Layoffs of support staff hurt neediest schools

Cara Metz

Veteran family associate Nanette Sepulveda (center), one of the school support staff being laid off, works with students in temporary housing in East New York and Brownsville. “We make sure students are able to make it to school every day,” said Sepulveda, flanked by fellow District Council 37 members, at an Oct. 4 rally against the layoffs, which were set to go into effect on Oct. 7. “We’re the bridge between the school and their temporary homes.”

Cara Metz

Hundreds of DC 37 members turned out for the protest rally at City Hall Park in a last-gasp effort to fight the layoffs of 700 school support staff.

Cara Metz

Hilda Garay (right), a school aide at MS 266 in Park Slope and single mom, said she is stunned at the prospect of losing her job and doesn’t know what she will do. “All my students, I know each and every one of them, all their parents. So it’s a big thing they’re taking away from me,” she said, teary-eyed, at the rally. “Words cannot describe how I feel. I’m heartbroken, trying to keep it together for my kids.” Tracy Whitehead (left), a 911 dispatcher and member of DC 37’s Local 1548, said she came to show support for the Local 372 members facing layoffs.

As the Oct. 7 deadline fast approached, educators at almost 350 public schools across New York City prepared themselves and their school communities for the crushing loss of more than 700 school support staff — including school aides, parent coordinators, lunchroom workers, crossing guards and others — who were set to be let go by the city in the largest layoff at a single city agency since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002.

The workers, who are members of AFSCME District Council 37’s Local 372, were to be laid off at a difficult moment for city schools, with class sizes climbing, programming cut to the bone and teachers stretched thin. Making matters worse, the bulk of the layoffs were to be from the city’s neediest school districts, with Washington Heights, Harlem and Ocean Hill-Brownsville losing the greatest numbers.

Harlem’s PS 153, where 85 percent of students qualify for free lunch, was slated to lose seven members of its support staff — six aides and one family worker — the most at any single school in the city. Claudia Glover, the school’s UFT chapter leader and a 2nd-grade teacher, decried the layoffs.

“We have 1,000 kids in this building,” Glover said. “What are we going to do without the seven people we’re losing? I don’t know what the city is doing, whether they’re paying attention to the needs of teachers and children.”

Noting that the teaching staff, too, has shrunk in the last three years as colleagues have left or retired and not been replaced, Glover asked, “Who is going to be watching the kids in the lunchroom? Monitoring the kids in the yard?”

Then there’s the human cost of the layoffs.

“We’re all sad,” Glover said, describing the emotional impact on teachers and students alike. “We’re losing people who have been with us for years, who the children and staff know and who help us every day.”

PS 270, in Clinton Hill, is one of three Brooklyn elementary schools — the others are PS 135 in East Flatbush and PS 73 in Brownsville — that will lose four workers, including its only school aide.

“A jack-of-all-trades” was how Chapter Leader Elizabeth Gonney described the aide. “She’s an integral person in our building,” Gonney said. “I can’t imagine how we’re going to function without her.”

Even schools facing only one or two layoffs are feeling the repercussions.

Benjy Blatman, the chapter leader at Harlem’s PS 125, where he has taught science for 26 years, said he is afraid that the loss of one veteran school aide, Harriet Tice, will hurt the entire school community.

Blatman said that Tice, an aide at the school for 10 years but employed in the district for a quarter-century, played a critical role at the school, often covering the front desk when the security officers on duty needed a break and working the early shift, where she helped in the school’s breakfast program and answered the school’s phone.

“We don’t really have the personnel to do everything that needs to be done and we’re afraid more of the out-of-classroom activities will fall on teachers,” Blatman said.

Blatman said Tice will be missed by students, especially those who came to school for breakfast.

“She’s the first person they see. It’s going to be a loss to them,” he said.

Tice said it will be a loss for her, too.

“It hurts,” she said. “I’ve been there so long in that same school.”

Chief among her worries is how she will provide health insurance for herself and her son, a college student, without her job.

But besides worried, Tice said she is also angry.

“They’re going after people who work only four or five hours, making little money, but there are others there who are making big bucks,” Tice said of the DOE central administrators and contractors. “Cut some of those people to keep us on!”