation. The remaining members of the Board shall vote on whether or not there was non-compliance and [sic] if so, the School Board will direct the individual Board Member [sic] to comply with School Board policies.
The criminal trudges with leg chains clanking into the majesty of the Board Room, clomps to the front of the room to occupy the dock where despised citizens appear to enter useless pleas for succor to contemptuous Board members, and confesses in a voice threaded with terror, “I’m sorry that I spelt the word,/I hate to go above you.”/ I’m sorry that I spelt the word/ Because, you see, I love you.”
The implacable collaborators of the in-compliance Board stare in frigid rebuke at the ostracized former colleague but current scapegoat and express annoyance to have their deliberations interrupted on whether cup cakes or Little Debbies along with Diet Coke constitute the right choice for next Board summit.
If the individual School Board Member [sic] continues to fail to comply with the School Board policies, the School Board may vote to request that the Governor remove the offending Board Member [sic] from office.
So it’s off to the pokey for the non-complying Board member. Radames’ Aida tomb song wafts from the sound system. Oh, what a falling off was that. Goodnight, sweet prince. The rest is silence.
Besides the attempt to scare the be-Jesus out of Board members to terrify them into mute acquiescence to administration’s incompetence, Le Hamilton makes further attempts to render Board members submissive by infantilizing them.
These tactics include codifying even Board behavior, to wit:
There are to be no sidebar conversations during Board meetings for Board members.
Note bene a double standard obtains for Board members and administration for the conduct of sidebar prattle. The sidebar proscription does not apply to administrators. I witnessed Les Hamilton’s and Otero’s performance at one meeting when the Board discussed policy whilst Hamilton balanced a bottle of water above his head, ate some substance that he rescued from the bowels of his pockets, and told jokes to Otero, to which Otero responded with raucous laughter. The Board chair did not check this behavior. Administrators conduct sidebar conversations with impunity during Board discussion to a faretheewell with the Board chair's waiting for a lull in administrator side bars to resume official speech.
The Board members are to respect diverse opinions.
Le Hamilton imperfectly modeled this behavior when he arose and stomped out of the meeting in which Board Member Valdez recorded her disagreement with Hamilton’s version of her input into the working pamphlet.
Board members must observe the Board-adopted civility in all settings.
Oh, yeah? Dr. Lamb and Ms. Olson blew this obligation to hell and back when at Tiger Bay Dr. Hamilton shouted me down, blustering that he didn’t want to hear my protest of the Board’s raising its salary before the teachers’ salaries got attention while La Olson nodded her hearty approval of Lamb’s resisting a citizen’s Constitutional right to approach an elected official for redress of grievances. Thus fares civility in all settings.
Things get worse. Dr. Hamilton dictates even correct Board body language. I’m not making this up.
School Board members will demonstrate positive body language.
What comprises “positive” Hamilton mercifully omits. But his jumping up and stalking out in protest of Valdez’s diverse opinion would not be role model for this dictum. Nor would his and Otero’s eating, drinking, display qualify as positive body language.
Now here’s a Kafkaesque directive: the Board is to Practice open, honest communication. The double standard cuts in here big-time with Elia’s cover-up of overbuilding and repudiating any knowledge of the real-estate scam. Open, honest conversation, my big foot!
The Board must fully comply with the intent of all provisions of the ethics provisions of FL law for Public Officers and employees.
I read the online ethics requirements for education’s public servants. The administration minions give those the lie from the minute they step into ROSSAC a.m. until they leave p.m. When convenient, they defy ethics provisions on the weekends.
Hamilton inserts pile-ups of protocols to discourage Board members’ attempts to lay hold of information—providing that a rare Board member may not rest content as Potted Plant.
Under the obstacle rubric of “Three Levels of Requests,” Dr. Hamilton clocks in with impediments Board members must overcome to extract information from the administration. This administration’s hiding information makes the White House shutdown on information look lax.
Even Board members who want to know what’s going on behind the Wizard-of-Oz administration curtain’s blackout must run a gauntlet of impediments to discourage their laying hold of even scuttlebutt the administration wants concealed. Hamilton inserts privileged-information cautions ad lib.
The Board’s constant excuse about not knowing about an outrage until it appears in the press doubtless has to do with the administration’s resistance to providing its members with open access to the information needed to do their job—not that this resistance excuses Board members their laziness and gutlessness in insisting that they receive that data from the administration to conduct the job voters elected them to do.
The cherry on the cake to infantilize Board members is Dr. Hamilton’s dress code. You heard me: Dress Code. Consult page 18 of the Working Document if you doubt. Dr. Hamilton sets himself up as the Mr. Blackwell of School-Board couture with these animadversions on appropriate dress for Board members.
As elected officials [sic] Board Members [sic] have established expectations for appropriate attire. Board members have established an expectation for business attire for Members [sic] attending official Board meetings and functions at which the Member [sic] represents the Board. Business casual dress has been an established minimum expectation for certain workshops, office visits, etc. The Board has established the same standards for modesty and good taste for themselves as they have established in their policies for students and employees.
Cotton Mather guided Dr. Hamilton with the modesty concept after requiring him to write a book report on Mather’s Manuductio Ministerium.
This whacko dress code for elected officials lurks in the Kafkaesque regions of Looney Tunes.
One should be grateful, one supposes, that this strange man did not append the requirement that Board members must follow the established custom of pinning hankies to their collars, cleaning their fingernails, not blowing their noses on their sleeves, and flossing twice daily. The modesty injunction means women Board members can’t wear Brittany Spears’ couture to express their inner sluts; nor may Dr. Lamb wear Italian pantaloons to display crotch bulge. Where’s the fun in such a life? “Oh,” to quote Kurt again, “The horror, the horror!”
These infantile Board members, Dr. Hamilton implies, are still learning to tie their shoes and to not leave their zippers open and clothes disordered after scheduled bathroom breaks to pee. That a grown man making $132,000 a year extracted from oblivious taxpayers could write such twaddle in a school document describing School-Board decorum surpasses weird and moves into Twilight Zone.
Getting into the spirit of Dr. Hamilton’s couture crackdown, allow me to weigh in on his sartorial lacks. Dr. Hamilton needs know that anybody making $132,000 a year has money sufficient to buy a non-polyester suit at some emporium a cut above J.C. Penny’s, upon the which a skillful tailor can do wonders to conceal belly bulge. He should act on this advice stat for administration aesthetic éclat.
I persevere with this public-service project by decamping tomorrow on a trek from the beach to the Board public-affairs downtown outpost to review Sunshine data that Hamilton alleges undergirds his astonishing pamphlet. These data include the original notes that went from him from four Board members’ two workshops; the names of the committees he alleges had input into this document; the notes and summaries from those committees; and the identification of a second eye witness to his stomping out on Valdez’s reading of her objections.
This research is a lot like my past trudging through folders of university libraries to discover the roots of the troubadour tradition in the Middle Ages—only not as lively as the Middle-Ages project. At least the troubadours sang.
One hopes that Dr. Hamilton has not fudged these data. If so, he must issue another papal-bull pamphlet that outlines protocols for punishment for an administrator’s huffing and puffing and blowing the house down while lying like a rug.
The penalty for Being Found Out and Not Following Established Protocols will go hard for Dr. H. He must stand in the stocks on Franklin Street for a yet-undetermined number of days during shopping hours and must empty the garbage cans in the employee cafeteria at ROSSAC during the Christmas season for the edification and delight of the janitors.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Ms. Steins: Can you use "chair" or "chairperson" for the cause of women's slow trudge to equality? Using "man" as standard implies women are less than standard. Dr. Lamb, take the plunge in linguistic equality and use "chair" as your title. If you don't your granddaughters will call you an old sexist puff of flatulence. Ms. Faliera, you do not work as hard as teachers or others in the school system do. And your comments on the Board show you incapable of thinking at the pre-school level. When is the last time you spent your weekends grading student papers? Why don't you propose that Board members get their own nuclear deterrent and a retreat in Bali? It's only taxpayers' money, fa la la. Ms. Griffin, thank you for your concern for the proletariat. What's happened to the bus drivers' salaries? We know that Ms. Elia is doing swimmingly on $252,000 sans ability to punctuate and sans ethics to come clean with the Board on her mess-ups, but what about the people at the bottom? Why is the Board dealing with deportment on the buses? Isn't that Dr. Hamilton's new job as bus czar? The last the public knew after the Board rubber-stamped a make-work job for this old layabout without bothering to advertise it for open application--so much for equal opportunity, he had hired with $132,000 in tax dollars a flossy consulting firm to help him figure out the brain-busting chore of making the buses run on time. There are school boards across the country who do the job as a public service. God forbid that idea ever occurred to this Board. lee drury de cesare
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Dr. Hamilton:
Getting information about what goes on in the School Board-and-administration's pas de deux is like herding cats. You can't chase down a fact to save your life if you are outside the bowels of ROSSAC. If I were on the scene at ROSSAC, I could get the janitors and lunch-room workers to fill me in. The guy who cleans the gutters would be a resource.
The Sunshine Law is a dead article at ROSSAC as far as the administration is concerned.
What interests this citizen concerns the odyssey of the recent Board-orientation document. I got word via a carrier pigeon that flew parallel Howard Franklin to the Gulf of Mexico, where I live with the seagulls, that four Board members--Edgcomb, Faliero, Kurdell, and Valdez--met twice on the project. They surrendered to you their notes, a copy of which I request as public document by forwarding this communication to Ms. Cobbe, of the Public Information Office.
A year later after submission of the committee-of-four's notes, the final document emerged from your office. To this document Ms. Valdez issued her formal demur. And if this Board member disapproved it, why did the administration publish the "Orientation and Board Procedures" product of your office on the Board web page as if she did? In the name of public honesty, why didn't the administration include the addendum of Ms. Valdez's remarks and any supporting remarks of Board members or dissenting remarks by administration ciphers?
My Deepthroat informs me that Board member Susan Valdez at this Board workshop stated for the record that, although her name is on the committee of four Board members "to produce the document," the resultant "School Board Members [sic] Orientation and Board Procedures" does not represent her intentions.
During Board member Valdez's statement, my Deep Throat reports that you, sir, arose "stormed out of the Board room."
Anybody who has passed Psychology 101 would diagnose your gesture as one of cowardice: you lacked the guts to remain and defend your product. I don't know how in the world you ever got the reputation of being a big bad administration Schutzstaffel enforcer. Standards have plummeted since Hitler retired to the bunker. You are about as fearsome as Tweety Bird.
Since I am a writer who favors verisimilitude, I need to know whether the verb "stormed" be accurate. Would you, as perpetuator of the gesture, submit your favorite verb for the act in which you engaged to protest Board Member Valdez's opposition to the document under discussion that you authored, "School Board Members [sic] Orientation and Board Procedures"? If you can't corroborate the accuracy of the "stormed," can you come up with a substitute? For example, do you favor "stalked" as a more accurate description? Did you perhaps stride out of the Board room? Or did you debouch or even hot-foot it? Did you mayhap strut or swagger from the room? What about stomping out? Did you do that, sir, so great was the blow to your amour propre? Perhaps you traipsed, promenaded, or strutted out of that meeting. This is America, if you chose to traipse, promenade, or even strut out of a meeting, that is your Constitutional right. I'll stand by you in your Constitution huff.
Be it possible that you booted it out the board room? What about parading traipsing, swaggering, or pounding from the hated environs? Those are but a few of the possibilities. What about one of my favorite verbs "slouch"? To report that you slouched out of the Board room would enchant me.
I need imprimatur of your stamp of accuracy on one of the above or one of your own choosing. I warm to this subject. Did you, in opposition to the above Baedeker, waltz out of the board room? Tippytoe out? Perhaps you wafted, moseyed, sauntered, sashayed, boogied, moped, toddled, strolled, drifted, meandered, gumshoed, dawdled, loitered, meandered, moped, oozed, percolated, rambled, sashayed, sauntered, strolled, toddled, or wandered out of that Board room. These verbs have scrambled my synapses; I believe I begin to repeat myself in a verb phantasmorgia.
You have an embarrassment of riches in our wonderful English language, sir. Just pick a verb of rich connotation to echo down the ages of administration-Board disputes. A verb is a word but so much more. Words are the most powerful things in our world. When Polonius asks Hamlet what he reads; Hamlet responds, "Words, words, words," Hamlet endorses the primacy of words. The words Hamlet reads shape his mind and shape history. A word is the nuclear human intellectual unit that decides history--history of the world or history of the school system or history of an in-house, bungled-document process.
I see in your temper-tantrum exit spore of the twilight of the hegemony of the administration's control of the School Board in Hillsborough County. The circumstance that after a feeble complaint by Valdez in the past about the West Chase debacle panicked the administration into leaking her travel budget to the press shows how insecure this administration is. Uneasy sits the head where lies the crown--especially when the crown sits atop the heads of a bunch of dumb clucks.
Your exit from the Board room because you were not man enough to face a Board member's criticism shows how fragile you are. You are supposed to be the administrator everybody fears--the enforcer of the reign of terror by the administration that squelches all criticism of this incompetent group's most egregious sins against ethics in education.
You, sir, don't know your ass from your elbow when it comes to holding on to power ill-gotten or legitimate. You are a political dunce.
I didn't hear what kind of suit you wore or whether it was with or without gravy stains from feeding at the public trough whilst doing nothing but act as Chief Enforcer and explicator of the Big Bad Wolf mythology that perpetuates the most incompetent, illiterate Board in the history of school boards.
On what day of the week did your grand dumbass exit from a meeting occur? We all know that Monday's child is fair of face,/ Tuesday's child is full of grace,/ Wednesday's child is full of woe, /Thursday's child has far to go,/ Friday's child is loving and giving, /Saturday's child works hard for his living,/ And the child that is born on the Sabbath day/ Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.
I bet the meeting was on Wednesday. You are Wednesday's child, Dr. Hamilton, if I ever saw one. Instead of having the courage to push your own candidacy for school superintendent, you have hidden for years behind the mediocrity of Lennard and the skirts of Elia. You stalked out of that room and stepped right into a political cow patty to give those of us who watch this little play a gaudy epiphany that exposed your pitiful psyche.
That I was born on Sunday should not surprise you. The cook delivered me to adorn this world in White Oak, Georgia, because the one doctor in the county had not arrived in my father's old Packard. A toss of my ancestors' DNA put me on the planet to, among other things, chronicle your abilities, such as they are. I know you will agree with my destiny's making me bonny and blithe and good and gay--especially gay. The number of times naysayers have called me a lesbian for fighting for social justice and good grammar would astonish you, who, I know, to be my secret fan. My Sunday's child answer has always been, "Not so far, but I am always open to new experiences."
I advise you to pretend you are Sunday's child. The which will prevent your stalking out of Board meetings in a pout and setting all the teeth of your boss's bosses on edge. Sooner or later this Board annoyance will reach critical mass, and a quorum of its members will wake up and start snarling to be followed by biting. Then you will stalk out of ROSSAC environs forever because of orders to do so, not because you have lacked the maturity during your reign at ROSSAC to indulge in tax-paid pouts.
lee drury de cesare, Sunday's child
PS: I reserve for later comment the incredible style of Saturday-Night-Live legalese in which you wrote the "Orientation and Board Procedures" and the plethora of comma errors athwart the title-page pledge "Hillsborough County Public Schools--Excellence in Education." That you don't know the difference between "your" and "you're" and that Ms. Elia can't punctuate and needs a ghost writer who can't punctuate either to produce her public documents belie that slogan to the point of turning it into vaudeville.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Explication de Texte of $80,000 for Empty Desks
Literary criticism uses “explication de texte” to describe the technique of dismantling a piece of writing to extract its implications.
T.S. Eliot called “explication de texte” the “lemon-squeezer theory of criticism.”
This method I shall employ on
lee drury de cesare
http://www.leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com
A case study
District schools with additional classrooms
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[Times photo: Joseph Garnett Jr.]
Writing specialist Sarah Garcia helps fourth-grader Tyler John during an exercise at
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Eighty million dollars represents serious tax money. School administrations shouldn’t throw citizens’ money around hey nonny nonny as they habitually do. One expects big-bucks projects like this to require minute scrutiny, discretion, judgment, professional savvy, and a file of complete records containing every dot and tittle of detail for anyone interested to scrutinize the process. Taxpayers have a right to minimally sane judgment from the horde of administrators who leach bloated salaries from taxpayers and claim to be worth them.
Most Board members campaign on the promise to “watch every penny of tax-money expenditure.” They promptly forget the pledge when they get into office only to renew it the next time they stand for election. Politicians on School Boards count on voters’ not remembering their promises on financial probity.
Current Board members have been asleep at the switch on the proliferation of $80,000 worth of desks without students to fill them. So much for watching every penny of taxpayer money.
One expects elected School Board to bear final responsibility for this $80, 0000 to honor its pledge to voters for oversight. The administration is supposed to carry out Board policies, not vice versa. Voters vote with expectation that this equation be valid.
If the Board be too cowardly and lazy to do its job, the administration moves into the vacuum. This has been the pattern so long that the administration has appropriated reverse hegemony in the matter of authority. The root of the problem is a weak Board let the in-house political bottom feeders pick the superintendent backstairs over better qualified outside candidates in the sunshine. The success of this maneuver fulfills the administration’s lust for power over the taxpayer purse to pump up their salaries and to appropriate the power of handing out lucrative contracts.
The problem: At about half of those 36 schools, the district created many more seats than it had students.
A problem pops up after the project has been completed? Was everybody at ROSSAC asleep during this time? All the world of the education industry knows that academic weaklings flock to administration jobs. Candidates with non-academic degrees from marginal institutions that border on diploma mills are perennial successful applicants for administration sinecures. Administration’s where the money is. Administration’s where the no-work jobs are.
Was the potted-planted
Officials filled some of the excess seats this year by forcing hundreds of students to switch schools through boundary changes. Many more could face moves in coming months.
I attended the heart-wrenching session of the Westchase boundary changes. Parents filled the Board room to overflowing to beg for intervention in their children’s being jerked around by the administration’s move to cover up overbuilding of additions at the expense of taxpayers and the torture of the children.
The Board sat as unmoved as the priests who put Radames to death in Aida while parents uttered broken-hearted pleas for their youngsters. The Board members’ faces betrayed profound ennui at ubiquitous parental sorrow and weeping.
Only
Board members are scared of the sound of their own voices. God forbid that they challenge the administrative malfunctioning automatons. The children lost that one. They will lose the next reboundarying too if Board members remain as gutless and as ignorant as they insist on being now.
A St. Petersburg Times investigation shows:
Why does the St. Petersburg Times have to walk in off the street, review the situation, and report the facts to the public instead of the Board’s staying on top of all these administration snafus and presenting the public the facts?
Think back to the recent real-estate rip-off of the public in Ms. Elia’s building department before she became superintendent. The excuse then and always is that nobody knew about it—not the administration supposed to be in charge of things, not the Board supposed to boss the administration. What does the public pay them for—to sit around and pare their cuticles?
• Hillsborough administrators knew before they broke ground on at least eight of the classroom wings that enrollment at those schools had dropped markedly. But they built them anyway, spending almost $15-million on construction.
“Built them anyway,” did they? This arrogance shows contempt for the Board—justified, alas-- and a criminal lack of concern about throwing tax money on a whopping mistake to detoxify it.
• When they planned the wings, administrators assumed that minority students would choose to stay in schools outside their neighborhoods after busing for desegregation ended in 2004. That didn’t happen. In fact, minority students fled suburban schools in droves, contributing to the excess seats.
On what did they base this assumption: an Ouija Board analysis? Or did they throw darts? Where are the studies they had done to gauge the probable choice patterns of minority students?
If Hamilton must hire a consulting firm for $132,000 to tell him how to make the school buses run on time even before the featherbedding job the Board created for him had its job description in writing, why couldn’t Elia et al farm out this task if none of the horde of C students making $100,000-plus a year on the administration gravy train didn’t have the skills do this survey?
One supposes it would be too much to expect somebody in the administration deadwood’s having taken a statistics course or knowing enough to suggest hiring a firm to do the work of the administration ignoramuses.
One knows for sure administrators Femme-Fatale-Kindergarten-Mata- Hari Connie or Hollandaise-Sauce-Sans-Lumps Kipley didn’t have any such intellectually rigorous course in their bona fides. Singing “Eency Wency Spider” or whipping up a string-bean casserole is not the expertise called for to come up with statistical projections.
This desk-count mess-up demonstrates why the Board needs to open up top jobs to others besides the inside mediocrities that got their jobs by sycophancy to top administration quidnuncs. Ability on their resume was the last thing Elia’s minions looked for: loyalty to the top was winning credential.
• Incorrect capacity numbers for five of the schools that received wings made them look more crowded on district reports than they actually were. School officials stand by their decision to build, saying it was based on solid projections. But three of the schools were targeted for boundary changes last year, and one is still under consideration.
Lies, lies, and damned lies are what we have here piled onto incompetence. These people are brazen in fabricating for reporters’ consumption manufactured spin information, but the Board never asks the administration for explanation and wouldn’t know or care what it meant if its members got it. They don’t read anything, apparently. They spend the entire Board meeting gushing about how wonderful everything is.
I want to see the rationale in writing for this administrative swashbuckling.
• School Board members say they weren’t told about enrollment changes at specific schools as they approved each step in the wings’ construction. Several members said future projects will need a more thorough and public vetting.
Are their mouths stopped up so that they can’t demand answers to targeted questions? Do they need a Romper Room lecture and pictures? When they “approved each step in the wings construction,” what did they think they were approving? What’s clear here is that the voters should initiate recall petitions on the whole lot of these potted plants. These Board poseurs are too dumb to sit on a School Board. They are, in fact, too dumb to be crossing guards.
“It’s time for us to talk about changing how we do business,” School Board member Candy Olson said.
Ms. Olson has been on the Board so long that she has grown to her seat. She had gone along with business as usual all these years. She’s enchanted with the social dimensions of Board membership.
Was Olson in a coma all these years? This was the same scenario that took place in the real-estate scam--identical. Nobody acknowledged anything. Nobody had participated. Things had just mysteriously happened as the Board kept signing the pages ripping off taxpayers that the administration laid before them. The administration claimed they flatlined.
Ms. Olson eagerly voted for Ms. Elia for the superintendent job and now wakes up to the need for a new way of doing business. Choosing a competent superintendent would have been a new way to business. Olson will huff and puff briefly for the cameras about the “new business” imperative, but she will do zilch to challenge the incompetence of which she is part and subside back into the old-biz potted plant that is her destiny.
Hillsborough’s troubles may offer a cautionary tale to other Florida school districts, especially those spending millions on new classrooms in order to meet the state’s tightening class-size restrictions.
Never mind other districts. They are on their own. We must keep eyes peeled on the Keystone Kops who mishandle things in
Hillsborough superintendent MaryEllen Elia doesn’t think it should. She calls criticism of the district’s handling of the wings shortsighted, saying all of the unused seats will be filled once class-size limits are enforced in each classroom in 2008.
One wonders whom the superintendent calls “shortsighted” in such absolute confidence for the mess she has made. One infers she means the Board is shortsighted if it doesn’t play dead as it usually does and accept the boondoggle as the product of a mind—Elia’s—which says the administration’s big booboo will all come out ok in the end because the administration will institute—ta dah!—boundary changes and throw the children into the maw its mistakes. God forbid that the Board object and fire this mess-up artist. Crossing guard is her level of ability.
Administrators always knew they could fall back on boundary changes.
Oh, certainly. The administration can always tear up communities and terrify children by moving the tots around to rectify their incompetence. And the Board will play along with the outrage. That’s SOP.
“We could put kids into the available capacity the same way we’d have to do it if we built a new school,” said Jim Hamilton, a high-ranking administrator for special issues.
Now that’s the kind of airtight wisdom Le Jimbo manufactures by the bushel. What an adornment he is to the high calling of windbaggery. He pulls the threat of a new school out of the air to justify the overbuilt classrooms. He seems to be threatening the Board with building a new school that’s not needed if its members challenge all the desks that exist with no students occupying them. The Board members will dive under their podium desks for fear of this old tax-paid bloated charlatan. Oh, my: Le Hamilton’s fierce and scares us all to death.
With that kind of logical ability, it’s no wonder the School Board featherbedded this old bloviating air-bag darling a job and placed him in it before the job description appeared on the books. It’s a wonder that he can navigate to his house to his third wife every night. She must hang out a lantern.
But school officials never warned parents. This spring, several parents unhappy that their kids were being moved from crowded neighborhood schools to schools with empty seats asked why so many of the under filled campuses had new wings. They said they never got a straight answer from the district.
School officials don’t warn parents as a matter of policy although they constantly harp on welcoming parents’ participation. Parents didn’t get “a straight answer from the district” about the moving of children to schools where the district had crammed in extra seats because this administration does not deal in straight answers. This administration backed by a supine Board has no scruples about playing parents for fools, including bald-faced lying to them. Straight answers and truth are not in this administration’s repertory.
Linda Archer’s daughter was moved from Westchase Elementary, still crowded after a classroom addition, to Lowry Elementary, which also got a new wing. Even now, as her family gets used to the new school, she wonders if all the extra space was really necessary.
Ms. Archer should put her question in writing to the School Board, send a copy to the state education commissioner requesting oversight, send a copy to the governor requesting oversight, and send a copy to the editors of local papers and the current Board reporters.
The Board routinely ignores its emails, as does the administration. Both of these specimens need to know somebody in authority is watching.
“People came to their own conclusion that somebody messed up in their calculation,” said Archer, now content with her daughter’s school. “Whether we had to move or not, I want to know why that money’s being spent.”
Hear! Hear! for Ms. Archer. We all want to know why the money’s being spent on mistakes. If you can extract that data from this gang of incompetents at the ROSSAC enclave, we will all doff our hats to you.
Elia said it’s good to have excess room in a district as large as Hillsborough, where new subdivisions are rising faster than schools in some suburban neighborhoods.
An extension of Elia’s logic would sanctify building football fields of empty desks. I want to see the statistics of this purported burgeoning of student-desk needs. One cannot trust the word of this administration. Lying is an all-purpose administrative technique. This is the administration that distorted the student figures to sucker the county into giving it more impact-fee money based on inflated figures with no local back-up studies to validate them. Steve Hegarty admitted to me that he sent that information to the County.
In fact, officials are now moving forward with plans to build classroom wings at 46 more schools.
Do those “officials” include the School Board? Do they justify the need with valid studies with backup data? No guesswork will do here. We want hard, cold data.
A no-win situation
The taxpayers lose when $80 million dollars get spent with no Board oversight.
Hillsborough has built many classroom additions over the years. Officials say they are much cheaper than new schools because there is no need to buy land or pay for expensive extras like cafeterias and libraries.
No more buying land for Ms. Elia: she has shown she can’t handle that chore and keep records on it and keep the land barons from overcharging citizens with Elia’s blessing. Unneeded classroom additions are twin to Elia’s real-estate scam that she presided over but subsequently claimed ignorance about.
In recent years, wings have replaced many portables on campuses. At its peak, Hillsborough had about 3,000 portables. Today, the number has dropped to about 1,900.
One should demand to see some solid statistics on this claim. Did a disinterested person do that count? I want to see the notarized statement of such. As Reagan said, “Trust but verify” with this administration’s loose handling of the truth. Gorbachev would be an infinitely more reliable bargaining partner than any of the administration henchmen and henchwomen.
But when administrators began planning the latest round of wings, they knew the high-growth district was entering a volatile period. Class-size requirements were starting to tighten. And a federal judge had just ended three decades of busing for desegregation. No one knew what impact that would have on enrollment at individual schools.
Did the administration do anything but consult a Ouija Board? Did it do projection studies? Did the Board demand them? Are these on file for the public to review? Has the Tooth Fairy given up on
This guy is great at rationalization. His lame-logic affliction is chronic. He’s not adept at hard-headed thinking that prevents the problems he posits as inevitable. Chance does not decide these things if anybody with a brain is involved. The district needs to ascertain with studies how many seats it needs; then it builds according to solidly supported need, not vague guesses made by the mental dwarfs in this administration.
“They weren’t choices about, 'Gosh, we should just build these empty rooms so we could irritate people by moving the boundaries,’”
Note
No one is taking responsibility for initiating the wings. Current administrators say they weren’t closely involved. Elia, then the district’s facilities chief, oversaw the planning but says the projects were identified before her time.
Same old same old. This is the exact response to the real-estate scam. No body knew anything. Nobody had signed off. Nobody was responsible. And the Board did not press for the paper trail. So it was not responsible either.
Records, however, show she signed off on most of the wings in the district’s long-term construction plan.
I think we must accept that Ms. Elia is a congenital liar. She tells fibs when it is convenient. She tells fibs for fun. She lies reflexively and chronically.
Already fewer kids
Even as district officials were planning the new wings, some of the schools slated to receive them were losing students.
One assumes that the school principals passed these data along to ROSSAC, where the recipients tossed the documents into the trash can.
God forbid that reality impinge on the lucubrations of the Laputans who run the administration and the Board. Compared to these hapless administrators, Gulliver’s Laputans presented models of rigorous thinking when they struck each other over the head with air-filled bladders to wake up colleagues so that they could think.
But officials didn’t pull the plug on those projects, which could have saved about 90 percent of their cost. They also didn’t discuss the changing enrollment picture with the School Board.
Why should they discuss pissing away tax money with the Board? When did the Board ever reign in this gaggle of incompetents or ask them any hard questions about anything, especially wasting tax money? They are free to romp incompetently at will. The Board will sit like potted plants and ignore the outrages.
Somebody should check for a pulse on the Board members.
Instead, at the meeting where four of the troubled projects received final approval, school officials talked at length about a $360-million shortfall in future construction dollars.
The Board was more interested in earmarks leeched from taxpayers to support more incompetence than it was about the projects on which it stamped final approval without scrutiny.
Elia, who had just been appointed superintendent, mentioned double sessions and staggered school schedules as options for dealing with overcrowded schools. Her warnings framed a yearlong lobbying effort and were instrumental in getting the
The snookering of the
Elia stands by her recommendation to build at the schools that were losing enrollment. She invokes class size and the need to provide room for school choice, the district’s plan for maintaining diversity after the end of court-ordered busing.
Did any Board member ask La Elia for studies that back up her ruminations? The administration runs on rumor and guesses. There is not science—much less common sense--- behind any of its projects.
“If you have movement one year, that doesn’t mean necessarily that you jerk back and say, 'Let’s not do this,’” Elia said.
That’s the kind of whacko syllogism that the superintendent tenders when she has just messed up big time. What kind of “movement” is she talking about? Did she document that “movement”? What does she mean by “jerk back”? Isn’t it smart to reevaluate a project when new data obviate a need? Isn’t that what an agile thinker in the superintendent’s chair should do? And isn’t the job of the Board to ask questions that elicit answers to concerns about a course correction?
But what about the case of Kenly Elementary?
Kenly was my grammar school. It’s holy territory. I don’t want the incompetent hands of the administration to contaminate my grammar school.
Before the School Board gave final approval for a new wing at Kenly, enrollment there plunged almost 130 students — a 21 percent decrease in a year. The 180-seat addition cost $1.5-million. It was one of the district’s smaller projects.
That area around Kenly is increasingly industrial. Didn’t anybody have the eyes to notice that fact? Children don’t live in factories that surround a school.
Today, Kenly is using 68 percent of its capacity and has more than 200 available seats. The district wants schools to use at least 90 percent of their capacity. If a school doesn’t meet that threshold, it can be considered for a boundary change.
Oh, the old cure-all boundary change: to hell with the lives of the kids it throws into confusion. The main thing is to give the administration dullards a fall-back move to cover up their obtuse decisions at the expense of the kids.
Nineteen of the schools that have opened classroom wings since 2005 don’t meet the standard. A dozen are using 85 percent or less of their space. The rest are close to 90 percent, though it took a boundary change to get three to that level.
Now isn’t that a swell record for an administrator who leaches $260,000 from taxpayers with Board complicity, who can’t punctuate, and who can’t, we now learn, count desks?
In Kenly’s case, school officials are considering pulling in students from nearby Schmidt Elementary, which is overcrowded.
Of course, let the kids suit up and board the buses as hostages to the ROSSAC dumb bells.
District officials knew this was a possibility when they built the wing at Kenly, but never reached out to families at Schmidt.
When did the administration and Board ever “reach out” to families? They are lolling around in Laputan ROSSAC La La Land drawing up more incompetent plans to screw up things further.
“Why would I go disturb something that may not necessarily have to be disturbed?” deputy superintendent Ken Otero said.
Will somebody trap this guy in the mop closet and administer a Stanford Binet test to him? What he says makes not a whit of sense. This is what goes for probity of such overpaid lower-quartile dingdongs as Le Otero.
Some School Board members say communication should have been better. And they were surprised when the Times told them about enrollment drops at some of the schools that got wings. They would have liked to have discussed the possibilities.
Board members always say communication could have been better and then go back to sleep. The problem is not communication. The problem is incompetence and lying to cover up incompetence, both of which the Board exacerbates by incestuous in-house hiring of all the dummies collected in the halls and cubicles of ROSSAC.
“It makes me uncomfortable when I hear that they added a wing and then they knew that the enrollment was declining,” School Board member Jennifer Faliero said.
Now isn’t this a decisive comment? Faliero reigns major dingdong on the School Board. Not long ago she declared that hiring Ms. Elia was a “bargain.” If Elia is a bargain at $260,000, then Mickey Mouse is Einstein. Faliero should be put in a strait-jacket until she is defeated and can do no more harm to the school system.
Flight from suburbs
Looking back, it’s clear administrators made one mistake: They assumed the end of busing for desegregation would not significantly affect minority enrollment at the district’s suburban schools.
On what did they base this assumption? Did they have any studies done to buttress it? Where are these studies? Facts, facts, and more facts are what we want.
That belief was shattered on the first day of classes in August 2004, when minority students who had been bused to the suburbs flooded schools closer to their homes.
Didn’t it make sense to the ROSSAC quidnuncs to infer that the kids would want to the schools closest to their homes? And didn’t the ROSSAC mess-ups have studies done to confirm their assumption that the kids would stay put after busing ended?
“We anticipated more of the youngsters remaining at their schools,” said former superintendent Earl Lennard, noting that many of the students who were being bused for desegregation initially told school officials they intended to stay put.
Dr. Earl the
One does not rebuke
But in school districts across the nation, the end of busing had prompted rapid resegregation. Some School Board members now acknowledge they should have seen it coming in Hillsborough, where several suburban schools slated to get wings saw their population of black students decrease sharply.
So if resegregation has occurred across the nation after busing’s end, what made the
Does that mean the board would have reconsidered some of the wings?
“Hindsight is wonderful,” said School Board chairwoman Carolyn Bricklemyer, who said things weren’t so clear then. “Looking back on it … I don’t know that I would have said yes.”
Ms. Bricklemyer is a society matron who should never have abandoned rolling bandages at the Junior League to run for the School Board. The students lost when she won election. She has given up her seat, Thank you Jesus and Socrates. If one deconstructs her ditzy remark, she says, in effect, “I didn’t know what was going on then and still don’t know. And I continue not to know what I didn’t know then.”
The roomy northwest
So far, the area hardest hit by the fallout from the new wings is northwest Hillsborough, where a high concentration of schools with available room were [sic] sitting next to crowded campuses.
What a feast of ripping off the kids these circumstances proffer for ROSSAC sadists. They licked their chops at the prospect of thousands of sobbing reassigned tots. They don’t know who the Marquis de Sade is; but he’s their fairy godmother and mentor but would never live in
In 2004 and 2005, the School Board approved wings for five elementary schools — Bellamy, Lowry, Morgan Woods, Town and Country and
Boundary changes come to the rescue of administration incompetence once again.
The district’s decision to build a new school in the area may have exacerbated the problem.
“May have exacerbated the problem”? What about this? “The stupid decision to build another school amidst all these empty desks played hell and presents primie facie case for the stupidity of the administration quidnuncs.”
Then a committee of outraged parents should trundle a guillotine into the ROSSAC parking lot for heads to roll for all administrators making over $100,000 a year. Board heads roll as finale. A Madam Defarge will materialize from Central Casting to keep count. Then a new Board can hire her to keep count of desks. Sheriff Dee can provide the guy with the mask to make short shrift of the head-chopping task.
The schools will be the better for this purge. Civic-minded citizens can bid for a guillotine on eBay. EBay guillotines are a bargain. Taxpayers won’t object to paying the winning bid. They know a guillotine is a crying need for School Board chores.
We won’t ask for any studies that backed up this assumption. This administration never deigns to resort to logic when guesswork and superstition are at their beck.
But the impact reverberated to other schools, including Morgan Woods, Town and Country and
Of course they had new wings under design. New Wings reign fashion statement of the ROSSAC ninnies. When administrators pass each other in the ROSSAC halls, they give a thumbs-up to signal a new round of class-room add-ons to house more empty desks.
“You had double relief for the community,” said Bill Person, now the district’s general director for pupil placement but then a school principal.
“Double relief”? What does Bill mean by that term? Is he saying that building new schools and tacking on wings to produce overcapacity are “double relief”? Bill needs a Baker-Act referral.
Is Bill bucking to join the ROSSAC enclave? When Elia sees this idiotic comment, Bill’ll be a shoo-in for the next $100,000 ROSSAC slot. The dumber they come, the higher they go.
Today, Morgan Woods is using 71 percent of its seats. Town and Country stands at 74 percent. Woodbridge is using just 68 percent of its capacity, though school officials say it would be full after a boundary change this year if an apartment complex hadn’t converted to condos and driven families with children away.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Don’t the local school people keep up with the neighborhood building patterns like this condo conversion? The developers didn’t keep it a secret. They advertised it to sell the condos. And what are the excuses for other schools sitting with empty desks? The administration can use condo conversion only once.
School Board member Susan Valdes, who represents the area, remains worried about the excess capacity in the northwest.
Ms. Valdez should be more than worried. She should be hopping mad. Her opponent in the next Board race she faces will nail her on her somnolence during this desk debacle. She will have no excuse.
“That’s a concern that we don’t have the students to fill all those seats,” she said.
A “concern”? Is this feeble comment all that a Board member who bosses the administrative minions can come up with?
One hopes that
Suspicious during Elia’s watch of the building department, a reporter walked in off the street from the St. Petersburg Times and asked a few questions. We learned the results when the reporter turned over a rock and the bugs went scurrying for cover and he wrote about it in the Times.
This real-estate report invokes the same scenario for the reporter who covers the school district for the Times. Now the public knows about the overbuilt desks and the cover-up of the outrage at the expense of the children’s psyches due to this current Times report on the desk outrage.
Steve Hegarty had
The administration gets no criticism from the Board. The school administration is not used to criticism—even from the press, which is supposed to be vigilant in the public interest. So when the press exposes the mess the administration has made of the overbuilt classrooms, Ms. Elia and Dr. Hamilton, her knock-off Rasputin, get questioned by the reporter about their incompetence, a new experience for them. But they are not apologetic but defiant and sarcastic. The Board? Its members are asleep at the switch as usual.
These two public-office deadwood—Elia and Hamilton-- have become accustomed to the perquisite of chronic incompetence and bloated pay with nobody’s objecting, least of all the Board.
The Board never presses the case. Board members are too gutless or too disinterested to dig in and do the job taxpayers elected them to do.
At the recent Board meeting discussing the desk problem in customary lackadaisical manner, the administration launched the Romper Room counter-intelligence move of promoting booklets for incoming Board members to tell them how to act.
There is only one incoming Board member: Ms. Griffin. She defeated Allen, the 36-year school administration veteran that the administration supported on the q.t. because he was already house-broken and would vote the administration line. This laying-down-the-law booklet’s obvious target is new member
Page 5 of the Warning Pamphlet for Board Members has ominous legal language about the Board member’s being the target of the Board attorney’s beady eye for various and sundry infractions. That attorney threat looks like Board-member intimidation to this citizen, although the Board ninnies said, when the administration slyly introduced the pamphlet at a regular Board meeting, that it was a swell idea, that they wished that they had had this useful pamphlet when they themselves had started serving on the Board—which for Dr. Lamb would be in the Pleistocene Era. This response sets a new standard for Board stupidity.
The only way to even the score in this area is for the Board to riposte with a companion booklet on deportment for the administration and have the school attorney target the ROSSAC whiz kids with warnings and implied unpleasant legal consequences for such infractions as contained in this Stein Times article about lying to the press, lying to the Board, lying to the citizenry, failing to honor the Sunshine Law, flimflamming parents during boundary debacles, failing to inform the Board of such things as real-estate scams, overbuilding desk space, and covering the last named up with reboundary projects to torture kids passed off as needed changes, etc., etc.
Romance and non-job-related erotic didos of any degree whatsoever including making eyes over the water cooler on the ROSSAC premises that lead to home-wreckings, divorces, and administrative promotions, especially to Tallahassee, should merit the attorney’s most sweeping language of the dire consequence for guilty administrators.
Of course, the Professional Standards head should have outlined for her in as vivid legal language as resides in the Board attorney’s Perry- Mason vocabulary—with as many “aforementioneds,” “to wits,” and “the party of the first parts” as possible to lend weight and terror to the legal proceedings hinted, which are to be performed in the village square-- the unpleasant consequences of that department’s torturing teachers by making them sort pens and humiliating them in other despicable ways, activities presently rampant in that hell hole of degradation for teachers.
The attorney must cite any forbidden behavior on the head of Professional Standard’s part’s resulting in skinning alive, dying her hair in her most hated hue, and other suchlike condign punishments, all listed in the Florida Statutes to be reaffirmed by Governor Crist shortly after he takes office in a “Springtime for Charlie” gala modeled after the Broadway hit “Springtime for Hitler.”
The Board attorney should as well author an astringent formula that forbids all administrators from wearing polyester since anybody’s making over $100,000 a year makes possible his or her purchasing garments of natural fibers with designer labels, In addition, the attorney should point out that implacable rules forbid an administrator’s driving a rust-bucket auto but, instead, the necessity of tooling around town a late model of the pricier type as administratormobiles for the dignity of maintaining an air of conspicuous consumption in harmony with the bloated compensation packages of the plethora of redundant ROSSAC administrative layabouts.
In addition, of course, the attorney must frame stern warnings about the consequences of administrators’ wearing too much lipstick--on the lips for women, on the collar for men.
And affixed should be as many et ceteras as members can add to the list of forbidden administrative behavior as the denizens who people the Board can come up with in the rare moments on the podium when they are not asleep.
This pamphlet project cuts two ways—or maybe dozens. We have not begun to canvas forbidden behavior for the clerical and cleaning staff. Then there are potential behavioral crimes in the lunch room personnel, not to mention the guy who cleans the gutters. He’s fair game, bien sur, for dire legal warnings of crimes committed on school grounds in the gutters.
One hopes Ms. Griffin will set a precedent for a Board member’s resolve and intelligence by slamming the New Board Member Deportment Booklet on the desk of the bureaucrat that gives it to her, stating that she doesn’t need any deportment protocols from the likes of Elia et al, that she knows how to comport herself to do the taxpayers’ business to clean up the school messes this administration has perpetrated with the present Board members’ collusion. If she doesn’t, she will be just one more potted plant.
These Board members will face the public when election time arrives. I promise to leaflet their campaign appearances with appropriate data to counter their stump lies.
School officials try to focus on positives. They say some of the excess space is being absorbed by classes for exceptional students, who need more room. And some schools have set up full classrooms for supplemental courses like art, a luxury that doesn’t exist in crowded schools, where art teachers have to push carts from room to room.
The reporter means that the administration is trying to cover up the mess with Band-Aid lies. I would like to see data that supports exceptional students’ needing more room. Never take anything the administration or Board says at face value is the rule. With this administration’s facility in lying, a Board member should check everything, demanding hard copies of studies and surveys that precede any decision. Keep this question at the ready when dealing with the administration and the Board: “Can you document that claim?”
When planning classroom wings, district officials said they look at more than individual schools. They may need space in the region, but have room to build only on certain campuses. They say it’s more cost effective to add a few extra classrooms now, even if some aren’t needed, than to come back and build them later.
Trust but verify. Ask for the stats. Demand the studies. Scrutinize the decision process and how it lines up with reality. The Board sponsors not only ill-trained C-student incompetents; but it also goes along with practiced administration liars.
“You’re much better off anticipating a scenario where you have more than enough,” Elia said.
Ms. Elia makes no sense here in this dithering. So what’s new?
That’s little comfort to William Ferreras, whose third-grade son was forced this year out of Bellamy Elementary, crowded even after receiving a new classroom wing, to help fill seats at
The administration answer to all their cockamamie incompetence is to sacrifice the kids. You got a problem? Throw the kids at it.
“I didn’t think it was fair,” said Ferreras, who remains skeptical that growth justified the addition of space to
Why, indeed didn’t the administration do the minimally sensible thing? Because its members are too dumb to pick out the best solution in a multiple-choice decision test is why. This administration would have done worse in
Full? That was mistake
And when did this administration produce anything but mistakes? It’s the constant product: mistakes and their cover-up, causing more mistakes.
Those involved in school planning say enrollment projections are at least as much art as science.
Who said this? What are their names? The author of this moss-grown shibboleth to excuse incompetence should receive scrutiny from a Board on the qui vive.
Counting school desks is not art. It’s a mundane chore. Supplying the lack thereof and not supplying too many have to do with review, surveys, study, and checking and rechecking. Never mind these “art-science” tired metaphors to cover up incompetence.
So in addition to the projections included in the long-term construction plan sent each year to the state, the district monitors enrollment at every school.
Who does this monitoring? The janitors? The hall monitors? The grounds keepers? The lunch-room police?
The two measures haven’t always matched up.
Oh, big surprise. And what did the administration do when it became aware of the mismatches? Did it press in and find out why the disparity? Or did it take out its ukuleles and play “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”? My candidate is the latter.
The Times found large errors in the district’s internal capacity report in 2004-05, when many of the classroom additions were moving from the drawing board to construction. The mistakes made five of the schools that ended up with a significant number of unused seats look more crowded than they actually were.
My God, these people should get the sack immediately. The Board members should get a flogging at the public square on
Riverview Elementary, for example, appeared on the internal report to be filling almost all of its 665 seats at the beginning of the 2004-05 school years.
The Board should jump on such statements, given the administrative record.
But the report failed to account for the 300 seats added previously to Riverview, school officials acknowledge. The school actually was running at 68 percent of its expanded capacity even as the school district approved the addition of 10 classrooms.
Are these people on drugs?
Mistakes made Morgan Woods and Town and Country appear full. In fact, both had breathing room. Mabry Elementary and Crestwood Elementary looked hugely crowded. Correct counts would have shown their space needs weren’t so critical.
Cocaine. It has to be cocaine. Maybe gallons of cough syrup. Or doctor shopping a la Limbaugh. They have to get their supply from some place.
School officials said the mistakes weren’t big enough to make a difference. The school district had class size coming, and its long-term construction plan contained correct information.
Weren’t big enough to make a difference to whom? The brain-dead administration and Board or the ripped-off taxpayers?
Elia stands by all the wings, even the one at Riverview Elementary, which today has close to 400 excess seats.
Of course she does. She feels quite comfy, in fact, unrepentant, in the debris of the messes she has made. She’s not scared of this toothless Board. The Board is scared of her.
She said there is growth all around Riverview, which is being eyed for a boundary change to draw students from crowded Sessums Elementary.
That’s it: throw the kids into the maw of misjudgments and mistakes.
“I think that you would say right now that the decision to put a wing at Riverview was enlightened,” Elia said.
“Enlightened”? Elia delivers her own encomium as cover-up for her lack of leadership and abundant stupidity. We are talking criminal chutzpah here.
Karyn Kasnik’s two sons attend Sessums. The school’s reputation helped guide her decision to buy a home near the school in the Rivercrest subdivision.
Karyn made a big mistake. She should have hired a research firm.
Even if her children don’t have to move, she would like to be told the possible impact of a new classroom wing long in advance.
One wishes Karyn all the luck in the world.
“I think that it would make me stay involved,” Kasnik said. “So I wouldn’t be blindsided.”
Karyn should prepare for blindsiding by the administration and Board. Blindsiding parents and sacrificing children to their mistakes are both’s specialties.
Just ask the parents of the reboundary agon in Westchase what it feels like to undergo a school-administration-Board blindsiding.
- Letitia Stein can be reached at lstein@sptimes.com or
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