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UFT files grievances on 6,700 oversized classes
Oct 1, 2009 11:47 AM
The UFT filed grievances on Sept. 24 involving 6,749 classes citywide that exceeded the contractual limits on class size.
With schools absorbing $400 million in city budget cuts this year, Howard Solomon, the UFT grievance director, said the number of oversized classes is higher this year than last year.
Under the expedited grievance procedure for class size in the union contract, the Department of Education had 10 days from the first day of school to remedy class size problems. The UFT initially found 7,419 oversized classes before the 10 days had lapsed.
“Since issuing our initial findings, there are still thousands of kids in overcrowded classrooms,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew. “The Department of Education must get overcrowding down so teachers can give our kids the individual attention they need.”
Thanks to pressure from UFT district representatives and chapter leaders, the DOE resolved some of the problems so that at press time on Sept. 25, the number of oversized classes had dropped to 4,783. That leaves about 143,000 students in oversized classes.
Eight of the top 10 most overcrowded high schools in the city are in Queens.
James Vasquez, the UFT district representative for Queens high schools, said principals had been hoping to manage incoming students but the number of students was different from what they had anticipated.
“Other high schools in Queens are underutilized so it seems the DOE’s Office of Student Placement has wrong estimates and made poor decisions about where to send the students,” Vasquez said.
Leonie Haimson, the executive director of the independent advocacy group Class Size Matters, said: “The situation is particularly outrageous since the city has gotten hundreds of millions of dollars from the state and federal government to reduce class size — funds that have been consistently misused.”
Solomon said the arbitrations will most likely start around Oct. 10 and last through December, hopefully at the rate of five per arbitration day. “We grieve the individual classes, not the whole school,” he noted.
Solomon said the DOE sometimes argues that a school has no space at all, an argument that it is not allowed to make for two years in a row. “The DOE can’t make the exception the rule,” Solomon said.
If a school does not bring its class sizes down after the arbitrator finds it to be out of compliance, the arbitrator can order a conference between the union and the city’s Office of Labor Relations to come up with a plan of action, which could include team teaching or adding a paraprofessional to the class.
The expedited arbitration proceeding applies to the class size limits laid out in the contract. It can’t be used to enforce other programs that set lower class-size limits. The City Council, for example, has set aside funding to cap class size in grades 1-3 at 28 pupils.
