This September, 3,000 new teachers have joined the city Department of Education’s ranks. Their interests and backgrounds are as diverse as New York City itself. But whether they teach 3-year-olds on Staten Island or high school biology in Brooklyn, they all have one thing in common: They belong to our United Federation of Teachers family.

If there is one thing that is a constant in special education, it’s change.

One of my responsibilities as the UFT vice president for education is to make sure you stay informed about the rollout of New York State’s Next Generation Learning Standards. In 2018, we focused on raising awareness; this year we are focused on building capacity.

Today, like never before, our collective bargaining rights, benefits and protections are under fire. Our enemies will spread rumors and misinformation designed to undermine working people. They will pretend to be our friends when their goal is to hurt us. If we fall prey to their lies, we risk losing everything. 

As early childhood educators, we know that social-emotional learning is just as crucial for our young students as number sense or early literacy skills.

The union launched a CTE Proud campaign to highlight the extraordinary things happening in your schools every day, and you can play a role in it.

Our hard-earned rights and benefits become meaningless unless we’re willing to defend them. Standing up for ourselves and our students through collective action looks different from one school to the next, but taken all together, our ability to act collectively makes us a powerful force for advancing education in our city.

Our goal is to provide excellent care and help patients achieve their optimum level of functioning. To reach that goal, we are committed to achieving staffing levels in hospitals that provide for safe patient care.

Let me introduce myself. I’m MaryJo Ginese, the union’s new vice president for special education.

Standards are important measures we use to compare and evaluate. Because there were myriad issues with the Common Core Learning Standards, the New York State Education Department scrapped them and, with the help of more than 130 educators and parents, developed the Next Generation Standards.