Open letter from the UFT president to ATRs
May 2, 2008 1:53 PM
Dear Colleague,
I wanted to personally reassure you that the UFT will not reopen the contract to negotiate any change in the terms and conditions of your employment. We have a rock-solid job security clause in our contract that does not allow the Department of Education to lay off any of our members, particularly ATRs.
We know you want to teach and have had obstacles hurled in your way. As you recall from the meetings and correspondences since last summer, we have tried to get the DOE to be more respectful of ATRs and provide full-time placements to those of you that want them.
That wasn’t the DOE’s agenda. Having failed to achieve one of its principal objectives in the 2005 and 2006 contracts and in the discussions throughout this school year – namely laying off excessed teachers – the DOE has enlisted a non-profit organization with millions of dollars in DOE contracts to issue a report that recommends putting tenured teachers on unpaid leave if they have not found a new assignment after serving 12 months as an ATR.
I told the DOE as clearly and unequivocally as possible that I would never agree to give it the right to fire or put on unpaid leave experienced teachers who, through no fault of their own, were excessed from their teaching jobs and have been unable to find new positions.
As you know better than I, the ATR situation is a manufactured crisis. The DOE created it and fuels it at every turn for its own political purposes.
The 2005 contract created a personnel choice system in which teachers would be able to choose schools and schools would be able to choose teachers. Bumping and the limited seniority transfer system were eliminated, and an open market transfer system free of any restrictions and a rock-solid job security clause were instituted instead. The open-market system has been a boon to thousands of members. More than 7,000 teachers have been able to secure transfers on the open market over the past two school years, a significant increase over the 431 transfers in 2005.
But the DOE has chosen NOT to treat ATRs fairly. As the New Teacher Project report admits, the school system has shifted the burden of finding a job to teachers instead of accepting responsibility for placing the teachers. Since September 2007 the DOE has created perverse incentives: a financial disincentive for schools to place ATRs in vacancies and a financial incentive for schools to keep ATRs.
Since 2005, the DOE has turned a deaf ear to every proposal we have made to resolve both the financial issues as well as the desires of teachers in the ATR pool to teach.
The 2005 contract gives the school system the authority to place teachers in vacancies unless the principal denies the placement, but the DOE has never exercised its contractual obligation and we have now grieved their failure to do so.
When Chancellor Klein created the weighted student funding system last year, we saw that it would create a financial disincentive for principals to hire senior teachers, which would make it even more difficult to place ATRs. That was why we negotiated the April 2007 hold harmless agreement that changed some of the funding formulas. Since we heard rumors from principals that they weren’t hiring ATRs because they cost too much, we made the proposal in September that the DOE charge schools that hire ATRs as if they were new teachers and make up centrally the difference in salary costs. Again, the DOE refused.
In the 2006 contract we agreed to do a buyout, but the DOE never followed up to negotiate the details.
Five weeks ago, we finally gave up negotiating with the DOE and blew the whistle on this waste of money and talent at a City Council hearing covered in the New York Teacher. Three weeks ago, we filed an age discrimination suit because we saw that many of you were not being placed because of their age and salaries.
The bottom line is we have taken the school system on in the budget fight to ensure that it keeps its promises to children and to maintain fairness for all our members, whether they are about to be considered for tenure or they are ATRS because they have been excessed. The more pitched this battle gets, the more the school system will try to use whatever resources are at its disposal to win, rather than to resolve both the budget and personnel issues. And this battle is pitched because we won job security for all our members in 2005, so please be assured that it is a rock-solid guarantee and we will still work, despite the heated rhetoric, to get those of you who want a real opportunity to teach that opportunity.
Sincerely,
Randi Weingarten
