UFT - 'Secretaries on Overload'

By ELLIE SPIELBERG
___________________________
CAST OF CHARACTERS

Connie Donohue, payroll secretary
Connie Donohue, principal secretary
Kids, sick
Kids, friendly
Kids, needy
Parents, confused
Parents, nice
Parents, angry
Teachers, needing ice packs
Teachers, "going crazy with that tax deferred annuity form"
Teachers, not yet paid
Substitutes, who — oops! — don’t realize they are using last year’s per diem guide
Principal, who needs it yesterday

MUSIC
Provided by Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic).

SETTING
Main office at PS 346 in Brooklyn, a Title I school with 1,203 children serving the Starrett City community.

The secretaries’ computers, surrounded by little stuffed bears, candy jars and framed snapshots, give the room a homey look. Unfortunately, the machines were just plopped onto the old, unaccommodating desks without consulting the secretaries and with nary an ergonomic thought. The computers are never maintained. Whenever the Board of Ed networks a new system to the districts, they go down. And the new programs don’t come with instructions. "They give you deadlines but no support," says Donohue.

The air is so bad and so hot that all the secretaries have sinus problems. The administration told them "to just work around it," but a few days ago the secretaries called OSHA and are awaiting a visit.

SCENE I

Donohue and her co-workers are surrounded by stacks and stacks of folders and paperwork.

As usual, she has come in early and will leave late. She has just finished her first chore of the day: Finding out which teachers will be absent and finding appropriate substitutes. She uses a big fat notebook called the "Substitute Eligibility Roster" and an even fatter book called "The New Per Diem Payroll Timekeeping Guide," with online procedures for paying subs and a list of bureaucratic techno-codes that would shock Kafka.

DONOHUE: The new online per diem schedule is going to be very difficult, because …

PHONE RINGS

DONOHUE: I already sent you the final entitlement for 213. Okay, then?

SHE HANGS UP

DONOHUE: Anyway, it’ll be difficult creating an online list, since we first have to …

ENTER FIRST TEACHER STAGE LEFT.

FIRST TEACHER: Connie, how come at the drugstore they said my pre-natal vitamins are not covered by the drug card?

DONOHUE: They should be. I’ll give Artie Pepper’s [director of the UFT Welfare Fund] office a call.

TEACHER: I’ll call GHI— do you happen to have their number?

DONOHUE REELS OFF THE NUMBER WITHOUT LOOKING IT UP. TEACHER EXITS.

DONOHUE: I have another teacher who can’t get an MRI because she hasn’t been put on the payroll yet. The district is overwhelmed with new teachers. We have 13 here brand new to the system who need forms filled out, health insurance, tax papers, forms for dependent children; forms to notify the union; we have to explain to them how to fill out a cumulative record, keep attendance. All this, plus our paperwork, the immunization records, and then there’s the constant interrup …

ENTER SECOND TEACHER STAGE LEFT.

SECOND TEACHER: Connie, can you notarize this for me? I’m still waiting for my bank to route the number for direct deposit!

DONOHUE: You can’t do that until you get your first paycheck! Anyway, it’s not the bank that does that. Come back when you get your paycheck and I’ll give you the right Board of Ed form.

SECOND TEACHER EXITS. FIRST TEACHER RE-ENTERS.

FIRST TEACHER: Connie, GHI says that the prescription copay is $120 a week!

DONOHUE: A week? Can’t be.

SHE MAKES A CALL; THERE’S NO ANSWER.

I’ll have to try later about the optional rider, OK?
I’ll let you know.

FIRST TEACHER EXITS. SOUND OF SOMEONE YELLING OFFSTAGE.

VOICE: There was a pending discharge this morning — does anyone know who it is?

DONOHUE: Julius!

ANOTHER VOICE IS HEARD OFFSTAGE.

VOICE: Does anyone know where Bernice is?

DONOHUE: In the library! Or she was, 10 minutes ago!

AT LAST DONOHUE GETS TO HER TOWERING STACK OF FILES. WHILE SHE’S WORKING, AS WELL AS KEEPING TRACK OF THE PRINCIPAL’S APPOINTMENTS AND MESSAGES, THE LIBRARIAN COMES IN FOR A PAPER CLIP AND A COUPLE OF PENS, A LIMPING TEACHER COMES IN AND ASKS FOR AN ICE PACK, AND ANOTHER TEACHER ASKS FOR CHANGE FOR A TEN.

AS SOON AS THEY ALL LEAVE, A LITTLE GIRL IN A PINK TOP ENTERS STAGE LEFT AND JUST STANDS IN FRONT OF DONOHUE’S DESK, SWAYING AND TWISTING ONE OF HER BRAIDS.

DONOHUE: Can I help you, Juliette [not her real name]?

JULIETTE: No, I just came to say hello.

DONOHUE: Well, hello, Juliette! But could you please come back a little later, OK, sweetheart? I’m really busy right now.

LITTLE GIRL PRETENDS NOT TO BE DISAPPOINTED AND EXITS STAGE LEFT.

DONOHUE: She’s new here, a foster child, she’s been abused; all she wants is someone to acknowledge her. One day her teacher was absent so I had her assist me for part of the day. I do that with some of these kids; they feel special sitting here and stamping envelopes.

END SCENE I

All day, scenes like this play over and over again in every public school in New York City — all variations on the theme of interruption.

Long before it’s time to eat lunch — if she gets to eat lunch today — Donohue has made sure classes are covered during a weekly total of six professional and common prep periods for every teacher, dispatched some kids with the right forms their teacher wanted, and put in some work on "the new thing from the districts, scheduling out the balanced literacy blocks."

Donohue has dealt with a class that was split and wasn’t supposed to be, and has finally given up the idea of "sliding in" on the one photocopy machine that serves the entire staff. There are too many teachers sliding in on their own lunch breaks. She has tracked down a parent to make sure the big sister coming to pick up her sick little brother is who she says she is.

"That’s another problem," Donohue adds. "There’s no communication between the lunchroom and the office so if a kid gets hurt during lunch period, parents call here, frantic, and we can’t tell them anything."

For the uninitiated, it’s enough to make your head spin. And it’s enough to make your jaw drop when Donohue turns to her co-workers and says, "Gee, it’s quiet here for a Monday; I wonder why?"

Donohue’s co-workers, pupil accounting secretaries Carole Mandel and Deborah Priester, agree that "It’s dead here today."

If the UFT has its way in the upcoming negotiations, the contract will recognize the demanding roles of secretaries, guidance counselors and other staff. The union seeks to establish realistic workload standards and a procedure to speedily resolve claims of excessive work and professionally inappropriate work.

But whether it’s a dead day or a hectic day, in every school there are always a bunch of adorable, needy kids like Juliette, who hang around the front office like it’s momsville. After all, the nice ladies at their desks don’t ever grade you with a red pen, they have candy, and they’re the ones who help you go home when you have a tummy ache.

Then again, there are also plenty of not-so-lovable kids that secretaries have to constantly shoo away, not to mention acting-out adolescents copping an attitude with secretaries in middle schools and high schools.

But kids like Juliette are the "interruptions" that Donohue wishes she had more time for. "I like working with the kids, with teachers, and I like the camaraderie here," Donohue says. "It’s the peripheral stuff that’s impossible."

Transient kids like Juliette also make the job of recording immunizations even harder.

Next to interruption, immunizations are the bane of secretaries’ existence. Talk to any one of them: First they have to make all separate entries for all the shots of every single child on complicated immunization cards.

Some are incomplete, so children have to be admitted provisionally. It’s the secretaries’ job to keep after parents to get their children’s shots.

Each age group has different criteria and it’s up to the secretaries to know what shots are age-appropriate. Sometimes a kid can get a measles shot in the fall, when doctors usually immunize, but it can be a few months or even a few days before that child’s next birthday. So even though the kid has had the right shot, the Board of Ed still considers that child’s enrollment provisionary.

"I even have to call up doctors to find the correct doctor," says Aracelia Cook of PS 72. It’s not like she’s making extra work for herself. The efficient, outspoken pro was the Brooklyn winner of the UFT Secretary of the Year award in June.

Evelyn Berg, chapter leader of the secretaries, couldn’t agree more. "The Board of Health should have their own nurses get all the info on immunization," Berg says. "The follow-up should be handled by the school nurse and the secretary should just have to input the information, period. But the Board of Health won’t go near that," she continues, clearly frustrated. "The secretaries are terribly overburdened."

"The UFT is fighting for that," she says. "There are 1.1 million school children, about 70,000 teachers, about 20,000 paras, approximately 4,000 supervisors and there are only 3,000 secretaries to take care of all of them.

"For as long as I’ve been in the system," Berg continues, "all the numbers have increased except the number of secretaries. Plus, computers have increased the work load. It gives people at the Board of Ed the ability to get a lot more information out, so secretaries have a lot more to get in."

Berg wants to see the chancellor allot money to each district specifically for hiring school secretaries. Cook, too, wants to see more secretaries in the office. "Not just to get things running smoothly," she says, "but to get things done on target. There’s one school I know that has only one school secretary!

"Now that we have school-based choices, principals have a choice about how many secretaries they want, but a lot of them are not allocating money for that.

"They don’t feel they have the money in the budget," Cook continues. More training and higher pay are also high on Cook’s list.

Like Donohue, there are days that Cook doesn’t get to take a lunch break and "barely has time to go to the bathroom. Your whole day can get thrown off because of students sent down to the office or parents coming in for unnecessary things. Then there are the phones, the phones! There’s no end to the phones," she says.

"I’m a people person, and I like working with kids. Even when I get off late, it’s still early enough to spend time with my own children. And one thing I must say, the day does go quickly!"

Donohue agrees that there’s never a dull moment, even on "dead" days. "You have to not get angry and teach everybody everything, I tell myself. If they knew the answer they wouldn’t be asking me."

So, if you ever come into the office and think that the secretaries are in a really bad mood, take a word of advice from Connie Donohue.