General News
Standing tall
Aug 9, 2007 5:45 PM
Members lauded for turning around unsafe school in Manhattan
JHS 117 Chapter Leader Jim Davis (front left) and Sterling Roberson, director of the UFT School Safety Department (front right) stand in solidarity with JHS 117 Delegate Debbie Sklar (front, second left), JHS 117 and District 4 Paraprofessional Representative Maria Figueroa, and (top row from the left), Sheila Friedman of the UFT School Safety Department; District 4 Representative Servia Silva; Manhattan Borough Representative Jerry Goldman; and Jeffrey Huarte, special representative.
Delegates on June 13 heard from the tenacious union leaders at Manhattan’s JHS 117, who described how they took back their school from a bullying principal who tried to destroy their chapter and allowed school safety to deteriorate.
The key to their success, said Chapter Leader Jim Davis, was sticking together as a chapter and holding weekly meetings in the school with the UFT staffers from union headquarters. “We took back the building,” he added. “There was a collaborative effort to maintain order.”
Ultimately, the pressure from the members forced more superintendent suspensions and a SAVE room was set up.
Davis was joined at the podium by the District 4 paraprofessional representative Maria Figueroa and UFT delegate Debbie Sklar.
After three teachers — one who was punched in the face — were assaulted last January, the principal, Major Fareed, instructed the DOE to cut off their salaries and medical benefits. Weingarten visited the school a few days later, and promised the staff that union officials would work with the members to turn the school around. She established a “rapid response team” made up of UFT central staffers and members at the school.
After Davis spoke, Weingarten said he was “understating” what he, UFT staff and the other teachers did. “They turned this school around,” she said.
Weingarten said the UFT would have closed the school on a safety issue if things hadn’t improved. Thanks to the school’s staff, Weingarten added, “the principal is now gone. It can’t just be two or three people waving a magic wand. This takes union building and chapter solidarity,” Weingarten said.
Davis thanked UFT officials who helped the members defend themselves in a school that he said was out of control.
“In my 21 years of teaching, I have never seen our school like this,” he said later in an interview. “Teachers were being assaulted on a regular basis and little was being done to protect them. Students were walking around with switchblades and guns and wearing the beads that identified them as members of the Latin Kings, the Bloods and the Crips [gangs].”
Fareed had ceded control of the school to ruffians who had unfettered control of the building, Davis said. When he finally agreed — under pressure from the UFT — to meet every Thursday with the staff, Fareed would find reasons to disappear from the building, Davis said, even as the members were filing 15 to 60 incident reports a day.
“That was our most powerful weapon,” Davis said. “We established a written record of how bad the school was.”
Davis said Fareed was reluctant to punish the miscreants. “I saw a student holding a switchblade to another student’s throat,” Davis said. “Fareed refused to do anything.”
Another time, Davis said, “two of my teachers said they saw a student with a black BB gun. When we got to Fareed’s office, he produced a lime-green plastic toy gun; he had switched the gun to protect the kid.”
Fareed did not return a phone call from the New York Teacher.
From the podium, Davis thanked UFT staffers, including Weingarten, who he said helped save the school.
Jeff Huart, special representative from the Manhatttan borough office who was a constant presence at the school, said that officials at Region 9, especially the superintendent, worked closely with the union to change the dynamic of the building.
Two days after the Delegate Assembly, the teachers at JHS 117 were also honored at a ceremony at UFT headquarters.
