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Mulgrew: Keep student MetroCards free
Mar 4, 2010 6:11 PM
Fourteen-year-old Valerie Bynaar, a 9th-grader at A. Philp Randolph Campus Academy in Harlem, and UFT President Michael Mulgrew explain why students should not have to pay for their weekday MetroCards.
At the Bowling Green subway entrance on Feb. 18, UFT President Michael Mulgrew joined other union and community leaders, students and elected officials in hammering the MTA for threatening to charge students for weekday MetroCards.
Mulgrew, who hosted the press conference, said children should not have to pay to get to school. “Students have a right to a free public education, and children going to school shouldn’t be part of the MTA’s revenue stream,” he said. “This shouldn’t even be in negotiation. Take it off the table!”
He and the other critics argued the move would especially harm the two-thirds of New York City’s public school children who come from low-income families. To send two children to school would cost an additional $1,890 per year.
That new expense, the speakers said, would rip a hole in already tattered family budgets. The result, they predicted, would be kids putting their educations in peril by skipping school or risking arrest for turnstile jumping, and some families choosing between school and food.
“It’s a mad, mad world when we bail out bankers and kick schoolchildren off the trains,” Transport Workers Union Local 100 President John Samuelson said. As he spoke, his members held up signs telling the MTA, “Don’t Swipe the Wrong Way.”
The MTA wants the new revenue from students to help close a reported $800 million operating deficit. Under its proposal, students would begin paying half-price fares in September 2010 and full fares starting in 2011.
Since 1995, the state and the city have each contributed $45 million annually toward MTA student funding. This year, the state slashed its funding to New York City to subsidize student transportation to $6 million.
“The MTA needs support, but there is no cost to the MTA to provide this service and the decision to use students and their families as pawns in an understandable effort to increase city and state funding is unfair, destructive and in the end, unacceptable,” said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, chair of the Assembly committee that oversees the MTA.
Brodsky said the Assembly was committed to solving the problem. He said his committee was a prime backer of mass transit, but that “the MTA has now alienated its biggest supporters.”
Jack Ahern, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, praised Mulgrew for organizing the protest.
Perhaps the clearest expression of what the MTA move would cost came from 14-year-old Valerie Bynaar, who commutes daily from the Bronx to A. Philip Randolph Campus HS in Harlem.
“This isn’t just about saving money for my family. It’s about my future,” the 9th-grader said. “Grownups always say that kids are the future. Right now the future doesn’t look very bright.”
Listening to New York City Central Labor Council President Jack Ahern are (from left) Assemblymen Michael DenDekker, Richard Brodsky, David Weprin, Felix Ortiz, Mulgrew and Assemblyman William Colton.
