In a single year, the UFT has helped 10,000 members meet a new state certification requirement by providing the mandated training on the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) at weekend and weekday workshops throughout the city.

“The union came through for me,” said a grateful Venus Ketcham, a paraprofessional at Queens HS of Teaching in Bellerose, who attended a DASA workshop with 300 fellow educators on March 8.

The new mandate affects newly hired teachers, paraprofessionals and other school-related professionals, as well as substitutes and anyone changing positions or moving up a level who has applied for certification after Dec. 31, 2013. The workshops are designed to develop sensitivity toward specific student populations and hone the skills needed to identify and prevent bullying, harassment and discrimination in the classroom and the larger school community.

Ketcham said she found her six-hour training “life-changing.” “Everyone should take it, including parents and principals,” she recommended.

Adhim DeVeaux, the UFT’s coordinator of DASA and the union’s anti-bullying BRAVE (Building Respect, Acceptance and Voice through Education) campaign, said it took an epic effort with all hands on deck for the union to meet the challenge of training staff and organizing enough workshops to meet the needs of all members.

Scores of daylong workshops for 300 participants at a time were scheduled on weekends at union headquarters throughout the summer and the school year, starting in February 2014. In addition, smaller workshops that met after school for two afternoons were offered in all five UFT borough offices.

The stakes grew higher in the spring of 2014 when more than 2,000 paraprofessionals were threatened with termination if they did not fulfill the DASA mandate by September. Union pension representative David Kazansky, who was in charge of DASA training in his former role as the UFT’s director of school safety and health, remembers suddenly receiving more than a hundred workshop registrations a day. He promptly organized more than 30 additional workshops — including 10 during the summer.

Shaquana Ramos, of PS 180 in Floral Park, is one of the paraprofessionals whose jobs were saved by a summer workshop.

“At the workshop, I got to see things from a different view,” she said. “Now I know how to prevent students from being bullied.”

Darlene Post, a social worker at the Eagle Academy for Young Men of Harlem who helped design workshop activities, said that the training meant much more than complying with a state mandate.

“It’s a challenge for learning communities to be inclusive and a forum for members to come together to recognize diversity among students and staff,” Post said.

Role-playing and reflective and interactive exercises are designed to keep participants “very engaged and to make them agents of social change,” Post explained.

The UFT will be holding a full schedule of DASA workshops through June for members who still need to meet certification requirements. Details of upcoming workshops can be found in the UFT’s course catalog online.