On behalf of my fellow UFT officers and staff around the five boroughs, I want to welcome you and your colleagues back from what I hope was a restful and enjoyable summer break. I also want to take this opportunity to wish you the very best for the new school year and to remind you that we as your union are here to support, help and guide you as you do your important work. Our goal is to see that all of our members and their students succeed and grow.

I also want to extend a special welcome to all of the new educators who are joining our school system and union this year. You are about to embark on an incredible journey that will change both your life and the lives of the many students you will teach and nurture over the course of your careers. You have chosen a difficult but truly noble profession. We all remember the challenges of our first year of teaching. Never hesitate to look to your older colleagues or to your union for the support that you may need.

Our annual Spring Education Conference is one of my favorite UFT events because of the focus it places on all the incredible work you do in your classrooms every day. After years of fighting first with Mayor Bloomberg and then with Gov. Cuomo, 2015 will be a year to celebrate. We will still have battles to wage, but this year I want to extend the spirit of the Spring Education Conference throughout the entire year and share with our entire city all that we do that makes our school system great — because it is great.

The media and corporate education “reformers” with whom we have been at war for years harp on our schools’ shortcomings but never acknowledge their tremendous successes. They won’t this year either, which is why it is so important that we work as hard as we can to make sure the public gets the truth about what is happening — the great work that is being done — inside our schools.

Here’s the truth that needs to be told: Each and every day, in every classroom in every school building, you are doing amazing work with your students under challenging circumstances.

One of the most important lessons we have learned during the last several years of teacher-bashing is that it is up to those of us in the trenches to convey this message and to make the changes we want to see in our school system. It’s that do-it-yourself spirit that is at the heart of our contract and its many innovative programs that we will continue to implement this year.

For example, our PROSE program, which allows schools to make certain changes to their day-to-day functioning in order to best serve their students, continues to grow. When we began in 2014, there were 63 schools in the program; this year that number has doubled, to 126.

In some PROSE schools, teachers are extending the school day for students through creative scheduling. In others, they have taken teacher evaluation into their own hands, working with colleagues on specific areas of teaching to enrich classroom learning. All of these teachers and schools are doing incredible work and learning important lessons that we hope will be shared with the school system at large.

Likewise, our Community Learning Schools Initiative, which transforms local neighborhood schools into community hubs that provide urgently needed social services, is also prospering. The initiative stems from our understanding that children bring all sorts of challenges — homelessness, poverty, medical conditions, family problems — with them to school and that these challenges impede their learning and must be tackled head on. We began with just six schools in 2012; today we have 26.

Finally, I am extremely proud of our newest initiative in career and technical education, the National Industry Certification for Educators, or NICE, program, which provides industry certification courses for educators without credentials in those fields and teaches those who already hold credentials how best to share their knowledge with students and colleagues.

All of these programs will continue to grow this year and are prime examples of our belief that educators must drive change in education. In pedagogy and school policy; in the provision of social services to students and their parents; and in innovative training for teachers, we are the ones making change. If we don’t, others will — but the changes they want will be bad for us, our profession and, above all, our students.

The best defense is a good offense. Rather than simply defend our schools, we are promoting innovative ideas and programs that will improve our schools. We will show the public what teachers, students and schools can do when they are properly supported and empowered to make decisions.

It is through this work — and our efforts to highlight and celebrate it — that we will ultimately defeat the “reformers” who want to privatize our schools and tear down our profession.

Thank you for all that you do for your colleagues, students and schools, and good luck in the weeks ahead. The UFT is always here to support you and your work.