Homebound Chapter

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to the UFT Homebound Chapter web page.

Home instruction is designed to meet the academic needs of students while they are confined to their homes because of medical, orthopedic and/or serious emotional conditions.

It is difficult to overstate the nature and difficulty of these past few years for our chapter. The pandemic has been roiling since March 2020 — upending "normalcy and all that we took for granted. The quilts that hold together our personal lives are stressed beyond limits, our jobs laid bare to the pressures of rapid adjustments and adaptations. Lives have been scarred and we have lost loved ones.

Yet, we are still here — and gratefully so. 

With no template to work from against the harsh headwinds of these deadly days, our union has risen to the occasion, and brought to bear a fulsome measure of sensitivity for the well-being of our collective. We are adapting and navigating the turbulence with creativity, diligence, resilience and pure guts and grit.

For our chapter, it is worthwhile to reflect on the early days of the pandemic and the debate on how we should have proceeded at that time. Staying true to a commitment to equity and robust advocacy, we leveraged the diverse pool of talents in home instruction to articulate a path forward and a vision for the future. We persisted through the UFT hierarchy, at odd hours of days and nights, to negotiate a lifeline for ourselves. A memorandum of agreement with the DOE (recently renewed to September 2023) equipped us with a remote learning option. It strengthens the viability of our program, keeps us safe and protects our fragile students while presenting countless novel possibilities for programming, instruction and learning. Our vision of the way forward has proven to be the right one. 

And we are still here — and not by chance.

Your engagement has made the continuing improvement of our chapter possible. Through our advocacy, we’ve gained transparency, equitable and appropriate assignment of cases, upgraded technology resources and support, and improved health and safety protocols. Communication with our chapter improved, as did the prompt redressing of our issues. As we forge ahead in these uncertain times, remember that effective advocacy begins with you. Our concerns are not disposable, and consequently our professional commitment to ourselves and our chapter must not be casual

Though the seas remain turbulent today, and the future still uncertain, we are better conditioned and positioned to get through this moment in time.

Fraternally,

Emmanuel Duruaku
Chapter Leader

Chapter Representatives

Chapter Leader

• Emmanuel Duruaku, EDuruaku [at] uft [dot] org (EDuruaku[at]uft[dot]org)

Delegate Assembly delegates:

• Karl Bruckner
• Barbara Hull
• Nissam Sadres
• Mary Salomone
• Douglas Sargent