Testimony delivered by UFT leadership before the New York City Council Education Committee on the funding of UFT initiatives

On behalf of our over 190,000 members, the United Federation of Teachers thanks Education Chair Rita Joseph and the Education Committee for granting us this time to present our initiatives. When you fund our programs, your dollars go directly into the classroom to improve learning conditions for students and working conditions for educators.

We are grateful for all your past investments, and we would like to take this time to demonstrate the impact they have had across all five boroughs.

Testimony of Priscilla Castro, Paraprofessionals Chapter chairperson, on City Council Int. 1261-2025

The UFT asks the City Council to call a hearing on and vote for the passage of the Paraprofessional RESPECT Check legislation (Int. 1261-2025) that was introduced in April.

Paraprofessionals are the backbone of our public schools. They work closely with teachers to provide children — especially those with disabilities — with the education and support they are entitled to.

Despite their crucial role, the city’s reliance on pattern bargaining has harmed and continues to harm our paraprofessionals. The starting salary for a paraprofessional is just under $32,000. This means that a 3% increase for a starting paraprofessional is roughly $900, while for the highest paid principals it is roughly $6,500. Over the decades, due to this broken system, the pay gap between the highest-paid principals and the lowest-paid UFT members — our paraprofessionals — has grown far too wide.

Int. 1261-2025 would provide every UFT-represented paraprofessional with a permanent recurring annual payment of $10,000 or more. This $10,000 will not be pensionable and will fall outside of pattern bargaining.

Now is the time to pass this bill, as we will face a shortage of 4,000 paraprofessionals this fall, despite aggressive hiring efforts. Our members cannot stay in this position, no matter how much they love it, if they are struggling to care for their own families and children.

For the sake of our students, our paraprofessionals and our public schools, we urge the Council to hold a hearing and then vote to pass the Paraprofessional RESPECT Check legislation.

Testimony of Karen Alford, UFT vice president for Elementary Schools, on United Community Schools

The City Council has supported the UFT’s United Community Schools' initiative from its start in 2012. You recognized that providing health, mental health, academic enrichment and social emotional services in our schools would have the greatest impact on the lives of our students.

Because of your insight, we now have 32 United Community Schools (UCS) in New York City.

The United Community Schools in New York City collectively provide over 25,000 mental health visits and 32,000 health, dental and wellness visits annually; in addition, UCS feeds over 35,000 families a year. Per a recent UCS survey, 93% of families ate more fruits and vegetables because of the food they received from our food pantries, and 89% said that they spent less money on food this month due to the bags of food UCS pantries gave them.

This level of support translates into better outcomes for our students. Across the UCS schools in New York City, we see students scoring higher on tests, attending school more regularly, earning more high school credits and feeling an increased sense of safety and connection within school communities.

Funding from the City Council also helps support a UCS coordinator in each school and six social workers. The coordinator’s job is to bring in the services and academic enrichment that each school wants and needs; our social workers provide crisis intervention and support at-risk students.

Additionally, UCS does not take a cookie-cutter approach. Each UCS school has a unique profile of services and supports. What is consistent across all our schools is that for each dollar you invest, you will see at least a 6:1 return. One dollar in investment yields at least $6 in programming at UCS schools.

The UFT’s United Community Schools’ model makes a difference in students’ lives, and that is why we are requesting a $5 million City Council investment in UCS.

Testimony of Mary Vaccaro, UFT vice president for Education, on the UFT Teacher Center

For over 45 years the UFT Teacher Center has provided cutting-edge, high-quality professional development for city educators. Thanks to past support from the City Council, we now have 208 Teacher Centers embedded throughout our city’s schools, an 80% increase from 115 sites in the 2020-21 school year.

Each of our sites has an experienced Teacher Center coach who provides professional development and one-on-one support to teachers on topics of their choosing. This allows teachers to constantly hone their craft and to reach their students effectively.

In addition to their onsite work, the Teacher Center holds sold-out seminars in person, online and in hybrid settings. These seminars sell out because they focus on what teachers want to know and are interactive, vibrant and engaging.

Together the UFT Teacher Centers annually provide over 125,000 hours of transformative professional development for over 317,000 educators, principals and parents.

Over the past two years, this work has included playing an integral part in the rollout of the NYC Reads/Reading for All Initiative and the new math curriculum. We have coaches embedded in schools year-round who provide implementation support to teachers as they navigate new curricula. These coaches help educators dig deeper into units, lessons and assessments.

This important work is why we are asking for $6.5 million in Speaker funds and $4.12 million in City Council funding. We want to expand this work and continue to ensure that educators are prepared to provide the social and emotional supports their students need to address these challenging times. Many students have experienced trauma or are new arrivals in our city. We will equip educators with a culturally responsive toolkit that enables them to reach all types of students.

Testimony of Tina Puccio, UFT’s Member Assistance Program director, on Social Emotional Learning Support

The UFT Member Assistance Program (MAP) and the Positive Learning Collaborative (PLC) provide the vital mental health support and programming that our educators, students and families need.  For years, these two initiatives have addressed the growing mental health and wellness crisis in New York City.

UFT launched MAP 16 years ago to fill the void when it became clear that educators had nowhere to go for mental health services. We became the supplemental mental health program for DOE employees, and we still play that role today.  Due to your belief in us and our work, we have been able to expand our services as the demand for them has grown exponentially.

In 2019, we served 4,500 members. In 2021, because of the pandemic, close to 32,000 educators asked for our help virtually.

Today, over 40,000 educators seek out our support groups, continuing education courses and wellness workshops each year.

Fifty-two percent of the calls we receive are about needing emotional support due to workplace-related stress and anxiety. Our members are fearful, worried and expressing a sense of instability and hopelessness. They fear for their newcomer students and worry that ICE will take them away. They are concerned about the state of the country, climate change and losing their jobs. They are grief-stricken due to issues related to suicide, gang violence, gun violence and subway surfing.

We know this because our school communities and staff tell us. They trust MAP and know it won’t take three months to get help.

Mental health affects our students just as much as our educators. That’s why we have extended our programming to serve them as well. We created the "Let's Talk About It" field trip for middle school students, which helps students learn to express their emotions in healthy and adaptive ways. Since 2018, over 2,000 middle school students have benefited from this day of mindfulness, music and other creative modes of expression. This year, over 300 students from District 25 and 200 Title I students from District 9 attended this field trip. 

We are asking the City Council to support a trusted program that is already anchored into the lives of the people you represent. By investing in MAP and PLC, you are helping to fill the cracks that the DOE has not. Specifically, your funding and support will help us:

• Expand all our current services.
• Increase the number of educators we can invite to our annual mental health and addiction symposium. This is one of the most popular clinical conferences offered to our school social workers and psychologists. For the last six years, our focus has been on loss and grief, intergenerational trauma, and understanding depressive and anxiety disorders to name a few. We have welcomed over 3,000 mental health clinicians and over 100 exhibitors and sponsors to educate, network and serve our colleagues.
• Produce more than 200 continuing education courses for social workers and psychologists.  Currently, the DOE offers the same five courses throughout the school year. As NYS providers for these approved continuing education courses, we want to offer hands-on courses by licensed clinicians who specialize in topics needed in our schools today, including Supporting Healing and Resilience through Trauma-Informed Care, Emotional Eating: Recognizing Patterns and Developing Healthy Coping Strategies, and Addressing Loneliness in a Connected World.

Testimony of Sally-Ann Famularo, PROSE program director, on the Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence (PROSE) program

The PROSE initiative empowers educators to think outside the box and implement their most innovative ideas to better serve students and families. Schools within PROSE are granted contractual and regulatory flexibility so that they can change how their schools are typically run in key ways, including how their school days are programmed, how their teachers are hired and how their students are assessed.

Within our network, there are over 200 PROSE schools that serve over 80,000 students, making PROSE enrollment larger than all of Boston Public Schools. Many of the schools within PROSE are Consortium and International Network high schools that have an emphasis on project-based learning and serve students who are new arrivals in our city.

PROSE gives its schools a unique ability to respond to what their students and families want and need. For instance, at the Urban Assembly Unison School in Brooklyn, families wanted innovation —  and once the school joined PROSE, the staff delivered. This school now offers cooking classes, a hydroponic lab and other valuable enrichment opportunities during the school day.

The demand to join the PROSE initiative has grown each year, and we are eager to expand the program. We are also eager to facilitate the sharing of best practices amongst educators at PROSE schools, as well as with educators at non-PROSE schools.

However, there is very little time to share or generate new creative ideas throughout the school day. That is why we are requesting $300,000 in City Council funds for the 2025–26 school year. These funds will ensure that PROSE schools can come together to discuss what assessment strategies work and what scheduling alterations reduce class size. They will enable the UFT to host events connecting PROSE schools to non-PROSE schools who need support to become more collaborative communities. They will also fund an outside evaluation of PROSE’s work to collect quantitative and qualitative data on how the program has affected school, staff and student outcomes since its creation in 2014. The results of this study will be used to analyze how PROSE schools and other city schools can expand the use of effective practices.

Magic happens at PROSE schools every day, and we are eager to find ways to bottle and share that magic with other district schools.

Testimony of Rosanne Kneubuhl, Dial-A-Teacher staffer, on Dial-A-Teacher

The UFT’s Dial-A-Teacher homework hotline (212-777-3380) answered over 35,000 calls last school year from students and parents looking for homework help.

Dial-A-Teacher was founded in January of 1980, with five teachers fielding questions from 17 elementary schools in eight districts.

Since then, the program has grown immensely. It now operates Mondays through Thursdays from 4 to 7 p.m., employs 40 teachers and serves students in higher grades. Dial-A-Teacher also offers homework help in nine languages, including Spanish, Mandarin and Bengali.

The City Council has supported Dial-A-Teacher from the start. This support has enabled us to purchase additional reference material and textbooks as well as to hire experts in advanced math and science so we can serve older students.

However, for the past 25 years, the funding amount from the city has not increased for this program.

We could do more. We could help more students and families.

We are asking for $300,000 to hire more teachers so that we can answer 50,000 calls, to upgrade our White Board technology and our remote online platform, and to provide staff with professional development that will enhance our ability to serve students in the modern educational era. 

Testimony of Maria Morales, UFT parent and community liaison for the Bronx, on the Building Respect, Acceptance and Voice Through Education (BRAVE) program

The UFT created the BRAVE hotline as an immediate, compassionate resource for any child experiencing bullying — because every student deserves to feel safe, seen and supported.

The hotline is available from 2 – 9:30 p.m. on weekdays, by phone, chat or text at 917-727-1908. The hotline is staffed by licensed counselors and trained professionals who provide confidential support, guidance and crisis intervention to students and families in need.

Between July 2024 and March 2025, BRAVE supported over 4,000 students, 900 parents and 600 educators — a powerful reminder that bullying affects our entire school community.

BRAVE also delivers anti-bullying workshops each year to hundreds of students, parents and educators and works to ensure that critical anti-bullying resources are visible and accessible in every school.

But we know there is more to be done.

That’s why we’re asking the City Council for an additional $300,000 — to expand these life-changing workshops and to create a digital resource hub with multilingual guides to help students, families and school staff navigate bullying, report it safely and access mental health support.

With your continued partnership, we can extend BRAVE’s outreach and continue to build safer, more inclusive school communities for every child in our city.