Fall 2006

A Message from the Committee Chair: Carolyn Herbst

Dear Colleagues:

Thank you for re-electing me as chair of the UFT Committee For Members Who Are Capably Disabled in June. It is an honor and privilege to have served as your committee chair for the last 10 years.

Our committee’s mission is to carry out the UFT policy of assuring that members get the reasonable accommodations to which they are entitled under the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). At the same time we must be teachers to our colleagues, their families and friends and the outside world on the rights of individuals with disabilities. It is a union issue, a civil rights issue, and an education issue.

Our committee has held monthly programs, monthly steering committee meetings to plan activities, and several all-day conferences on the ADA. We have publicized our mission at UFT Delegate Assemblies, at NYSUT Representative Assemblies and AFT meetings.

We have also had wonderful personal experiences with committee members as colleagues and friends. We must not neglect this aspect of our committee. Our dinners, concerts and museum trips, often suggested and arranged by committee members, have brought us closer together and heightened an understanding of our needs. As a committee family we must work hard together, we must support one another and we must break bread together as well (or noodles and rice), as we did at our June dinner.

During the last number of years we have seen real strides in people’s understanding of the ADA. We have a large number of individuals receiving reasonable accommodations and many members have been satisfied with the way their ADA cases have been handled.

However, we still have more work to do. Soon we will have a whole new set of issues to deal with. With many retirements we have many new colleagues in the school system. That means new accommodations and more education. Many new supervisors and administrators were appointed and need to know about accommodations. New Supreme Court decisions have chipped away at the power of the ADA, although in some cases New York State and New York City laws and their enforcement are stronger than the ADA.

Using our Web site and using the city and state’s legal resources will be important in the future of this committee. We all need to contribute to make our committee work. We all need to input our ideas. We all need to offer our personal experience. We all need to encourage one another. We need one another.

Thank you to all the committee members and to our wonderful staff of Eugene Rubin, Abbe Nosoff, Bonita Gibson, and George Fesko.

Let us continue.