Viola Browne (left), a nurse at PS 326 in Brooklyn, and Jennifer Aponte of PS 46 in the Bronx show their union pride with buttons.
Sixty nurses from schools throughout the city came to union headquarters on May 6 for the UFT’s National School Nurse Day celebration. “It’s so nice that the UFT has thought to appreciate us like this; being spread over five boroughs, we don’t often get to interact with each other,” said Ellen Sebastiano, a nurse at PS 204 in Brooklyn, a union delegate and a member of the School Nurses Chapter’s executive board. Nurses were welcomed to the event by Chapter Leader Cathy Connolly. The chapter’s founder and former chair, B.J. Darby, recounted
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School Nurses Chapter Leader Cathy Connolly (left) presents chapter founder B.J. Darby with flowers after her presentation.
how the chapter grew from 30 nurses in 1978 to the nearly 600 members citywide it has today. She shared the chapter’s struggles and made note of the gains made by the union to help school nurses do their jobs more effectively. “With every negotiation, under each union president, we moved ahead,” Darby said. “The UFT brought us together and empowered us to build a strong chapter.” LeRoy Barr, the UFT’s assistant secretary, thanked the nurses for their activism and asked for their continuing engagement in the face of unrelenting assaults on the labor movement. For Sherry Branch of PS 37 in Queens, the event is a time to meet up with friends and colleagues and talk about issues they face in their schools. Janet Carter of PS 107 in Queens said that it gave her a chance to meet nurses she would not otherwise know, “and I do feel appreciated!” Delegate and executive board member Beverly Briggs of MS 219 in the Bronx said, “We need to stay united to be heard.”
