On behalf of my fellow UFT officers and staff around the five boroughs, I want to welcome you and your colleagues back for the new school year. I also want to take this opportunity to wish you the very best for the year ahead and to remind you that we as your union are here to support you, help you and guide you. We want all of our members to succeed and grow.

Most of all, I want to say thank you. I don’t think that anyone can thank you enough for the work that you do: for everything you accomplished with your students last year and for the difference you will make in their lives in the year to come. Stand up and be proud of your accomplishments and your commitment to the children you serve.

In the coming days, be mindful of the new faces walking around your building, and make sure you say hello. We’re proud to have thousands of new teachers joining our ranks this year, and they’re going to need our help and support. We can all still remember and relate to how overwhelming those first few weeks in the classroom can be, and that’s why we have to be there for each other, especially during this critical time. Even the smallest acts of kindness can go a long way.

This is, of course, the first full school year under Mayor de Blasio, the city’s first pro-public education mayor in a generation, and it is also the first year with our new contract for education that we negotiated with his administration.

Thanks to our partnership with the mayor, we have the opportunity to introduce innovative, teacher-led and community-oriented strategies that we believe will bring about the improvements to our school system that we have long sought on behalf of our students. Our new contract values the expertise of classroom educators and gives us an unprecedented voice in school-level decisions. It’s up to us to lead this process of renewal. All eyes are on us here and nationally to show what public education can be when educators are in the driver’s seat. This is our time, and we will succeed.

Of course, the so-called “reformers” are still out there, looking for ways to attack our profession, and so we’ll have to continue our work battling back their misguided ideas as well. With the plummeting fortunes of Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst — Rhee is resigning as CEO of the organization, which recently withdrew from several states — former CNN correspondent Campbell Brown has emerged as the new face of the corporate “education reform” movement. Brown and her allies are now suing to try to overturn tenure here in New York on the grounds that it protects “incompetent” teachers. (Brown’s case will likely be consolidated with another copycat lawsuit brought by the New York City Parents Union, which is being bankrolled by the same millionaire who financed the California lawsuit against tenure.)

Unlike Brown, public school parents know that attacking their children’s teachers is not the answer to the problems faced by our school system. Together, we will fight these spurious lawsuits with all legal means at our disposal. The factual inaccuracies and questionable legal arguments in both suits are too many to list. But let me be clear: Our fight isn’t over tenure so much as over what will and will not help our children learn. We need to think creatively about the challenges our schools face. We will win the legal argument in court, but it is our work in the classroom that will win the support of the public.

As we begin the school year, we must show how public education can and should work — and what it can do for our students — when teachers are receiving the proper support and resources and when experienced educators who understand students’ needs are driving the agenda. That’s why we negotiated with the Department of Education a series of new education initiatives that are launching this September.

New model and master teacher positions will encourage mentoring and the sharing of lessons inside school buildings and at the same time create a career ladder that will offer experienced teachers opportunities and time to be instructional leaders in their schools.

The new PROSE program will give entire school communities more flexibility in how they operate in order to allow them to better meet their students’ specific needs.

We will also continue to push for more technology in schools and the expansion of our Community Learning Schools Initiative, which transforms local schools into community hubs through the collaboration of educators, administrators, parents and local nonprofit agencies that provide health services.

It’s this work that really matters, and it is by doing this work and showing our public schools’ potential that we will ultimately defeat our opponents and their misguided attacks on our profession.

Again, thank you for all that you do, and good luck in the weeks ahead. The UFT is here to support you and your work.

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