General News
Conversation starters
Nov 15, 2007 11:56 AM
Borough meetings provide early support for new members
UFT President Randi Weingarten speaks with members in the Bronx.
Just over a third of New York City’s 80,000 public school teachers have five or fewer years of experience in city schools. That’s the group that UFT President Randi Weingarten reached out to this fall for conversations to hear firsthand what was on their minds.
“These are the kind of meetings I love,” Weingarten remarked at the after-school gathering with about 70 newer teachers at the Brooklyn borough office on Oct. 10. “I want you to make any comment or ask any question you want, and I can be as candid as possible.”
The UFT invited about 100 randomly selected first-to-fifth-year teachers in each borough. Besides Brooklyn, Weingarten met with the teachers in the Bronx on Oct. 16, in Queens on Oct. 24 and in Manhattan on Nov. 1. The Staten Island gathering is slated for Nov. 27.
“Providing services and support to you is really important, but equally important is how do we as a union give you a professional voice in the work that you do every day?” Weingarten said to the Brooklyn teachers. “And how can we help you so you don’t walk into school every day with a pit in your stomach?”
During the two-hour gatherings, Weingarten shared her thinking on a variety of subjects involving the union and brainstormed with the teachers how to address their specific problems. Afterward the teachers had the chance to talk to one another and each borough’s district reps over dinner.
In Brooklyn, teachers talked about maternity benefits, changes in mentoring, the lack of affordable housing in the city, and classes being split up when a teacher is absent.
Joe Amato of PS/IS 80 has a question at the Brooklyn get-together.
The Queens teachers wanted to know the UFT’s position on merit pay and paying kids to take tests, and they had questions about how to share resources and what tax deductions for educational expenses they were entitled to.
In Manhattan, one teacher wanted to know how different it was to negotiate with Mayor Michael Bloomberg versus Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor, while others asked about support and professional development opportunities for teachers past the newbie stage of their career.
The Bronx teachers had questions about No Child Left Behind and the disrespect shown teachers by principals and students.
Two topics came up at every conversation: the problem of disruptive students and the paperwork demands that steal time from instruction.
Weingarten gave lots of practical information and advice to the teachers, but when it came to the strategy for tackling the bigger issues, she said that she could not do it alone.
“This union is about collective power and collective action,” she said to the Bronx teachers. “The UFT is not me; it is all of us.”
She urged the teachers to know about their rights and exercise them.
“When the union becomes a collective voice for its members — not what will you do for me but what can we do together — that’s when we have the power to change the conditions,” she said.
It wasn’t a hard sell because the teachers were happy to be part of a union.
PS 118 teachers Badyr Aschkar and Erica Rose look over the UFT “New Teacher Handbook” at the Queens session.
District 2 Representative Evelyn DeJesus (second from right) spends some post-Manhattan-meeting moments with (from left) Irene Silverman, Sari Marder and Lauren Casion.
