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Topics in the News:
chapter leaders
With the mayor’s escalating attacks on the UFT, the proportion of members contributing to building the union’s political efforts is at an all-time high. For the first time, a majority of UFT members belong to the Committee on Political Education (UFT COPE), the union reported.
Election Day 2011 provided yet another opportunity for more than a thousand UFT members to receive training at UFT-sponsored sessions.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew opened the Nov. 9 Delegate Assembly with some good news: in Ohio the previous day, voters turned back by a 61-39 percent margin an attempt to prevent public-sector workers from being able to bargain collectively. He noted that 25 UFT retirees and staffers had been on the ground in Ohio, knocking on doors and making phone calls to talk about the issue and get out the vote.
Thanks to the vigilance and diligence of UFT chapter leaders, the union has been able to alert parents, elected officials and other stakeholders to the pain being inflicted on schools, students and staff by those cuts.
Budget cuts reported in percentages are troubling enough, but budget cuts reported in the words of teachers in the schools convey the flesh-and-blood wounds that cuts can cause. A new UFT survey of chapter leaders showed teachers fear for their students’ futures as class sizes ballooned over three years and schools lost tutoring, academic intervention services, enrichment classes and support staff.
Standing with teachers and families in front of PS 1 in Manhattan’s Chinatown on Nov. 1, UFT President Michael Mulgrew revealed the results of a new UFT survey that confirm the devastating effects of three years of budget cuts on the city’s schools.
More than 160 UFT chapter leaders from schools across New York City — most of them new, but a few veterans with 10 years of experience or more — attended the first part of the union’s annual three-part chapter leader training in Rye, N.Y., on Oct. 15 and 16, where they spent the weekend learning how to be effective school-based union leaders.
New and returning chapter leaders hit the ground running as they were welcomed to a new school year — and briefed on the pressing educational and budget issues framing it — at their Sept. 14 citywide meeting held at a packed Shanker Hall at UFT headquarters.
She stumbled to the doorway of her classroom, clutching her throat, unable to speak or breathe. The fresh fruit salad that Camille Eaddy had been enjoying a moment ago, on a break in her classroom at Brooklyn’s PS 81, had suddenly turned lethal.
200 chapter leaders, paras and secretaries came to the Chancellor’s Day professional development sessions at UFT headquarters on June 9. The sessions were offered by the UFT’s Safety and Health Department to meet a wide range of needs and included violence and suicide prevention workshops, school response teams, bedbugs and bullying.
Educators at the Kingsbridge Innovative Design Charter School on Feb. 4 publicly announced that they have organized a union with the UFT, citing their desire for greater stability, collective-bargaining rights and a union contract that “will allow us to recruit and retain excellent teachers.”
New chapter leaders learned the fundamentals of their job as the union’s frontline representatives over the Oct. 23-24 weekend.
Summer became a distant memory as UFT chapter leaders got down to business on Sept. 22 at their first citywide meeting. More than 500 elected school representatives gathered at Shanker Hall, approving several new initiatives, reviewing potential land mines and trading information on the opening weeks of school.
While other UFT members took graduate courses, worked summer school and at children’s camps, and vacationed, high school social studies teacher Gregg Lundahl was petitioning for a place on the Sept. 14 Democratic Primary ballot.
“So much of the time we’re focused on the problems in public schools that we don’t take the time to celebrate what’s good,” said UFT Bronx Borough Representative Jose Vargas, “especially the collaboration that goes on every day between the staff and administration at dozens of our schools.” On June 9, the Bronx UFT office hosted a fete to honor the chapter leaders and principals from those schools.
The UFT has given its enthusiastic endorsement to Washington Irving HS chapter leader and union activist Gregg Lundahl in an effort to oust incumbent Assemblyman Jonathan Bing. The Upper East Side Assemblyman was the chief sponsor of now dead-in-the-water state legislation that would have given the DOE unchecked power to lay off whom it chooses.
The UFT Delegate Assembly on May 12 overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution to support an agreement between the UFT, NYSUT and the State Education Department to create a new teacher evaluation system that is based on multiple measures and provides customized professional support for those in need of help.
Calling the Albany budget crisis and its threat to rob city schools of as much as $600 million in state aid “the most dangerous thing this union has faced in 30 years,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the April 21 Delegate Assembly that members had to redouble their efforts to get the message out to elected officials that “children can’t be made to pay for the mistakes of Wall Street.”
All six resolutions on the agenda were passed fairly easily at the March 24 meeting. A resolution on the union’s 50th anniversary thanked the founders for their “courage and foresight;” a resolution sharply critical of the latest special education reform plans was unanimously approved.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew told delegates at the March 24 Delegate Assembly that the chancellor’s testimony earlier that day averred that the best way to fix the city budget was to save money by “removing seniority layoff provisions, and firing the ATRs and everybody in the rubber rooms.” Not a word about cooperation with parents and the union in pressing Albany for better funding.
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