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Member actions needed to head off cuts
Oct 29, 2009 12:28 PM
UFT President Michael Mulgrew speaks to the delegates about city schools’ precarious budget situation.
On the eve of the governor’s announcement of $223 million in proposed midyear budget cuts to New York City schools, UFT President Michael Mulgrew called for building an “army” of volunteers to try to head off the disaster that deep budget cuts would mean to students and their classrooms.
In his president’s report to the Delegate Assembly on Oct. 14, Mulgrew said he, along with the district representatives, was in the process of appointing a political and a community point person in each community school district who would help mobilize member, parent and community volunteers quickly, not just for the impending budget fight, but also to respond to the myriad other challenges facing educators and public education today.
Next month, he said, chapter leaders will be asked to gather the names and contact information of member and parent activists in their school community.
“After that is done, we should have a small army ready to go,” the UFT president said.
Since chapter leaders are already weighed down by day-to-day responsibilities, Mulgrew suggested that other UFT members step up to become the point people in their schools.
Mulgrew also told the delegates that the UFT had a big stake in the outcome of the fight in Washington, D.C., over health care reform, since the country’s “out-of-control health care costs” impose an economic burden on contract negotiations and the UFT Welfare Fund.
Mulgrew encouraged the delegates to pay special attention to where the five health care bills making their way through Congress stand on a public option, which the UFT and AFT support. He said every bill had aspects that are worth considering.
Citing the fierce debate around health care reform, including what he described as “a very ugly town hall debate on Staten Island where the tea party folks came by bus,” Mulgrew said the union had to advocate at the federal level for what was in the members’ best interests.
“We need a bill this year,” Mulgrew said, “and we might have to lobby in D.C. to make it happen.”
Mulgrew also reported to the delegates that the number of class size grievances filed by the UFT this fall was up 15 percent over last year. With the DOE slow to reduce class sizes to the contractual limits, he said, more grievances were going to arbitration than ever before.
He advised chapter leaders not to negotiate with principals who say that they can’t comply with the class size limits in the contract because they don’t have the money or the space.
“We do not manage the system and we don’t tell them where to put children,” he said. “The DOE has created this mess and the only way to fix it is to hold the line.”
Tackling the issue of excessive paperwork, Mulgrew noted that when the DOE introduced the ARIS computer system, part of the rationale had been to reduce the paperwork burden. Instead, he said, many principals are demanding that teachers enter data on ARIS and compile the same data in paper form.
“As a profession, we can’t be afraid of data,” he said, “but we are using a system created by data specialists who don’t understand education.”
Mulgrew announced that the UFT was creating a task force to take an in-depth look at the usefulness of ARIS and the vast amounts of data that educators are struggling to keep up with.
“We need a group of teachers who genuinely understand the system,” he said. “We need to have a position that says this is what works with ARIS and this is what doesn’t.”
The problem has gotten worse, Mulgrew said, since principals now receive credit in the school’s quality review for having 90 percent of staff logged on to ARIS.
