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Thank uou for saying what teachers are saying!!! This travesty does nothing short of perpetuating a crime upon high school students which will compromise their future--where ever it may lie. Hillsborough county will be a greater laughingstock. Reality will decimate hopes and dreams when our students try to enter a business door or the gates of a real university

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 7:08 PM

This grade-inflation scheme is the ultimate insult to teachers: as usual ROSSAC gave teachers no input. That is sadism.

I am going to do my best to get across the horror of what the academic weaklings at ROSSAC have cooked up tomorrow at the meeting, but don't hold your breath. These are people who don't care about learning. They only want a degree that says they have learned something.

Have you read the credentials of those people who hunker down in ROSSAC? They have gimcrack degrees from Nowhere U's. Marc Hart was the only person in ROSSAC with a decent degree--magna cum laude from Loyola--and they kicked him out for succumbing to La Belle Dame Sans Merci Falliero's hanging out in his office until he gave in. Now it's wall-to-wall intellectual pygmies in ROSSAC. Trying to reason with them is like venturing into the Rain Forest and trying to chat up the aborigines.

And then there is the matter of the ROSSAC aborigines' wanting to kill me for even opening my mouth. If I don't show up to complain, look for me in the southwest corner of the administrator parking lot slumped over the wheel of my old Mercedes.

Tell the police to begin forensics in the board magic half-moon circle after the coppers put some of that red tape around it, roping in all the suspects. The police must follow the procedures I see on Court TV. I demand all the crime proprieties be observed in my murder. lee

Tribune Marilyn Brown's articles represent the best research of any of the public-school reporters.

Brown wrote a perceptive article on the grade inflation going on now in the county schools: "Grades Going Higher," January 12, 2008. She doesn't call the situation grade inflation; but she provides the data that make that inference inescapable.

Ms. Brown also doesn't say so, but one can infer that this grade-inflation scheme is another plot to make Ms. Elia's superintendency look good so that she and her administrative myrmidons can gouge more money from taxpayers for this doctored performance. Elia's scheme to hype grades, in fact, is a scam on the taxpayers but, worse, the students.

What dummying down razzle-dazzle does instead of prepare students for college or the real world of employment is to make them unequipped for the rigors of both. In college, they will compete with students whom grade schemes have not disenfranchised with a crooked scheme like the local one that Brown outlines.

Students will apply for jobs in companies whose employers even now complain of the lack of writing ability of applicants who graduated from schools with grade scams such as the one that the administration thrusts down the throats of county teachers. These artificial grades cripple students' futures. Hyped grades may make their work easier now, but these catch up with them after graduation.

I used to get area students in freshman English class at HCC who couldn't write a literate paragraph much less an essay and whose grammar and punctuation were abysmal. Instead of teaching them Shakespeare and Yeats, I had to take up half the class time reteaching them what they should have mastered in high school. Yet they would have made A's and B's in high-school English. And this was before this newest grade-inflation scheme promulgated by the Hillsborough County administration.

These students hated me, of course, when I turned back their papers festooned with red marks for all the errors. It traumatized them to get the grade they deserved. This was a new experience. They had grown used to the cotton wadding of grade inflation.

I had a high drop-out rate. Students would leave to take adjunct teachers' classes and get A's and B's. The reason for these inflated grades is that adjuncts have no job protection. They are like teachers in high school and can get fired for opposing administration's wishes to hype grades to get funding in HCC's case and to get Ms. Elia a glowing reputation in the public schools' case.

When the HCC administration summoned me to question my high attrition rate, I told its members as tenured professor that if they bothered me again I would go to the board and complain about their pressuring me to give students a grade their performance did not deserve. The administration gave up on me after a few interviews like this and left me alone to award students the grades they deserved.

When students passed my classes, they celebrated in the cafeteria that they had survived "that bitch's" class. I like to think that I am the teacher students once hated and later admired. As the years pass, I have had evidence that such is the case.

Teachers' lying to students about what their real grade is does them no good in the real world, where grade inflation stops at the employment door.

Only school administrations offer a haven for illiterate college graduates. Both Dr. Hamilton and Ms. Elia must have slid through their school years as students with the help of grade inflation. Neither one has a grasp of basic grammar, punctuation, or felicitous rhetoric. A moderately talented junior-high student writes better than does Ms. Elia. Dr. Hamilton would drop to 4th-or 5th grade.

The comments of the teachers following the Brown article cheer me. They know what the administration is doing; so the administration does not pull the wool over their eyes when it dictates that teachers distort student grades for dishonest ends.

The principals in the article who defended the grade-inflation cheat reveal why they became principals. Board member Edgecomb was a principal. She reflexively defends the administration no matter the outrage. Her daughter is now in the administration chute to inflated salaries. So I doubt voters can expect Ms. Edgecomb ever to defend education excellence and not administration perks or grade-inflation schemes.

Parents need to grasp the harm this new grade-inflation distortion will do their children when they move on to college or to a job. Dummying down high-school training with artificially pumped grades will cripple their children later in college and in the job world.

lee drury de cesare

Hillsborough High School Class of
'51 50th Reunion: Lily Massaro and I. Lily lived across the creek from me. Her family owned a dairy. We rode the bus to HHS together.

From:	"lee de cesare"
To:	doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us, jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us, candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us, susan.valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us, "april griffin" , carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us, "'Tom Gonzalez'" , "'Tom Gonzalez'"
CC:	"Janan Chandler" , james.aulusio@schc.k12.fl.us, jhill@sptimes.com, palmer@tampatrib.com, tash@sptimes.com, abelibarra@lagacetanewspaper.com, president@hcbar.com, Tobin@sptimes.com, "'Maida Bello'" , Montolino@aol.com, michelle.barlow@sdhc.k12.fl.us, hooper@sptimes.com, Tobin@sptimes.com, tisch@sptimes.com, huntley@sptimes.com, wayneGarcia@creativeloafing.com, steveotto@tampatribune.com, stevehanlon@hk.law, patrickmanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com, pgailey@sptimes.com, "Fred Burns" , "'Frank Sanchez'" , lee_decesare@yahoo.com
Subject:	Monkey Biz
Date:	Mon, 14 Jan 2008 01:12:27 -0500

United Way of Tampa Bay

1000 North Ashley Drive, Suite 800

Tampa, Florida 33602

January 12, 2008

Dear United Way:

My husband, Tom De Cesare, used to serve on the board of the United Way when we lived in Tampa’s Beach Park for twenty years.

I taught at HCC then, during which for a time Dr. Ambrose Garner was college president. He told the assembled faculty the year he arrived that he would “cut off your legs at the knees and make you walk around on bloody stumps” if a hundred percent of the faculty did not donate to United Way. Dr. Garner wanted to cut a swell figure at Chamber-of- Commerce breakfasts.

I rose to object to that crude coercion and said I refused to donate to the United Way because at that time it gave more to the Boys Clubs than to the Girls Clubs. I debated this point with my husband at home.

Dr. Garner did not cut off my legs at the knees but rather chased secretaries around the desk. I helped one quarry get an attorney, Steve Hanlon, who is now with the flossy Holland Knight law firm. Secretary Iris Willis was willing to press charges against Dr. Garner for his untoward behavior. Other women were afraid to object.

I am always surprised at the outrages people will put with if the somebody who inflicts the outrage has power to fire the victim.

Mr. Hanlon involved the Florida Ethics Committee, which removed Dr. Garner from his job. After Dr. Garner’s eviction, I used to see him wandering about the airport post office looking forlorn. No doubt he missed the days when he threatened Ph.D.s with cutting off their legs and making them walk around on the stumps, not to mention his sprints around desks in pursuit of clerical help at Gordon Keller’s Penthouse Playhouse for guys.

I see on the January 15th school-board agenda that United Way is donating money to the Hillsborough County School Board:

Approve Accepting $42,500 from United Way of Tampa Bay as Match Funding for the Early Childhood School Readiness Programs for the Period lower-case “period” ont>of January 1, 2008 comma through June 30, 2008, Effective lower case “effective” January 15, 2008 (Student Services and Federal Programs Division) period

I consider a fine thing that United Way donates to the schools, especially for the Early Childhood project. HCC’s administratition has just kicked out the Headstart kids to put up a luxury apartment building.

Some on-site observers suspect graft is the root of HCC’s administrative efforts to turn HCC into a business with many subcontractors to open up more bribe opportunities with the state’s providing education funds diverted from education to this crooked enterprise.

I have talked some of those HCC people's complaining not to tell me about the problems but to go to the feds. They have finally.

So there exists ballast in these gestures to children: United Way’s benign, HCC's malignant.

I urge United Way to be aware of Hillsborough County school board's carelessness with money and its disinclination to rein in the waste of tax dollars by the profligate administration. The board allows the superintendent to indulge in no-bid contracts for buddies and sycophants, bloated salaries for featherbedding administrators, and hiring-and-firing irregularities that violate the equal-opportunity laws and imperil the schools’ federal grants with eqal-opportunity riders on them.

The board claims it is an equal-employment-opportunity employer, but that claim is utter piffle if you look at what goes on in fact. The school board presides over a jobs program for administration friends, sycophants, and family and hands out plum jobs with no advertising.

Once in a while you read hints of this situation in the print press, but mostly the press goes along with the outrage by reporting the lunch-room menus instead. This look-the-other-way by board and press gives Superintendent Elia patronage power to hand out these jobs—many of the featherbed variety--paid for with tax money. The attorney says that some footnotes in the state rules for education make possible the board’s considering money no object in the no-bid contracts.

The corker is that this board attorney, Mr. Tom Gonzalez--who lives in my old Tampa neighborhood, where our family occupied the sole hovel with our four children; two-earner minimum-wage-head-of-the-family, Tom; ill-paid-house-wife professor, Lee; arthritic bulldog, Obie; and no-pedigree cat, Twink—Tom Gonzalez, as I was saying, luxuriates at this very minute back in our old neighborhood in a baronial hacienda with Olympic-sized pool, servants’ quarters for butler and three maids, lawn service, pool service, house calls from the $400-John-Edwards hair cutter to attend Le Gonzalez’s tonsorial rituals, not to mention gourmet pizza delivery from the Michelin four-star Pizza Hut ad lib.

Senor Gonzalez’s life style is little short of that of the emperors of imperial Rome. There is even talk that Counselor Gonzalez may present legal rationale to the board to have his horse Stare Decisis made a board member. He doubtless will cite horse precedents that reach back to Caligula. I bet the board approves the petition and makes a place for Stare’s stall on the podium in Dr. Hamilton’s old chair’s location next to Dr. Otero. However, I hear Gonzalez is having trouble getting the Hillsborough County Bar to admit steed Stare to membership. But that may come too when the board makes Tom board attorney for life.

Where does Tom keep his horse, you ask? In the equestrian expanses of Beach Park, of course. Surely by now everybody knows that Beach Park is horse country.

All this Gonzalez wretched excess gets paid for in large part with the ten million dollars the flossy firm of Thompson, Sizemore & Gonzalez has raked in from taxpayers for its having laid hold of the board-attorney job via Tom’s kissy-poo relationship with Dr. Lennard fourteen years ago: a gift encumbered with no Title VII advertising athwart federal law, fairness, and base-line ethics.

Tom knew this scam was wrong. His firm specializes in labor law. He can invoke Title VII when it suits his purpose. He can also ignore Title VII or any other of the panoply of equal-opportunity laws when doing so is to his advantage. Tom’s filching the job from dumb-as-a-stump Dr. Lennard prevented Tom’s Bay Area brother and sister attorneys from competing for this lucrative, tax-money lawyer perch.

Tom doubtless cheated at marbles too on the playground and even filched pure-es from weaker kids. Skullduggery tendencies surface early according to world-famous psychiatrist and massage therapist Ronda Storms.

Since getting the job, Tom has hyped the desirability of no-bid contracts with lawyerly flourishes. Doing so constitutes a conflict of interest since Tom is the recipient of no-bid largesse. Thus Tom should hush up on the subject. He doesn’t. Tom touts his ethical purity instead. But, as Milton said, “I cannot praise a fugitive and a cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed.”

Or was it Tom’s horse who said that?

Tom’s firm’s school-board hiring was unfair and belied the equal-employment-opportunity spin of the board, which stamps “We are an equal-employment-opportunity employer” all over the place.

Mr. Steve Hegarty presides over the ROSSAC tax-paid wind machine that spins this equal-opportunity claptrap, although he chiefly issues press releases cataloguing the many gimcrack education- bureaucrat awards won by Ms. Elia in the perpetual Crackerjack Education Bureaucrat Awardee Sweepstakes. These have begun to arrive in dump trucks to the ROSSAC redoubt, so numerous are they.

Le Hegarty replaced Mr. Marc Hart, fired on the trumped-up charge of alcoholism as cover for the real reason for kicking him out: an affair with the board’s La Belle Dame sans Merci Jennifer Faliero at her instigation. Board and administration aimed to cover the ugly situation up for fear that families would disapprove an on-site adulterous pas de deux as unwholesome environment for their children.

This adultery dust-up presented instance of the board and administration’s double standard. After kicking out Hart, whose two children his ongoing homewrecker divorce has injured, of course, the board then voted La Faliero in as board chair, in which position she gavels people down who want to make inquiries about this Peyton-Place atmosphere that surrounds her. We have an instance of adultery cover-up trumping the First Amendment presided over by the school-board elected officials.

To give you some idea of the administration and board’s exotic, non-EEOC hiring practices, there looms the employment saga of Dr. James Hamilton. He held a top administration job for many years despite his not knowing the difference between homophones “your” and “you’re” and inability to write a literate paragraph.

Dr. Hamilton in mid-07 had second thoughts about retiring after a career of decades of huffing and puffing to make underlings afraid of him and augment his self-produced reputation of being a ba------rd to work for. Dr. Hamilton was far gone in the glamour of ba…rd swagger and Jimmy Buffet songs. To soothe his dithering, Superintendent Elia created him a job out of thin air, did not advertise it, and put him into the slot before it even went on the books one staff member told me. This maneuver represented the creating of a sinecure for an administrator incapable of making up his mind. That is one of the most exercised skills of the superintendent: creating fluff jobs for buddies. She too has writing deficiencies, so she and Le Hamilton are birds of a feather. Both write with the rhetorical felicity of essays one finds scrawled on bathroom walls.

Taxpayers forked out $140,000 a year for this faux job without knowing it so that Dr. Hamilton could hang around ROSSAC and have the willies about whether he wanted to retire or not. Somebody even scribbled in by hand his name beside that of his administrative replacement, Dr. Otero, on the school Web site. One infers that citation signaled that he hung out in Otero’s office and drove him crazy.

When Dr. Hamilton bestirred himself to leave-- a beneficent moment for education--about nine months had elapsed while he shambled about ROSSAC in a pother. This decision equipoise made Hamlet look a model of dispatch and cost taxpayers about $80,000, bled from a shrinking school budget which the board and administration claim doesn’t have enough money for students’ needs. It is wicked to throw away $80,000 in school money to indulge a spoiled, vacillating-doesn’t-know-the-diffence-between-“you”-and-“you’re”-from-a-hole-in-the-ground departing buffoon.

Upon Dr. Hamilton’s retirement, the public-affairs office says Ms. Elia wiped out Dr. Hamilton’s ad-hoc job. That fact testifies to its having been a boutique job for Dr. Hamilton's dithering period.

The board had rubberstamped this tax-rip off coming and going on the consent-agenda conveyer belt. Not one board member demurred. Four—Valdes, Kurdell, Lamb, and Edgecombe—are up for election. One wonders whether they will reveal to voters this Grand Guignol that they staged. A good place for such admission would be after they make the template board-candidate promise to "save every penny of taxpayer money that I can, cross my heart."

For more irregularities about how the school board and administration misappropriate tax money, see http:www//SchoolBoardSpending.blogspot.com.

And for probity’s sake, put a rider on your money to the board that dictates that it goes strictly to the early-childhood project. Otherwise it could divert to one of the create-a-job-for-a-irresolute-buddy projects the production of which Ms. Elia excel. Behind her members of the school board wave pompoms to cheer her on.

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Dr. Hamilton nude. Isn't he a beauty? If you didn...":

Was this Jim Hamilton the same Jim Hamilton who taught English at Hillsborough High in the late 60's/early 70's? (Hope not given the exhibited grammar skills?)

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 6:11 PM

I don't know if Dr. Hamilton taught English at HHS, my alma mater. Lord, I hope not; I had good English teachers there in the Fifties. If he did teach English, he didn't learn anything from the books he taught. His writing shows him to be barely literate.

Somebody told me that Hamilton and Lennard were overheard when they both taught at some school plotting how they were going to take over the school system.

They did.

That shows you how crooks and illiterati succeed in the Hillsborough County school system with the nonexistent oversight of a board that features a lot of obtuse specimens who want to sit on the board dais during meetings, look important, and gad about town posturing about how concerned they are for learning. Concerned about learning, my foot. I bet not one board member has read much beyond The National Inquirer.

This state of affairs will continue until enough people object and hold the board members' feet to the fire.

I think there will be a change on the board after the next election. I think Burns will defeat Hamilton. And then in another year I believe Faliero will go. I can't see even indifferent voters keeping an adulteress on the board.

When Ms. Cobbe confirms that Florida State gave Hamilton a Ph.D., I shall write the president there and send him two samples of Hamilton's illiterate writing and ask how the forensics of it line up with Hamilton's putative thesis. I once asked Hamilton at Tiger Bay what his thesis was about, and he said he couldn't remember. Had he written it, he would have remembered. A real thesis is hard work.

It's my belief that Hamilton had it ghosted for him.

I am going to ask the president how he justifies the failure of the thesis committee to spot a bought-and-paid-for thesis, hence thrusting on the taxpayer a grammar thug who claimed a Ph.D. from a state university using it to leach hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax money as a high-level administrator for years yet not knowing the difference between "your" and "you're." And what about the dumbclucks that hired him? That must have been Lennard.

I shall complain as well to the Board of Governors about Florida State's kick in the face to scholarship. Such fake theses make Florida's state universities look like a bunch of NOVAs in the educational world.

Such outrages would not occur if more people hollered and complained to the governing bodies. lee

PS: I just thought of another group to complain to: everybody on the education committees of the Florida House and Senate.

What we have to do is to embarrass these shameless characters. We have to shine a light on them and make the community aware of their scams.

Letitia Stein, brown@tampatribune.com, , tobin@sptimes.com;hooper@sptimes.com

Ms. Cobbe:

Today La Gaceta published the superintendent's performance pay. 1. How long has this system been in effect? 2. Did it start in Dr. Lennard's tenure or when? 3. Is there a policy-manual rationale for it on record?

Where is the teachers' performance pay schedule listed? Since they do all the work that results in the performance scores, a reasonable assumption is that they get performance pay as least as generous as Ms. Elia. And they need it more than she since she already gets an obscene salary.

I would like to know if Dr. Hamilton got his doctorate from Florida State.

lee drury de cesare

Middle- Class Capitalists

David Brooks, nyt

Middle- Class Capitalists

David Brooks, nyt

The G.O.P. presidential candidates vow to spend more on scientific research and to take on special interests like the teachers’ unions. If schools can’t fire bad teachers and reward good ones, then nothing else we do to improve education will do any good.

Mr. Brooks, the above quote from your column today annoys me no end.

Teachers’ unions—the good ones— try to raise teachers’ salaries and make their working conditions humane. Many of them—such as the CTA in Hillsborough County, Florida--are in bed with the administration and thus ciphers when it comes to teachers' well being.

To say the Republicans are “taking on the teachers’ unions” goes against politicians' perpetual, pious promise to raise teachers’ salaries. If politicians carried through the empty promise to raise teachers' salaries, the need for unions would dissolve.

I never read that the Republicans or Democrats are going to take on the greedy, incompetent, featherbedding school bureaucracies.

School superintendents have a country-wide cartel which boosts and reinforces their obscene salaries. They quote each other’s hyped salaries as the going rate and pile some more on when they bargain with unsophisticated school boards that don't care about throwing away tax money on marginally literate, marginally competent superintendents such as we have both in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, Florida. Both boards have succumbed to these superintendents' bloated salary demands and raises.

Both superintendents--Ms. Elia, Hillsborough County, and Dr. Wilcox, Pinellas County--are marginally literate (see my corrections of Dr. Wilcox’s thesis from the Florida diploma mill NOVA:
http:/wilcoxilliteracy.blogspot.com/

Ms. Elia hires her friends and sycophants for $100,000-plus jobs. She hands out unbid contracts to buddies. The board lawyer, Tom Gonzalez, who got his job without the board's advertising it fifteen years ago, has raked in for his firm close to ten million dollars during that time as well as I can calculate. He won't send me the public information on the particulars of his relationship with the board as the state law requires.

Mr. Gonzalez knew when he took the unadvertised job for his corporation that Title VII requires advertising of jobs such as his. On the job, he condones with legal flimflam the board's cooperation with the administration in unbid contracts and buddy hiring for high-level administration $100,000-plus jobs.

The board is supine, ignorant, or too gutless to intervene in the taxpayers', students', and teachers behalf. Two board members--Kurdell and Olson--jumped on to Board Member April Griffin when she questioned an unbid contract to a former administrator. Kurdell and Olson told Ms. Griffin that she was being "disloyal" by questioning the infallibility of the administration.

Look at school administrations and collusive school boards if you want to see what is wrong with education. The Republicans are using a ritual campaign blab of kicking teachers' unions to cure what is wrong with the schools. It lacks basis in fact.

The Republicans and you should look at the greed and corruptions in school administrations and the cooperation of potted-plant boards whose goal is to sit on the dais at board meetings, look important, and gad about town as guardians of education to puff up their egos.

This obscene situation is Number One in what's wrong with the schools.

lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Blvd. 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708

copy sent to all members of the school board, the school-board attorney, some members of the school family abused by the school board, and the administration, and some denizens of the somnolent Bay Area press that lets this obscene situation unfold without reporting it to the public ldd

Dr. Hamilton nude. Isn't he a beauty? If you didn't know better, you'd think he was Barack Obama. Too bad that he doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're" even with his bought-and-paid-for doctorate.

From: Anonymous [noreply-comment@blogger.com]

Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2008 6:01 PM

To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com

Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " Th....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " Th...":

You have figured out the whole scam of the School District of Hillsborough County. The majority of the top officials are not qualified for the positions they hold and do not know what they are doing. They do not dare get a Superintendent from out of state from an ivy league school, because that person will discover that the majority of them have cracker jack degrees from Nova and don't have qualifications for their job. That person would actually hold them accountable for their jobs. Elia is part of the Good Ol' Boy network and will never fire any of them, because she benefited from this whole scam that rips off the taxpayers. Hire the least qualified people so no one discovers that the others are not qualified.

It's disgusting: they make a mockery of learning. lee


Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 2:27 PM

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2008 6:52 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " Th....

OK, sugarbritches (below), this is the last post you get on the main page. You are doing a Don Quixote on this blog. You attack things that have never been said. We are keeping our eye on the school board and administration. Get with the program or butt out.

If you will come to the school board and help me beat up on the podium villains, then I will put you back on Page One. Otherwise, you get parked in the comment section. Hail and farewell. Lee

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " Th...":

So why do we continue to regurgitate the labels? Liberal, Conservative, Christian, Atheist, Gay-Rights, PETApods are entirely too broad for our purposes. Let's stop using a shotgun approach and start being more surgical in nature.

Since Edmund Burke is the only true conservative (although a little too authoritarian for my taste) perhaps people are "picking" positions rather than "living" philosophy.

Modern day conservatives have allowed themselves to be defined by liberals. Liberals have allowed themselves to be defined by conservatives.

Is Elia conservative? liberal?
Is Faliero Christian? Catholic? Protestant? Jewish?

It is their actions, behavior, etc. that should be the point.

When you accuse/label someone of being something as generic as conservative/liberal you dilute the argument.



Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 3:19 PM

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " The comments to Casting-room Couch reflect the r...":

I hope the school board members are reading these comments. They want to believe the school district officials are above reproach, yet if they read most of their personnel files, they will see the top officials usually have no qualifications for their jobs, and what school board members don't understand is that the district officials will always be nice to them and make the board members think they are nice people. They need to interview and talk to the officials' underlings. There are so many stories about how Elia threw her weight around as she climbed the ladder. I have never met a person who has known her who likes the woman. Maybe some of her peers and those who worked above her before she became Superintendent like her, but those who worked under her say they hated working with her.



Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 6:35 AM

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Be a watchdog of the Hillsborough County School Sy...":

"But the conservatives don't care." is a bunch of crap and really undermines your point. It is not conservative/liberal gibberish we are concerned with but right/wrong. I used "conservative" only when I said that Ms. Faliero has called herself a conservative Christian.

I know that only people like Edmund Burke are real conservatives; but the Republicans have appropriated "conservative" and have villified Democrats with calling "liberals." They have taken a perfectly fine word--liberal--and made it into an epithet.

But how many people do you know who have ever heard of much less read Edmund Burke on the school-board dais? The administration's degrees are in hokey subjects on the periphery of the academic world that people with real degrees laugh out. The administration scholars manque can't write. The can't even punctuate. But they have mastered the politics of the school system, and those are not lovely politics if you have reviewed the comment on how the administration bullies keep written records on a victim until they have enough to hang the poor wretch. That is the politics of personal distruction. And the board knows all about it though it will claim it doesn't; and what's more, it approves of it. Have you ever heard a rebuke on the dais of the administration's skullduggeries? All the board sat there mute when Elia downloaded an extra class on teachers. Not even Griffin or Valdes uttered a peep. I wish we could get just one brave person on the board--a person who will speak up and tell them like it is. I will needlepoint that board member a whoopie cushion.

Anybody as emphatic as you are, sugarbritches, should show up at the school-board meetings, sign up for the podium, and blast the board and administration. I would bet my best frock that you are a guy. So help out. I am about to run out of terms of invective. lee

Political agendas are what got us here my friend so my suggestion is to make logical arguments with solid foundation.

Support those that support you and VOTE with confidence - remember the "chads"?



Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 9:05 AM

Shame in the schools that reflects the administration and board's lax morals, harassment of teachers and staff, and double standards

Sun 1/6/2008 10:27 AM

steve hegerty (steve.hegarty@sdhc.k12.fl.us); 'linda.cobb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'susan.valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jennifer.faliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'carol.kurdell@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'tobin@sptimes.com'; 'degan@tampatribune.com'; 'MBrown@tampatrib.com'; 'hooper@sptimes.com'; 'Stein@sptimes.com'

amanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com; Anita J Henriquez; Ann C. Davis; Barbara Stein; Cathy & Doug in SCW; Dabonich@aol.com; Anita J Henriquez; Ann C. Davis; Barbara Stein

School Board Members: My blog leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com got almost 4,000 hits last month. That means that school people--mostly teachers, I infer--are reading it and reacting with comments such as the blue one below.

The comments are anonymous. People are afraid to use their names for fear of retaliation. The board knows that Ms. Elia uses the Professional Standards office to cook up charges against people who emit a whiff of criticism of the administration. The lawyer Tom Gonzalez knows it. I know he does because I told him about it. He promised to author a booklet for teachers trapped in the Abu Ghraib of Professional Standards cell block. He lied. He had no intention of authoring such information for teachers and staff. He is committed to using the patina of his lawyer status to shill for the board and administration's abuse of the rest of the school family. I have filed an ethics charge against Mr. Gonzalez's firm to see if the Florida Bar's Ethics Commission thinks such behavior is unethical. Its opinion will tell us whether it itself is ethical and concerned about the ethics of bar members.

The comments below outline how malignant and paranoid the atmosphere is for some--and I suspect most-- teachers and staff in the schools.

They live in fear of the administration's targeting them for harassment or firing if they give their frank opinion about how the administration with board collusion runs the schools in accord with the administration's lust for power and to satisfy its greed to bloat its salary and perquisites out of the tax dollars meant for use of the schools.

One notes that one of the charges that Mr. Erwin won in his case of crucifixion by the board and administration was that they suppressed his free-speech rights. The board and administration suppresse free speech routinely, and the Gonzalez law firm condones this abuse of the school family's and the public's Constitutional rights.

Mr. Gonzalez's behavior must call to mind that he is a no-bid recipient of fourteen years, during which his firm has extracted almost ten million dollars as well as I can figure (he won't send the financial information I asked for since he thinks he is not liable for the public-records law).

The board can't be proud of the comments from school employees below. These comments fly in the face of the board's hypocritical concern for teachers and students when its only concerning is bowing to the superintendent's bad management. Or it doesn't care what teachers think, just pretending to care at election time; it appears that the board's rolling over for the administration's every whim is business as usual. Board members' only concern seems to be maintaining their incumbency and to hell with teachers, students, staff, and taxpayers. These are neglected constituencies that a board member mimes caring about about at re-election time with fingers crossed behind backs.

And if any board member so much as asks for an item to come off the agenda for public discussion such as April Griffin recently did, corrupt, colluding board members such as Carol Kurdell and Candy Olson jump on that board member, who, as Board Chair Femme Fatale Jennifer had already told Ms. Griffin in a workshop, has not learned the rules of curtsying to the administration and should resign the board. God forbid that a board member look out for the taxpayers' interest and the welfare of teachers and students.

One expects Ms. Kurdell on the hustings to explain her attack on a fellow board member who dared ask a question about the no-bid gravy train that Ms. Elia uses as patronage device to reward her buddies and sycophants out of taxpayer money.

Board Chair Jennifer, who claims to be a conservative Christian, does not think that herself's having sparked an adulterous affair with the chief public-information-officer Mr. Hart represents grounds for quitting the school board, however. She thinks instead that a board member's asking the administration questions about its policies is lese majeste. Asking questions in Ms. Falliero's weird scheme of morality should lead to the questioning board member's resignation so that harmony can reign once again with all members of the potted-plant board gaggle who bow to the superitendent. Adultery on the job to La Jennifer is a mere trifle, one of the perquisites of a lusty board member who can pick and choose among the male administrators for sexual distraction. The poor male administrators at ROSSAC sound like a school-board version of the Vestal Virgins.

Ms. Falliero has a weird sense of morality. Adultery on school property is ok, but a board member's asking questions on behalf of taxpayers is treason.

Apparently board members found Ms. Falliero's adultery acceptable behavior but the questioning by Ms. Griffin of a no-bid contract subversive. Both Olson and Kurdell were on the board that punished Doug Irwin for pointing out waste; they are the two who jumped on Griffin for asking for information about an obscene no-bid contract to one of Elia's former administrator buddy who didn't have a phone with a person's answering it and did not return voice mail. The taxpayers were also subsidizing his first job for his start-up.

One infers board and administration consider adultery just swell but asking questions about a buddy contract at the taxpayers' expense unacceptable since the board named Ms. Falliero board chair when its members all must have known about her long-running adultery escapade. And they all knew the no-bid recipient had just retired as administrator, yet all but Griffin and Valdes voted for his getting the gravy-train no-bid $148,000 from the school tax kitty.

Teachers in far-off schools knew about the ROSSAC adultery. So must the board have done. They also must have known that this adultery destroyed the administrator's marriage and caused injury to his two young children. But what of the misery of children? Children's misery for this gang is inconsequential. If the board and administration could cover up the stench of Faliero's behavior, all would hunkydory. It's not reality that counts to the board and administration; it's the see-no-evil-speak-no-evil they use to cover over a malodorous situation so that nobody knows about it.

That the board named Ms. Faliero chair, knowing about her vile behavior and tolerating it until the board and administration got scared it would come out in public, shows board members have about as much respect for the board its members serve on as Bill Clinton's Monika frolics in the Oval Office showed his contempt for the presidency.

Election looms. Happy day! The voters may ditch one or even two of the potted plants. Incumbent candidates running for another season on the board must tell the electorate in the name of transparent government what they did about adultery in the ROSSAC bunker, how board members justify firing the administrator on a charge of drunkenness when the real reason for firing him was to cover up the adultery long tolerated by the administration to indulge Femme Fatale Jennifer's erotic inclinations, and why board members think the voters will swallow without question the board-administration hypocrisy. The re-election politiking board members must explain also to voters how they uphold the highest standards of morality in the schools by savaging a band leader for voice mails while indulging the vile behavior described above and the vile behavior toward teachers and staff described below.

lee drury de cesare

The comments to Casting-room Couch reflect the reality that unfolds in the schools that I have no access to. So I have promoted these comments to front-page positions as valuable insights from the front-line troops.

What strikes me about these revelations such as the one below is how sadly different is the reality of betrayal, duplicity, and cruelty that the comments picture from what most citizens believe is the benign atmosphere of schools.

People outside the twisted reality in schools that the comments reveal have a hard time believing that such behavior exists. Most people romanticize schools and all their participants. This situation makes the despoiling of the schools by the power-and money-hungry administration supported by a corrupt board possible because nobody believes such malignant atmosphere exists.

One wonders how the behavior described in these comments came to be; one puzzles about who or what was the origin of the malignant atmosphere now afoot in the schools. That's the sad mystery for me.

lee

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Be a watchdog of the Hillsborough County School Sy...":

The point should be made that screaming loudly and kicking will not overcome proper paperwork.

The supervisors and higher levels know that the bottom line is what can be proved in documents. They monitor every incident that rises to a level of notice. The first thing they do is ascertain "what can be proved in court". The battleground is in the paperwork.

Too many honest, trusting employees, and parents, do not understand that this is high stakes for the school system. No matter how wrong the actions may be by the school people, unless there is paper work on record from day one, the lower level and parents will lose. It is common practice in some areas of the district to simply fabricate documents to show a false timeline.

Everyone that finds themself in a bad spot thinks it is just them. This "isolation of information" is by design. How many teachers work in fear of finding out the rumors are true?

Too many employees turn to the system for help and are sold out.

Someday, with new technolgy that amplifies screaming and kicking, people may realize why the long time entrenced power people within the system are where they are.

There are a few people who are trying to bring about honest changes. If they can last long enough.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 7:53 PM

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post " The comments to Casting-room Couch reflect the r...":

I hope the school board members are reading these comments. They want to believe the school district officials are above reproach, yet if they read most of their personnel files, they will see the top officials usually have no qualifications for their jobs, and what school board members don't understand is that the district officials will always be nice to them and make the board members think they are nice people. They need to interview and talk to the officials' underlings. There are so many stories about how Elia threw her weight around as she climbed the ladder. I have never met a person who has known her who likes the woman. Maybe some of her peers and those who worked above her before she became Superintendent like her, but those who worked under her say they hated working with her.

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 6:35 AM