Top News Stories

The fight for District 79

by Ellie Spielberg and Ron Isaac

Sep 6, 2007 12:19 PM

Union wins strong agreement, but district’s implementation flawed

A vigorous effort by the UFT prevented some 750 educators from being thrown to the wolves this summer when the Department of Education announced at the end of May a top-to-bottom restructuring of District 79. These educators work with students in alternative school settings including pregnant teens, students who have been removed from regular schools for disciplinary reasons and older students with few high school credits.

After hearing of the DOE’s plans, the UFT held a membership meeting in early June, which was attended by 400 District 79 educators. After weighing the pros and cons of potential reactions and responses, the union and members agreed on a negotiations route that would help ensure that students and educators had placements in September.

The union and the city reached an impact bargaining agreement on the last day of school. That agreement should have allowed the reassignment process to go smoothly. However, the DOE’s shoddy implementation of the agreement has justifiably angered members and frustrated union officials.

On Aug. 30 — the day that teachers were supposed to be in their school for orientation and classroom preparation — 262 District 79 teachers were still without assignments. The UFT demanded that the DOE re-offer these educators their preferences and the department acquiesced, asking them to attend an all-day placement center in Long Island City. They had to re-do their program preferences because the DOE was not able to get its online system to work.

UFT President Randi Weingarten, who came to talk to the first group of displaced teachers — the most senior group — said, “All of these teachers will have a job and they will get to choose their location but this fiasco never should have happened. The disrespect for educators who have spent their professional lives serving at-risk kids is appalling.

“Make no mistake about it, we will hold the DOE’s feet to the fire on this.”

Michael Mulgrew, UFT vice president for career and technical and alternative high schools, said the DOE published application deadlines and changed them three times, it never got its online excess preference system to accept all the choices and it failed to communicate with members or only communicated at the last minute.

“People were given less than one day’s notice of scheduled interviews and some were interviewed over the phone late at night in time zones half-way around the world,” Mulgrew said.

He added: “This has been a nightmare for our members and was not a respectful way to treat professionals who have dedicated their careers to working with some of the most challenging students in the system.”

Throughout all the turmoil, however, Mulgrew said, uppermost in the educators’ minds was concern for their students. “With all that was going on,” he said, “they worried about what would become of their kids. Some even gave me phone numbers for the kids and asked me to call to make sure they would know where to go when classes started.”

At the Aug. 30 gathering, Weingarten, Special Representative Marc Korashan and other union officials conferred with members and assisted them in getting their preferences processed. The teachers said they appreciated the union’s successful hands-on intervention, but were bitter about the DOE. This was especially so for senior teachers who had performed uninterrupted satisfactory service for decades and were forced to re-apply, often unsuccessfully, for those same jobs.

The criteria for selection were never explained by the DOE. Weingarten said she would pursue an investigation into why so many senior teachers were not chosen and, if the evidence led to it, file an age discrimination suit. She also urged anyone who felt wronged by the process to appeal.

“I don’t believe that our resumes were even considered,” said Dominick Delsante, of the St. George School, an Auxiliary Services HS site. Delsante began his career in 1971.

John Murray, who has a doctorate and worked at Odyssey House for more than 20 years teaching convicted teens in drug rehabilitation, was never interviewed.

Harassment against senior teachers

Premnauth Somrah who has been an educator for 44 years, half of them in New York City public schools, most recently at the Jamaica Learning Center, called the DOE’s actions “harassment against instructors, especially long-term veterans.”

The nightmare for District 79 educators began last spring. Not only were they devastated to learn that the programs they had been working in for years were being closed when the DOE announced on May 24 that it was reorganizing District 79, but they were all being put in excess and would have to find new positions.

The DOE hit list included schools for pregnant teens, New Beginnings, and the city’s four largest GED programs, spread out at more than 250 sites in all boroughs: Auxiliary Services for High Schools (ASHS), Career Education Center (CEC), Offsite Educational Center (CEC) and Vocational Training Center (VTC). Those four programs will be replaced with two new citywide programs, GED Plus and Restart, and two new full-day GED schools called Access. In addition, the SOS (Second Opportunity Schools) program is being redesigned.

“The Department of Education decided at the 11th hour to ostensibly reorganize District 79,” Weingarten said at the time. “We asked that it be delayed for a year so we could develop a plan that works for kids. But the DOE insisted it had to be done immediately and proceeded without sharing any proposed changes with us.”

Weingarten said the union was particularly upset about the abolishment of schools that educate pregnant teens. “These schools helped kids who are pregnant who want a cocooned environment. They should have been expanded, not closed. We will continue to advocate on behalf of this particular group of at-risk students and we will closely monitor the situation because we do not believe the new programs will provide the services they need,” Weingarten said.

Summer emergency meetings

Frustrated, humiliated and angry, teachers came in droves to the emergency meetings the UFT held all summer.

Mulgrew said the DOE had not informed the union about its District 79 reorganization plan until the night before publicly announcing it.

He told educators at a June 7 meeting, “We called for impact bargaining immediately.”

When, at the June membership meeting, UFT Secretary Michael Mendel announced an agreement and explained the details there was a collective sigh of relief. He said that the union won its demand that 100 percent of the new positions in the new GED Plus and Restart programs and in the two new Access schools would be filled by staff from the affected programs and school staff would be selected by personnel committees in accordance with the contract.

Mendel assured the educators that full protection of jobs and of seniority rights would remain inviolate.

“I can’t imagine the scenario if the union hadn’t turned this around to the degree they have and are still working on,” said Eileen Lampkin, former chapter leader of the citywide New Beginnings program and English teacher at its Staten Island site.

“We were devastated by this. I’ve been teaching for 22 years with an “S” rating and excellent attendance and now I have to go through selling myself again at an interview for one of the new programs.

“I think one reason this happened is because the existing programs are filled by veteran teachers and the DOE wanted to weed out teachers on the upper pay scale,” Lampkin said. “Many of my colleagues are worried that the DOE is going to replace us with younger teachers at lower pay. But very few brand-new teachers will be able to just walk in and handle teaching the challenging population we teach, and I think the tables are going to turn,” she said. “The DOE is going to be begging us to come back.”

In the impact bargaining, the UFT was able to negotiate the following key points:

• Staff in all impacted programs can apply for positions in the new programs with priority for placement.
• Interviews were to take place in the summer; those who could not come in to interview in person could do so by phone.
• Personnel committees were to be formed in accordance with Article 18D of the contract on staffing newly redesigned schools. The union serves on these committees as a check and balance to ensure that teachers get a fair shake.
• Any teachers left in excess have a choice of location. Elementary and middle school teachers could select up to five districts and a borough. High school teachers could choose up to five schools and a borough. Preferences were to be granted in seniority order.
• Right-of-return was won for newer teachers not placed because of seniority preference.
• A brand-new right was won for teachers in excess on the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) list; they will be assigned to new program positions that are not filled by Sept. 17. At the end of the year the principal and teacher can agree on whether to make the assignment permanent.
• Teachers from the closed programs for pregnant teens will be offered positions serving those students at GED Plus hubs, at regular high schools and at LYFE centers (Learning for Young Family Education); 100 percent of these positions will go to these teachers.
• LYFE centers will remain open through the 2008-09 school year before any decisions can be made regarding their status.
• The DOE must create a committee including UFT and community representatives, advocates and experts to examine services for pregnant and parenting teens and recommend improvements.
• A reduction in the number of teaching periods and the length of day was won for teachers in the SOS program. Those opting to stay in the redesigned program will be placed without an interview. The DOE will place staff that opted out in December.
• Teachers in the SOS summer program were to continue to be paid on a pro-rata basis and have the option to work or not in the summer. Those who worked this summer and last summer will have retention rights to the summer program.

Still more obstacles

Reassured but still rattled, UFT members faced another hurdle when filing their applications on the DOE’s designated Web site. There were so many glitches that people couldn’t even log on. In July, they streamed into the help sessions the union set up to navigate those glitches.

The DOE continued to have problems with its Web site even after the UFT forced it to redo the process. In fact, according to Mulgrew, the union asked the department to redo its Web application process yet again at the beginning of the school year because there were still problems.

Mulgrew said the union worked very successfully to overcome the initial disruptions caused by the DOE’s sudden reorganization of District 79 but in the end was able to expand members’ Article 18 D rights.