In a fiery speech accepting the Charles Cogen Award, the union’s highest honor and the highlight of Teacher Union Day, Mona Romain, the recently retired UFT assistant treasurer and trustee of the Teachers’ Retirement System, told cheering colleagues, “The union is deep inside me. It took me out of poverty and into the middle class.”

“That’s what unions do,” she declared.

Calling the UFT today a “vibrant, diverse and relevant” organization that Charlie Cogen, the union’s first president, would be proud of, she nevertheless warned against complacency. She stressed the need to fight back against those who call union pension systems unsustainable and want to eliminate them and against those who have declared war on teachers and are spreading misinformation about public schools.

She also lashed out at the corporate education reformers who she said hijacked former UFT President Albert Shanker’s idea of charter schools as laboratories to experiment with new ideas and “turned it into an alternate school system: two forces competing for the same funds” — a situation she termed “insidious.”

Working as a math teacher for 20 years, starting in 1971 at IS 246 in Brooklyn and moving on to Tilden HS in 1980, “made me a teacher first and a unionist second,” Romain said. She remembered the strike of 1975, losing dues check-off and the struggle to maintain union solidarity.

In adding the Cogen Award to her long list of union and professional-organization awards and accomplishments, Romain was generous in acknowledging those who helped her along the way, from her earliest days in the classroom to the present. “You don’t do anything by yourself,” she said.

In that spirit, Romain called to the stage Sandra March and Mel Aaronson, her TRS colleagues, and Tom Brown, her successor as assistant treasurer. She introduced March and Aaronson as “my team” — a team that has been together since she joined them at the TRS in 1998 and was named UFT assistant treasurer the following year, a team that ate lunch together every day at noon for 16 years.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew, in introducing her, called Romain “the voice of reason.” March and Aaronson characterized her as graceful, gracious, thoughtful, caring, smart as a whip and also tough. “These two taught me how to fight in nice ways and in not so nice ways,” she said of her fellow trustees.

Romain said she was proudest of her work fighting to protect and improve the pensions and other retirement benefits of the union’s 195,000 members. But she acknowledged that she is worried about what the future holds.

“Pensions are in the crosshairs of the billionaire-funded conservatives who seek to roll back all the rights and benefits we fought so hard for over the last six decades,” she said.

On the human side, Romain, now retired, said that she enjoys nothing more than having FaceTime with her grandchildren in Texas on her iPad.

She thanked her family for coming so far to attend the ceremony and for their support. “They give me the strength to go out and do whatever I do in the world,” she said.

At the reception following the award presentation, Tom Brown said the reaction to her speech from everybody was a resounding “Wow!”