UFT Assistant Secretary Khiera Peña has a long track record of shepherding member grievance victories.
Khiera Peña, a special representative in the UFT Grievance/Arbitration Department, was elected UFT assistant secretary, UFT President Michael Mulgrew announced at the Delegate Assembly on May 18. The UFT Executive Board’s decision fills the role vacated by Michael Sill with his election as UFT secretary in February to replace the retiring LeRoy Barr.
“I am committed to serving all UFT members and advocating for them not only in the role of assistant secretary, but also through my grievance and arbitration work,” Peña said. “It is a privilege to follow in the footsteps of Mike Sill and LeRoy Barr, both union powerhouses who served in the role of assistant secretary before me. It means so much to me to serve in a leadership role and be part of helping to shape the union’s future, which is full of progress and promise.”
Peña’s election expands the depth and breadth of her yearslong service to the union, beginning with her role as a chapter leader at PS 114 in the Bronx, where she taught English as a new language for nearly a decade. As chapter leader, she learned about union activism and achieved one of her proudest accomplishments: organizing the chapter in support of a long-term substitute teacher who was dismissed after being assaulted by a student.
Encouraged by District 9 Representative Carol Harrison to pursue learning and service opportunities within the union, Peña became a convention delegate to the NYSUT and AFT conventions. She also served as a part-time pension consultant in the UFT’s Bronx borough office for five years.
She completed arbitration advocacy training and began working in the Grievance/Arbitration Department as a part-time union staffer. Peña became a full-time special representative and arbitration advocate in the Grievance Department in 2014. Since then, she has represented the union in hundreds of arbitrations, achieving victories that resulted in winning thousands of dollars for members and reinstatement and back pay for discharged and suspended members. She was also successful in getting teachers’ adverse ratings overturned and disciplinary letters and adverse observation reports removed from members’ personnel files, and obtaining reinstatement for excessed members.
Peña also negotiates nurse contracts with the Federation of Nurses/UFT and is a member of the negotiating team for city Department of Education employee contracts. She is a graduate of the New York State AFL-CIO/Cornell University Union Leadership Institute, where she created a project that streamlined the process for selecting arbitration advocacy trainees.
Peña also serves as a liaison to the UFT School Secretaries Chapter.
The scope of her work has earned her UFT recognition as well. She has been honored with both the Small-heiser and Marsh-Raimo awards.
Peña began her career in city schools in 2005 after joining the NYC Teaching Fellows program and becoming an ENL teacher. She earned a master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from CUNY Lehman College.