Spring 2005

A Message from the Committee Chair

Dear Colleagues:

I would like to share with you some of my personal experience with the UFT Committee for Members Who Are Capably Disabled.

I first learned about the committee a few months after its inception when I saw a meeting notice at the former UFT headquarters. At that time, I was chair of the union’s Association of Teachers of Social Studies (ATSS/UFT) and a high school social studies teacher on sabbatical. I started attending meetings because I had a deep, dark secret almost nobody knew. I was legally blind — but extremely good at self-accommodating and thereby hiding my disability.

I often presented workshops at social studies conferences, so I proposed that the Capably Disabled Committee present workshops on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and began creating them.

As I “came out of the closet” about my disability I formally asked for reasonable accommodations in the classroom. When our committee held elections in 1994, I decided to run for committee chair.

Since then, I have enormously enjoyed my many outreach activities. Here are a couple of examples that come to mind:

1. When I was presenting a workshop on the ADA at the New York State Council for the Social Studies in Albany, the participants asked me to make it “a closed door session” — we wouldn’t reveal what we discussed. I enjoyed that show of confidence and camaraderie, and learned how people were dealing with disabilities in school districts large and small throughout New York State.
2. At an AFL-CIO conference of the President’s Committee for the Employment of People with Disabilities in Orlando, Fl., at a small workshop on using the disability issue to organize workers, I learned that not only were so many of the workers of our country not organized, but the UFT is far ahead of other labor unions in utilizing our collective voice to carry out the intent of the ADA.

Our committee not only does good work but it provides an opportunity for members to learn, share, make new friends and find new meaning in their lives. To keep the committee running smoothly and for their work in getting our members accommodations, I am most grateful to the staff: Eugene Rubin, George Fesko, Abbe Nosoff and Bonita Gibson.

Sincerely,
Carolyn Herbst, Committee Chair