Dress code victory for school nurses

School nurses represented by the UFT won a big victory when the Department of Education was forced to rescind the dress code that it unilaterally imposed in September 2010.

The Public Employment Relations Board settlement agreement that the DOE and the UFT signed on Oct. 28 requires the DOE to issue a memo announcing the code’s withdrawal. It also requires the DOE to void any dress-code violation charges and remove any letters in the file concerning dress-code violations.

“For so many years, our nurses enjoyed the same dress code as our teacher colleagues,” said School Nurses Chapter Leader Patricia Ross Spiller. “Suddenly, the Office of School Health decided to implement and enforce a dress code. The union stepped in on our behalf and safeguarded our rights.”

Ross Spiller said that school nurses have always dressed in a profesional manner. “This new regulation was unnecessary,” she said. “We stopped the DOE from arbitrarily changing a working condition. Any changes in a derss code will have to be bargained for.”

The code, contained in the Office of School Health Policy and Procedures Manual, was written to apply to both DOE and Department of Health school nurses — the latter represented by District Council 37. While Department of Health employees have traditionally followed a dress code in schools, no such rule applied to UFT members; nor was the regulation ever agreed to by the union.

The UFT filed a complaint with the state labor board charging that the DOE improperly changed its members’ working conditions without bargaining with the union first.

The agreement, brokered by a PERB administrative judge, states that UFT-represented head nurses, staff nurses and registered nurses “are expected to be neat, clean and presentable at all times.” The DOE has the right to raise the topic of a dress code when negotiating a new contract, but the UFT is not bound “to agree to any proposal regarding a dress code.”