More than 30,000 lights, spelling out the word “HOPE,” shined a spotlight on the number of New York City lives lost to COVID-19 in an initiative of the Urban Assembly School of Emergency Management in Manhattan from March 12 to March 14.

The union defined standards for paperwork reduction in it's 2014 DOE-UFT contract, and when a principal at John Dewey HS in Brooklyn ignored those standards in 2015, the contract enabled the union to hold the principal accountable.

The UFT's 115 in-school Teacher Centers, located in all five boroughs, support educators as they investigate best practices, seek out new materials and collaborate to improve their instruction and, during the pandemic, have also helped with the successful transition to remote teaching. 

The 2020–21 school year is demanding ingenuity, flexibility and patience from New York City public school educators in all job titles. Both in-person and remote functional chapter members are grappling with the unique challenges of serving their students during a pandemic. These are their stories.

Joseph Buro's students at Staten Island Technical HS can really get inside their teacher's head during Buro's 3D computer-aided design class. For their remote teaching lessons on biomedical engineering, Buro uses images of his own CAT scan, taken when he had skull surgery in 2019.

A city DOE employee since 1986, Friedman says she now works 24/7. “My phone is always with me. Teachers who work in the building call or text me if they're going to be out and then I have to get a sub. That’s been much harder this year.” She misses the kids and hopes they’ll soon be “yelling and screaming and smiling and laughing without a mask on.”

The pandemic has created unique challenges for Kasowitz and other teachers like her, “but we're not letting them get us down,” she says. Social distancing affects seating arrangements and masks make it hard to see facial expressions. “I have taught my students that we don't give up when there's a problem,” she says. We solve it and move on from there.”

“Before I was always visible,” says Perry. “That's gone now. You take on different roles because there are fewer staff and fewer children in the building.” Perry says students’ families are overwhelmed by remote learning and the process for setting up or changing services takes longer. But she’s learned “you have to be creative and adapt to the situation at hand.”

“There’s nothing that compares to in-person learning,” Kaplan says, “but I'm putting the same amount of energy and love into every session I create, whether in-person or remote.” In a challenging year, Kaplan points to rewards: speaking to parents more frequently, seeing skills carried over from school to home, and deepened relationships with colleagues.

Jeff Orlowski, who attended PS 42 and IS 7 on  Staten Island, is a filmmaker who specializes in movies about existential threats such as climate change and social media. As a senior at Stuyvesant HS in Manhattan, he was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper on 9/11. Covering that act of terrorism started him on a journey to tackle important issues on a worldwide scale.