Editorials
An impressive and important victory
Apr 10, 2008 11:11 AM
Perhaps for as long as there have been school secretaries, some in the school system have been looking for ways to have other, lower-salaried employees do their work. After all, school secretaries can command a pretty good salary because they have lots of training, including 30 semester hours of college courses, including some in education and in school records and accounts.
Good school secretaries are the first people anyone sees in a school. They connect the school to the outside world. They keep order in what would otherwise be a chaotic office. They keep all the payroll and personnel records straight. They are worth their weight in gold — but, while many principals understand this, too many looked for alternatives on the cheap, and these days it seemed Tweed allowed it.
Over the years, many grievances have been filed when principals brought in school aides or paras or parent coordinators to try to do the work of secretaries. It’s demeaning to the secretaries, it’s inefficient and, in some instances, it’s illegal, because school secretaries are allowed access to confidential files that these other employees are not. Some of these grievances were successful, some weren’t. It seemed to be a perpetual exercise going nowhere.
About three years ago, School Secretaries Chapter Leader Jackie Ervolina and UFT President Randi Weingarten decided enough was enough. The union started down the road of trying to accumulate a body of evidence so the issue could be put to rest citywide once and for all. Part of the problem was that often secretaries were loathe to make waves because, frankly, it’s not easy to point an accusing finger at a principal with whom you work closely day in and day out. Ervolina decided to seek evidence not directly from the secretaries but from chapter leaders. The secretaries would still have to be involved, of course, but at least initially, the chapter leaders gave them some buffer.
Between Ervolina and the UFT Grievance Department — this time, Michelle Daniels, a UFT staffer and a former chapter leader herself — the union was able to pull together more than 300 well-documented cases in which principals in contravention of the law and of Department of Education policy used other employees to do school secretary work. They were able to offer details of principals assigning such secretarial duties as student admissions, per-session payrolls and ordering of supplies to other employees. In some cases, secretaries were not replaced when they retired or were involuntarily excessed and their duties were given to others. As a result, there was no increase in the number of secretaries to correspond with the increase in secretarial responsibilities.
Armed with this information, the UFT was able to mount a union-initiated grievance that went to arbitration more than a year ago. The DOE did not want to lose this one. It pulled out all the stops, bringing in witness after witness, dragging the whole thing out, month after month. Even the arbitrator got exasperated. (Not a good tactic, when you think about it.)
Then, finally, in March — as the story on page 3 details — the arbitrator ruled in favor of the secretaries. It is a huge victory and should put a permanent end to the abuse.
Unfortunately, since no good deed goes unpunished, it opens the way for another abuse: overloading secretaries. We hope it won’t come to that and that principals will hire enough secretaries to do the ever-increasing work. If it does, the union will use the workload dispute process in the UFT contract.
