Trying to change the status quo in Tampa Bay is akin to being the doctor in charge of drying out Lindsay Lohan. You know you must try, but you also know you're probably going to fail.
No local politician understands that more than April Griffin, a first-termer on the Hillsborough School Board.
On the day after she abruptly walked out of a "team-building" session with her colleagues, Griffin sat in her Temple Terrace kitchen as two cell phones buzzed constantly. She'd just gotten off one of them with a political veteran who was offering advice in the aftermath of the meltdown that occurred at the School Board, in which Griffin was criticized for not "engaging" in the discussion. One board member, Jennifer Faliero, suggested she get with the program — and if she didn't get with the program, she would "need to resign."
In a fit of bottled-up anger, Griffin instead gathered up her stuff and left. She vowed never to attend another team-building meeting.
The headlines the next day read, "Teamwork training up in smoke" and "Team Building Turns Ugly For School Board." Her e-mails, however, were supportive:
"We teachers are well aware of the civic process. Please continue to be independent of a board and administration that values the rubber stamp above the democratic process."
"Please don't resign. We need more people like you and Susan Valdez, who are unafraid and willing to express your views and opinions (though not popular with your fellow Board Members) to the community."
"Remember we voted you in for change; you may seem alone in those meetings, but we are behind you. Stay courageous!"
An agent for change. That's what Griffin calls herself, and it is the mission she believes that voters gave her when they chose her over a career school system administrator last year.
"Teachers feel like they've been dumped on for too many years," Griffin said. "They see on a daily basis the waste in the system, and they're afraid to report it."
Griffin has become the gathering point for criticism of Hillsborough Superintendent MaryEllen Elia. In an annual employee evaluation given two weeks ago, Elia received mostly 3's and 4's on a scale of 1-5 from the majority of the School Board. Griffin gave her mostly 1's and 2's.
Almost from the start, the status quo at the school system worked to slap Griffin down. She says that little courtesies such as being allowed to automatically defer discussion on an agenda item were not given to her.
Hillsborough's school system, the largest employer in town, is a vestige of a political mentality in Tampa that for decades has valued friendship over efficiency, trust over innovation, insiders over more qualified outsiders.
Griffin said she's spoken privately to administrators about the need to hire outside applicants to bring in fresh ideas. Her frustration boiled over publicly in June when she voted against Elia's desire to give two demoted department heads — from the troubled transportation and purchasing divisions — new high-ranking jobs that paid more than $80,000.
And there was the teacher revolt that came after Elia unilaterally added an extra hour of instruction daily for high-school teachers. Griffin said she found out about the change when her son came home from high school one day last spring and threw a letter in her lap, telling her that his school was going from a four-period bloc schedule to seven classes a day. Elia invoked a section of the teacher's union contract that obligated them to teach that extra hour, but Griffin said such a major move was a policy decision that should have been made by school-board members.
The more Griffin pushed back against the way things are done — publicly questioning individual appointments made by Elia, something the board simply doesn't do —the more she got the old "go-along-to-get-along."
I have no doubt that dealing with Griffin isn't easy; she's extremely focused and aggressive in her desire for change. She is not willing to play the rookie role, to learn "the system" before raising hell.
But I've come to understand over the past 25 years of observing politics that it is that very process of indoctrination that can turn progressive leaders into yes-women and yes-men for the entrenched bureaucrats. Think the term indoctrination is a little too cult-like? Consider these snippets of conversation from the team-building session (I'm quoting here from the Tampa Tribune, because despite most governments' habits of recording every meeting of their boards, this session wasn't recorded in any way, shape or form. A school spokeswoman said these kinds of meetings where official business isn't discussed aren't recorded):
"Veteran board member Candy Olson said 'We all came in with things we wanted to change' before understanding how the system works."
"'You have to learn to swallow your medicine,' Faliero said. 'If you keep going in the direction you're going, you're going to be a maverick — and it's going to be six-to-one votes.'"
Especially galling for Griffin was the fact that her chief inquisitor was Faliero, who only days before had been the subject of headlines revealing that she had moved out of her district as the result of a divorce. State law requires her to live in the district in which she was elected.
Faliero didn't want to discuss the team-building meeting for this story, saying in a voicemail response that she prefers to focus on the needs of her eastern Hillsborough district. Elia could not be reached for comment.
Griffin is only the latest in a long line of Tampa politicos who have slammed their heads against the wall.
When Rose Ferlita spoke out against the good-old-boys system at Hillsborough County government that placed the county administrator in the position of having to lie to cover the fact that four commissioners wanted to attend the funeral of a powerful developer, she was verbally assaulted at the next meeting by one of the four. When Bob Buckhorn raised questions about then-Tampa Mayor Dick Greco's plans to build Centro Ybor (which eventually failed as an entertainment destination and left the city on the hook for millions of dollars), he was dismissed with a waving hand and a chuckle that he was merely carrying water for his former boss, Mayor Sandy Freedman.
The lesson in Tampa Bay politics is clear: Don't rock the boat, junior.
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This article appears in Sep 5-11, 2007.