ATRs jobbed at job fairs without jobs

Welcome back from your friends in the Educational Twilight Zone! We hope you had a restful summer because you’re in for a wild, wacky ride in a world where common sense is considered nonsense, ineptitude aptitude, and failure success.

The new school year may have just begun, but the Department of Education is already up to its old tricks.

Take, for example, the job fairs the DOE hosted on Sept. 13 and 20. While Tweed required teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve pool to attend these fairs, it did not require principals from schools with vacant positions to attend. The result? After a painfully slow registration process, hundreds of teachers waited in interminable lines to speak with just a handful of principals — or, in some cases, their secretaries — with jobs to offer. Sounds like a real morale boost, right?

Adding insult to injury, the DOE required the job-hunting educators, who lost their positions due to excessing and through no fault of their own, to stay at the two fairs until the end of the day rather than return to their assigned schools to do productive work — even when there were no more principals to talk to.

ATRs want to work and the DOE, in the midst of a tight budget crunch, says it wants them to work, too. But is this any way to run a job fair? We wouldn’t require our students to attend a college fair without college admissions officers present — so why should the DOE make ATRs show up to a job fair with so few principals?

“Many of these teachers would rather have been at their assigned schools working with students than involved in this futile endeavor,” said UFT Special Representative Ann Rosen, who attended the Sept. 13 fair. “Without principals, the jobs fair process just doesn’t work.”

Budget cuts to classrooms never make sense, but at some schools the cuts being made are downright wacky.

Take, for example, the Brooklyn elementary school that last year spent some $30,000 on new computers — with “flat screens and everything,” according to the school’s computer teacher — but has since had to close its technology program.

The school bought the new machines to replace its decade-old computers last May and had the computer lab, which had been used for storage space for years, refurbished over the summer. But it was all for naught.

“I had everything prepared, but when I came in September I was told I wouldn’t be doing that,” the computer teacher said of the canceled program. Instead, he said, he has been assigned to a 5th-grade classroom, where he doesn’t even have the luxury of a whiteboard.

“The computer teacher has gone from technology back to the stone age,” the tech enthusiast said of his new classroom’s chalk and blackboard.

And the computers?

“They’re sitting in that lab, not being used,” he said.

Don’t be too quick to blame the school’s principal, though. The real fault for the situation, the teacher says, lies with the DOE, which refused to grant the school an ATR to cover the 5th-grade class.

And here we thought the DOE was all about promoting new technology.