A Bronx Community is safer after 76 people got free COVID-19 vaccines at the Vaccination Day and Family Festival sponsored by the UFT's United Community Schools initiative and health care provider MetroPlus on June 4 at the Bronx Writing Academy.

The UFT's community schools initiative, which now serves more than 20,000 students in 32 schools, launched on June 20, 2012, when it received financial support from the union and the City Council to begin with six schools that September.

The UFT and its members step up to help communities hurt by the pandemic by helping deliver food to those in need and by donating coats to children in shelters.

Along with notebooks and pencils, students come to school carrying the weight of anxiety, fear and trauma in their lives. As we grapple with COVID-19, educators say students’ mental health should be the priority.

The PS 19 school community was hit hard by illness, layoffs and food insecurity. Luckily, the Corona elementary school is part of the UFT’s United Community Schools initiative. “Everybody came together in a time of need,” said teacher Christina Tholl...

PS 188 in Coney Island, Brooklyn, is remembering a former educator at the school by giving teachers tote bags full of supplies purchased thanks to a donation by her daughter.

United Community Schools, a program run by the United Federation of Teachers, has won a $2.3 million five-year federal grant to provide additional mental health services, restorative practices and after-school programming at three of its Bronx...

The Edmund O’Neal Middle School of Excellence in Albany has joined the United Community Schools initiative, a network providing school-based educational, emotional, health and social services to children and their families.

“About 60 percent of kids who fail a vision screening don’t ever ultimately get glasses,” said Delaney Gracy, the director of clinical services for the Montefiore School Health Program.

Parents, students, teachers and local office-holders and community members came together to celebrate the official opening of a school-based health and vision center at PS 18 in the South Bronx.