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Not perfect, but better
Apr 10, 2008 10:13 AM
UFT’s efforts help collaboration return to Brooklyn school
Vicent Tarsio (standing) of the UFT Teacher Center's Regional School Support Center conducts a team building meeting to help identify needs Chapter Leader Vicky Halm can raise when she meets with Principal Jonathan Straughn and his cabinet.
There was a time when the staff at PS 276 in Brooklyn could only accentuate the negative about Principal Jonathan Straughn. A time when they picketed in protest in front of their school. And a time when the principal, who called the union “toxic,” refused to meet with UFT President Randi Weingarten on her Oct. 3, 2006 visit to the school to try to sort things out.
Now, it seems, there’s a chance for the Canarsie school to get back to the days when it operated collaboratively and when the staff and the principal treated each other with respect.
Are things ideal now at PS 276? “No. But we’re working on it,” Chapter Leader Vicky Halm said. “But better? Yes.”
Richard Mantell, UFT District 18 representative, describes the staff as “cautiously optimistic.” Last year he was in the building almost every week trying to work things out. “Now they seem able to resolve their problems,” he said, “so I haven’t been in much.”
This paper, in an October 2006 article, detailed a long list of staff grievances against Straughn, including telling a teacher that she was too old to teach a gifted class and he needed “new blood,” threatening U-ratings and generally demoralizing the staff.
It was also a time of grievances for safety issues, reorganization problems, job-posting failures and ratings. “And this was a school,” Halm said, “that never had grievances before.”
She knows what she’s talking about. While Straughn has been at the school just four years, Halm has been there for 25 and has served as chapter leader for nine. She had her own problems with Straughn when he failed to include her in meetings she belonged at and treated her and the union disrespectfully. She suspects his union bias stems from the fact that he came to New York from Georgia, a right-to-work state.
Straughn finally did agree to meet with the union president on another of her visits to the school on Oct. 6, 2006 when she spent several hours during lunch periods to meet with all 90 staff members. Brooklyn Borough Representative Howard Schoor, who was at that meeting, characterized it as “totally unproductive and totally discouraging. Straughn had his own agenda and that was to avoid the issues at hand.”
Here’s how the New York Teacher first reported the challenges staff faced in its Oct. 19, 2006 issue.
Halm, who has the full support of the PS 276 staff and was commended by Weingarten “for standing tall and for keeping the staff united,” said this week, “I think he finally realized the union was not backing down.”
The chapter leader thinks the turnaround started perhaps when his name appeared on the UFT’s list of Principals In Need of Improvement (PINI). Weingarten had also suggested in the fall of 2006 that the principal meet with the chapter leader to begin discussion of issues paramount to solving the impasse and asked that Local Instructional Superintendent Joanne Mejias and representatives from the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators attend.
Halm reports that since that meeting in 2006 she been named to the principal’s cabinet and now attends meetings and is consulted on school issues. To help the process along, the UFT Teacher Center has begun a series of team building meetings in the school.
“When you walk into the school now there’s a different sense in the building,” Mantell said. “There’s a calmer tone.”
