Cara Matthews

Chapter leaders have taken the Delegate Assembly’s Fix Tier 6 presentation on the road. Chapter Leader Lillian Crespo at PS 216 in Brooklyn and her UFT district representative, Adam Shapiro, showed it to PS 216 members at a Jan. 22 chapter meeting. 


UFT President Michael Mulgrew told union delegates at the Delegate Assembly on Jan. 17 that the UFT is moving full steam ahead with its lawsuit to stop Mayor Eric Adams’ school budget cuts. He said the mayor’s budget restorations in mid-January amounted to only a fraction of the overall cuts.


The UFT, along with seven New York City public school teachers and the Staten Island borough president, filed a federal lawsuit on Jan. 4 seeking to halt the implementation of congestion pricing in Manhattan. The suit charges that the plan’s potential negative impact on traffic and air quality in the surrounding areas was not adequately studied, and the “regressive and discriminatory pricing” of the tolls violates the constitutional rights of the individual plaintiffs. 


UFT President Michael Mulgrew and other union officers gathered at the Corning Tower Observation Deck in Albany on Jan. 29 to make the case for the union’s 2024 legislative priorities with state lawmakers. “We have a lot of challenges, as always, in front of us,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told them. 


More than 500 newly minted retirees gathered to celebrate at the union's New Retiree Luncheon at the New York Hilton Midtown on Nov. 21.

When Roy Fialkow retired in 2019 after a 29-year career as an adaptive physical education teacher, his life came full circle: He returned to Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, where he had been a dancer in his 20s, as the nonprofit’s education manager.

In a terrible blow to New York City public schools still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayor Eric Adams plans to make three successive 5% cuts to education funding between December and June.

The UFT is launching a Fix Tier Six campaign in an effort to improve the pension benefits of its more than 50,000 members who have joined the New York City pension system since April 2012.

The UFT and other education advocates are applying pressure on the Adams administration to have a viable plan for implementing the state’s class-size reduction law. The mayor’s midyear budget cuts and his comments about how he doesn’t believe the city will be able to meet the new requirements have cast doubt that his administration even intends to comply with the state law. 


UFT members celebrated past, present and future union leaders on Teacher Union Day by mourning founder George Altomare on the anniversary of the union’s first strike and honoring the new school-based Contract Action Teams and others who carry on his legacy.