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Cheers for members battling abusive principals
Jan 31, 2008 1:41 PM
Bravo
UFT BASIS District Representative Charles Friedman introduces members from ACORN High School of Social Justice.
The union’s “principals in need of improvement” campaign, aimed at bad principals either shaping up or shipping out, is having a positive effect, UFT Staff Director LeRoy Barr reported at the Jan. 16 Delegate Assembly.
“We have some schools in which the DOE is not taking responsibility for the autocratic nature of the principals,” Barr said drolly, “so we decided to do things the old-fashioned way. And we’re good at doing things the old-fashioned way.”
Barr talked about three schools where the union was “modifying behavior,” and using different strategies “so that teachers will want to come to work and children come to learn.”
Representatives from three schools were on hand to tell their stories.
Forty staff members from beleaguered PS 114 in Brooklyn, which was featured in the Jan. 17 New York Teacher, took to the stage, led by UFT District 18 Representative Richard Mantell and Chapter Leader Keith Peterson. Mantell said, pointing to the large staff turnout, “If this doesn’t show you what that principal is like, nothing will.”
Susan Wagner Chapter Leader George Anthony (second from right) speaks to the delegates as his colleagues join him on stage.
Peterson said the key to winning was “concentrating on fear, and saying ‘what are we afraid of? We’re professionals.’ So whenever the principal did things, we’d look at the contract and say, ‘That’s not very professional of you.’”
Pointing to the large turnout of his colleagues, he said, “Even one of the APs wanted to join us tonight.”
Introducing staff from the ACORN HS for Social Justice in Brooklyn, UFT BASIS District Representative Charles Friedman announced that “in two weeks [the principal] is gone. This principal united those who never got united before … You need a staff that will stand up,” and this staff did, Friedman said. “This principal united people like I’ve never seen.”
The staff at PS 114, Brooklyn, fill the stage as Chapter Leader Keith Peterson addresses the DA.
Chapter Leader Devon Blinth agreed that it was his colleagues’ determination to stick together that got the principal — a Leadership Academy graduate and someone who gave 10 U-ratings to a staff of 40 — “to go.”
Staten Island Borough Representative Emil Pietromonaco introduced Chapter Leader George Anthony and other Susan Wagner HS staff who were intimidated by school administrators and urged to change students’ grades on Regents exams.
The Office of Special Investigations recommended the assistant principal be dismissed and the principal—the A.P.’s husband—be disciplined for their roles in a Regents cheating scandal. The assistant principal has since been reassigned, though not fired. The principal is still in the building, but not allowed anywhere near the Regents exam proctoring, “so the DOE in its infinite wisdom is asking the staff to move to another school to grade the exams,” Pietromonaco said.
Anthony introduced a number of colleagues and then said he was “trapped in an episode of the Twilight Zone. But I had a whole support network in the UFT.”
After harassment from his AP, three senior UFT officials came to confront the administrator. Anthony said he felt like telling the AP, “Say hello to my friends.”
Weingarten said that what all three schools have in common is that “when a staff stays together, nobody can disrespect us, and that’s what the folks from 114, from Wagner and from SOJO can teach us. That’s what unionism is all about.”
