Testimony of Michael Mulgrew before the Council Education Committee on Restructuring of the DOE's Alternative HS Programs: Nov. 14, 2007

Nov 14, 2007 10:11 AM

My name is Michael Mulgrew. I am the UFT’s vice president for career and technical high schools. Seated with me is Marc Korashan, UFT special representative for District 79 schools.

Starting in September of 2004, I had over two-dozen consultative meetings with the Board of Education concerning serious mismanagement issues in various schools and programs inside of D79. Whenever the discussions would become substantive, the Board would quickly respond, “Due to pending litigation, we can neither comment nor address any of your issues.”

Last year, with the change of administration in D79, we had hoped to be able to start a collaborative effort that would benefit the students. Instead of engaging in dialogue, the new Superintendent, Cami Anderson, spent most of the year examining and analyzing data. All of that data validated the concerns that we had been bringing to them for two years.

While we agreed that there was a need to look at and redesign many of these programs, our issue here is with the process. That process left out the voices of the front line staff who know these students and programs best and it led to outcomes that were never intended or desirable. The DOE’s failure to collaborate has forced it play catch-up on issues such as systematically registering students, securing the most basic of instructional supplies, and trying to rebuild fractured relationships not only with the community-based organizations that partner with the DOE in many of these sites but with its own staff. We don’t know how many students were lost in the transition, nor are we certain that the system the Board now has in place is capturing all those students who want to return to school to earn their GED.

Just one night before the May 24 press conference announcing its reorganization plans, the Board informed us of the scope of their planned restructuring. The UFT immediately filed for impact bargaining, since it was obvious to us that our members, who had themselves been fighting for changes, were about to be used as scapegoats for the administration’s own failures.

During the bargaining sessions, we raised serious concerns about the ability of the administration to implement such a massive change over the summer and repeatedly asked the Board of Education to consider a phase in process in order to minimize the negative impact on the current students in the programs. We were told that they had already held a press conference so that was not possible.

At the end of the impact bargaining in late June, the Board assured us that they were capable of carrying out the staffing process in time for the start of school and to do all the other necessary work needed to have the new programs ready for the opening of school in September.

The Board was not even able to finish the staffing phase of the agreement before school opened, never mind anything else. Continual communication lapses at the Board between the Human Resources department and Ms Anderson’s staff led to utter confusion for the teachers of D79. There were constant changes in deadlines for the same processes. There was an untested on-line application process that would send a verification number to an applicant and then inform them that they did not apply. Applicants, in the middle of summer, received interview notifications twelve hours prior to the actual interview. There was also the preference placement system that required people to go on-line two different times, only to find that in the end the system never listed all the options, and it had to be done by hand on the first day of school. Teachers were informed that yes they had a position, then told no, then yes. Many, who were told that they had a position, were never told where to report, and when school opened, 262 people were still without an assignment.

Throughout all of this, teachers were being called by students for information about what they should be doing, because no information was coming from the Board. Outreach to students was minimal. There should have been an urgency to recapture these students and meaningful contact with them during the summer, but most of them received only a single letter telling them where to report.

We’re now well into the third month of the new school year, and my members still must deal with widespread disruptions caused by this abrupt and poorly implemented reorganization. With the stroke of a pen, the DOE eliminated schools for pregnant teens. It wiped out New Beginnings. It closed the city’s four largest GED programs, which operated in more than 250 sites in all boroughs. Auxiliary Services for High Schools, Career Education Center, Offsite Educational Center and Vocational Training Center—programs with long histories of serving students —were replaced with two new citywide programs, GED Plus and Restart, and two new full-day GED schools called Access. In addition, the Second Opportunity Schools, which serve students suspended for a full year for bringing weapons to school or other severe behavioral infractions, were redesigned.

Some reorganization may have been necessary at this time to revitalize these programs, but this massive reorganization was only made necessary after four years of administrative neglect. Instead of owning up to that sorry history of failure, the DOE mistreated and disrespected our members during this reorganization, and, in many ways, made them scapegoats for the administration’s failure. That failure, as I’ve said, was compounded by rushing into the reorganization without a detailed plan to ensure that all the interlocking pieces that must be in place for the system to work would be finished in two months.

Here is just how that lack of planning worked in practice. In late June, after seeing that the superintendency’s action threatened our members, the UFT won an Impact Bargaining Agreement with the DOE ensuring that dislocated staff selected by the hiring committees for the new programs would be able to fill every one of the new district positions. In addition, any staff left in excess got their choice of placements outside of their home districts.

As I noted earlier, the DOE was unable to implement the provisions to which they agreed, leaving the application process a nightmare for many. The DOE announced application deadlines, only to change them three times. DOE never got its online excess-preference system to accept all the choices it agreed to offer. It failed to communicate with many of my members or only communicated with others at the last minute. Interviews were still being held the day before school opened. Staff did not know where they were to report until the last minute, and staffing changes took place throughout September and into October. As I speak, the DOE still has not provided an accurate staff list for the new GED programs.

Although the interview process used included UFT members and had input from the UFT, the pressure to create it quickly did not give us adequate time to look at the process and ensure that it would allow all the staff an opportunity to present their qualifications fairly. The rush to complete the interviews meant that some staff were called and interviewed on the phone. Some people were interviewed by phone from half-way round the world in the middle of their night. One teacher with a doctorate and 20 years working at Odyssey House teaching convicted teens who were in drug rehabilitation, was never interviewed.

So far I’ve talked about teachers. I want to be clear that teachers, despite the disruption and a summer of uncertainty about where they’d work come September, weren’t the main victims. That would be the kids.

Losing preparation time turned out not to be a problem—at least for teachers—because school started with few students. The DOE failed over the summer to contact many returning students or recruit new ones. Some of the new referral centers, advertised as the centerpiece of the reorganization, opened without phones, while the DOE website provided no information on how to reach these programs.

The two new ACCESS programs, trumpeted as the DOE’s model GED initiatives and one of the reasons given for the reorganization, opened with no students. Two weeks into the year and the South Shore program had a principal, a para, and seven teachers serving a total of 12 of its 200 scheduled students. Meanwhile, ACCESS in downtown Brooklyn started up with just eight students. In fact, neither center had a principal assigned to it until the week before school opened, so there was no one to plan for the opening of school.

Nearly three months into the school year, neither site is at capacity, and staff at both schools complain about a lack of supplies. In the South Shore site, schedules have changed on an almost weekly basis. Into October and the two ACCESS programs were up to just 60 students enrolled between them. Only together would they now have close to a full complement for just one of the sites.

The new hub-based referral centers, which on paper look like a good mechanism for directing students to services, are still not fully functional. The Manhattan hub opened without telephones and was relatively inaccessible to the general public. The work order for the phones was finally processed two weeks ago, but phone service has not been installed yet. We’re hopeful that the phones will be working soon. There were phone problems in other hubs as well, and the DOE had to create a separate hot-line for students seeking to access these programs.

It is striking to us, and indicative of the poor planning for this change, that the 2007-2008 Directory of the New York City Public High Schools, which came out in October, lists the hub sites without phone numbers and suggests that information will be available on the Web. This just creates another obstacle for these disaffected students to overcome in order to continue their education.

It’s not even clear how many students are registered district-wide, or whether all the students who were in programs last year were contacted by the district. Teachers living in the neighborhood of the district’s ESL site on Forsyth Street on the Lower-East Side reported meeting students on the street who asked them when they’d be called back to school. Two students from the Bronx school for Pregnant Teens have told their teacher that they are still waiting to get into the GED program in the Bronx Hub since September and were still not placed as of last week.

The UFT has, in fact, been stonewalled when we asked the DOE hard questions or requested simple information. Even with hub school registers of zero at the opening of the term, they quickly ballooned to very large registers, yet we cannot get class lists because the DOE is having trouble generating class codes. Students aren’t being entered into the database and those no longer attending are not being discharged. The result is that our staff report oversized classes in some sites, though we can’t yet verify these reports, and the DOE denies that they are oversized.

In any event, we clearly have classes with 25 or more students who are supposed to be getting instruction in basic literacy or English as a Second Language in preparation for the GED examination. These are overly large classes for our most at-risk students, many of whom had already left school once because they never felt connected or never got the attention they needed in classes of 30. We need to welcome them back and provide the individualized attention they need. Instead, they are receiving more of the same indifferent treatment they dropped out to get away from.

We get conflicting reports on whether there are wait lists at the hubs for students who are seeking services. The District denies this, but our members consistently report on students being turned away and told to come back or that they would be contacted when a seat is available.

In the rush to implement this plan, the DOE neglected to communicate with the community-based organizations that partnered with us at many sites. The end result of this communication failure is that many CBOs dropped their programs and no longer serve students who benefited from the vocational or counseling components of those programs. Although in May they projected that this Hub and Spoke model would result in more seats being available, the closing of CBO sites such as Boys Harbor which served 100 students, now means that they are working to maintain the same capacity as last year.

Finally it is clear that the new programs and referral system are not working well for students who are 16 and 17 years old. The new GED programs are not supposed to admit students in this age group and when they appear at a referral center they are directed back to the kind of high school from which they already dropped out. What alternatives is the system now offering these students to help them complete their education?

When we go beyond the GED programs to look at the other programs that were impacted by this rushed reorganization, we find the same kind of problems. The new one-year suspension center opened with 18 teaching vacancies for positions that the DOE never advertised. It continues to have multiple vacancies in key subjects such as math and science. The reorganization eliminated any incentive for teachers to continue to work with this population of suspended students, who have already been removed from schools for assaults, weapons possession, and similar severe infractions. Some new hires have quit after less than a week, and not just because they found working with this population difficult, but because they got no support from the administration. The program still has teaching vacancies in mid-November.

The Board of Education was unable to locate a space for the high school suspension program in Queens so those students must travel to Brooklyn and the middle school suspension site is housed in an office building and shares space with ;the office staff for the GED plus program. Neither of these situations is desirable or an appropriate way to meet the needs of these students and taking more time to phase in the reorganization and devoting time in the summer to solving these space problems could have prevented this.

The DOE was so involved with staffing the GED programs, that they were unable to spend any time focusing on this important program. It has now reopened with no new initiatives, no real effort to address the problems that we could identify in the program it replaced, and with teaching vacancies that did not exist before the reorganization. This was a real disservice to these at-risk students.

Nor was any thought given to developing services for the middle school and early high school students served by the New Beginnings program. This program, which was developed in a collaborative manner between the Board and the Union, was intended to serve students who were failing to earn credits and had less serious behavioral problems. It was designed, as its name suggests, to give the students a chance to start over. The decision to close the program was made, not because it couldn’t work, but because the administration never tried to make it work. Now there is no program in place for these students, many of whom are on the path to dropping out.

Lastly, of the many challenging groups that D79 serves one of particular concern is the group of pregnant and parenting teens. During the Board’s restructuring press conference, they announced that they were closing the individual schools (P schools) that some of the students attended. When we asked for the servicing plan for these students during the impact bargaining, we were told that the students would be sent back to their original schools and that all future servicing would be done by ensuring the individual students rights by holding all principals accountable and in compliance. The Board had a philosophical issue with P schools because they allowed students to be “pushed out” of regular school and segregated students.

The best estimates are that there are approximately 7000 students who become pregnant each year in the NYC public school system. The P schools had close to 400 students enrolled in 2006-2007, (down from enrollments of 1200 only five years ago). I asked the board how the other 6600 pregnant and parenting teens were doing in school since that would be their new plan. I have still not received an answer.

When I met with the groups who service and work with these students and with the students themselves, they had a different opinion then Ms Anderson of their schools. Yes there are some issues of girls being “pushed out” which needs to be stopped, but most choose to go.

Pregnant teens need an instructional program that will accommodate their particular attendance issues, which include frequent doctor visits for pre-natal care, absence or lateness due to morning sickness or other pregnancy-related conditions. They need teachers who can meet them half-way. They need access to social services. They need someone who can help them plan for childcare and other post-partum needs. .

Making the local schools responsible for all of this is unlikely to work well in many cases. It is simply too much to add to the workload of already overburdened counselors and teachers in regular high schools. One teacher who was assigned as an Academic Intervention Specialist at a hub referral center to work with pregnant teens—who are now required to remain in their current schools—was told not to visit schools or work directly with these teens until the end of September, risking that the young women would not even be attending when she began to reach out to them. The new model requires the students to reach out for services they may not know exist instead of the Board reaching out to them to offer service.

The one thing we should have learned from the data is that having many options is the best way to serve at-risk students, especially pregnant and parenting teens. It is our view the P schools served those students pregnant youngsters who needed and benefited from a cocooned environment well. These programs should have been expanded, not shuttered. I would urge the City Council, whatever else you may do, to act as advocates for these young at-risk people. There is no way that immersing them indiscriminately in a mainstream classroom will provide the services they need.

The P schools were extremely caring and considerate environments where real learning took place. The Queens site had a 100% passing rate for the History regents in June. They were not always one year transitional programs. Students who chose to stay were able to continue in the school and earn their regular diplomas in buildings where they felt comfortable and where there was a LYFE (Learning for the Young Family through Education) center where their infant could receive quality day care and which would teach them parenting skills.

These LYFE day care centers serve students who need day care for infants and toddlers under three at 39 sites in the school system. This is a vital component of an educational program for parenting students, yet the Board’s reorganization plan originally intended to close them and, given our strong objection to any diminishment of the program, has now eliminated the central program office and has made getting into a center an obstacle course for the students who need this service. The Board complains that the centers are under utilized, but has no effort in place to publicize the service or outreach process to assist students who need the service to use it.

Part of the agreement between the UFT and Board requires that there be a working group formed from the various groups that service this community. Even though a meeting has not yet taken place, I believe that this is an avenue where a real plan can start to be developed which can service all the pregnant and parenting teens in NYC.

Finally, the teachers, in all programs, continue to complain about a lack of basic supplies. In response to staff complaints about a lack of supplies, Anderson wrote the union that sites would be fully stocked “by the end of October.” It’s now Nov. 14, and we are still hearing of supply shortages.

We are not saying that the old programs were perfect; they were not, and we had raised many issues and concerns with the superintendent and indicated a desire and willingness to work on improving the programs. What we asked for was time to phase out the old programs and install new ones. We asked the DOE to put off the reorganization for a year so we could work out a plan that would make meaningful changes while addressing all the myriad details that ensure continuity for students and supplies for teachers. But the DOE insisted it couldn’t wait. The results are the problems we’re seeing now.

One teacher summed it up in an e-mail to the union. “I think that if the administration knew what they were doing in June, we wouldn’t be in such a tizzy about what’s what now.”

It didn’t have to be this way. We were, and are, prepared to work with the DOE and the D79 Superintendent. This reorganization was an opportunity to work together, to collaborate to solve the problems we could all recognize.

Telling teachers to function without supplies, equipment or phones is one thing, but creating an environment where at-risk children are faced with obstacles to getting services or put back into classes where they can’t get the individual attention they need is worse. It’s one more impetus for students who’ve already had trouble in school to drop out permanently.

At this point in the D79 reorganization, it would be helpful to have transparency of the issues. Every issue that is brought forth is met with “Its not true” before it is even looked into. The process has not been smooth, but there needs to be an environment where at-risk children do not face obstacles when trying to receive services or are put back into classes where they can’t get the individual attention they need. It’s one more impetus for those who’ve already had trouble in school to drop out permanently.

Despite all this instability, we always insisted we were willing to work with the administration to make these new programs succeed. We said and say again that if the superintendency will work in partnership with us, we’ll do everything we can to see that the students and teachers have what they need to achieve the goals of the program. That’s why transparency beats planning by cabal.

Thank you.