I got in very late but I did hear part of Michael Mulgrew's President's Report:
No calendar yet has been released; we need it to do School Based Options remotely. There is going to be major excessing but that is not a layoff. Rules have to be followed. No word yet on getting an Executive Order to waive APPR ratings this year. If we do not get the Executive Order, that will be very difficult but we will have to figure it out.
Politics: The political director gave instructions on how to get their absentee ballot. Go to city or State Board of Elections, or call local Board of Elections. State Board of Elections tried to cancel presidential primary, ruled unconstitutional. This is being appealed. Arguments coming soon.
Mulgrew back. Endorsements are just a recommendation but in the end, you make your own decision. Tomorrow is the day the 2.5% pay increase goes into effect. It will show up on May 29 pay period. We expect snarky pieces in the NY Post. We have never seen them recommending freezing corporate bonuses. With so many people out of work, we have many two-person working families that are now one person working families.
Review: We need to put our energies to getting the federal fiscal stimulus through. Working on safety to make sure people can get in a school building to close down classrooms. What should we do with staff who should not be going into buildings in the fall for health reasons? Parents concerned for September and now that children are getting sick, parents don't want their kids to go out and get sick. Not sure how to deal with all of this but need to hear from parents. We have to take care of our profession. We are the experts in classroom learning and also remote learning. We will be the experts if there is a hybrid system. We should lead this but we aren't afraid if something doesn't work. We will use our professional judgment and creativity. Not everything will work.
Thanks to Delegates for being on the phone and for telling the country that NYC schools are open.
Staff Director Report:
Leroy Barr wants people to sign petitions on reopening to get the maximum number possible signing. Reminds people to do the census. Next DA is June 17th.
Mulgrew back apologizes for 50 Delegates who can't get through. Mulgrew then talks about the importance of the census.
Question Period:
Question: Have there been conversations on social distance learning? We can't do group learning or share supplies. Have these conversations begun?
Answer: Those conversations have begun from early childhood through the high schools. Have been in contact with other countries that have reopened. Kids at grade school like to hug. High school kids like to pass things back and forth. Groups to discuss hybrid education. Instructional practices will be impacted. Email President if you want to be in the group working on this.
Question: Chapter Leader from the Bronx says he heard the mayor say on the radio that teachers have already been compensated with 4 CAR days for working through spring break. Please clarify?
Answer: We have a written agreement that 4 additional CAR days do not stop us from seeking additional compensation. DC 37 and CSA also have the same agreement. We can go to arbitration if the mayor doesn't follow it.
Question: What happens if my kids don't have the same hours as my school that I am teaching in?
Answer: Must figure out something for families who need childcare. We need facilities in all kinds of different neighborhoods. We understood the need for support centers when we closed school buildings. We need the same thing if we open up schools in September. This is part of the discussion we are having.
Question: Teachers are being tasked with coming up with NX grades for entire schools?
Answer: NX means the student has not mastered enough to move on to the next level. Teachers are not responsible for that student through the next school year. If the student does summer school, then the teacher who teaches summer school can give the student the credit.
Question: Chapter 683 for the summer?
Answer: They are going to have to run it. The question is if it is going to be virtual. Goes against what Betsy De Vos says. City has to make final decisions. We were hoping to have an answer by today about summer school. We have been working on 683. Mayor thinks we have all kinds of time. 683 will run, whether it is virtual or in-person is unknown. NYS starting to open but NYC quite a bit away from opening up. Gut says 683 will be virtual.
Question: Concerned about clerical day that is approaching?
Answer: Clerical and PD days should be used for planning for September. It is hard for a school to plan until we get policy decisions from the city. Chancellor wants planning to take place.
Question: 100 hours requirement. Will that be pushed back due to COVID-19?
Answer: I think that has been sent out that those requirements have been pushed back. We want to make sure that nobody will be harmed in terms of licenses.
Motion Period:
Motion for next month. Resolution for solidarity with postal workers. Support our union brothers and sisters in the postal union. Postal system in danger because of 45.
At this point, I got cut off so I was not privileged to hear everything else. If anyone else wants to fill me in, please contact us. SORRY.
Update: I heard from HSAS Chapter Leader Jonathan Halabi. He informed me that the support for the postal workers motion will be added to the June DA agenda. It had 96% of the vote.
A motion to suspend SBO and DA remote votes until we know more about who is running them was defeated.
Then there was a motion to prioritize public school special ed reimbursement list 49-50 percent (rounding). That was it for motions directed to the agenda.
There were two endorsements. The first passed 92-8. The second, Brooklyn machine candidate pushed progressive opponents off. I spoke about the progressive Sandy Nurse. (Machine candidate used the equivalent of voter suppression). They won 74-26 .
40 comments:
dammit. I forgot I had to call in for this one. Used to getting the phone call. Missed the UFT meeting/assembly
Read carefully...We have the right to ask for compensation from spring break, there was nothing promised, nothing guaranteed.
I have the right to ask for a Rolls Royce. The mayor has the right to say no, you can't have one. Then what?
Consider yourself lucky Nerd.
Yeah, really. We can ask for comp, but nothing was agreed to, we will probably get nothing. Typical uft.
So i am to put myself at risk in september on the bus, train, and in the building?
Why arent schools investigated when they have an extremely low average teacher salary and an extremely high teacher turnover rate? What about extremely high grad rate while and extremely low SAT score?
There should be red flags for all of those things 6:01.
What is the purpose of mass excessing? Are they not going to replace teachers who resign/retire/got fired with new ones and move people to other schools, or to be an ATR, despite there being no decrease in student population?
Each school has their own budget. A school can replace a $130K teacher with a $60k teacher but the $130K teacher stills gets his salary from a different budget. It makes no sense.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said she’s probing whether the NYPD’s social-distancing enforcement is targeting minorities.
NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea got heated when responding to the accusations, saying, “I will also not have my Police Department called a racist police department.”
Meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio revealed that he has never been tested for the coronavirus, despite making regular visits to hospitals across the city.
And Gov. Andrew Cuomo made the eyebrow-raising claim that the state “did everything we could” to protect nursing home residents, despite nearly 5,400 people dying from the virus in the facilities across the Empire State, and growing calls for a probe into policies that forced them to take COVID-positive patients.
"We have a written agreement that 4 additional CAR days do not stop us from seeking additional compensation. DC 37 and CSA also have the same agreement. We can go to arbitration if the mayor doesn't follow it".OMG what does this say?
Yes, if you excess, there still needs to be teachers to teach those students unless they are getting rid of electives and fine arts classes.
All joking aside, we need to all get together and file a Dept of Labor lawsuit. Lawsuit not complaint.....and never ever work before you know compensation, never ever.
While you are at it, get the 8.25% the csa still has...
1280 people on line, over 3000 delegates, terrible turn out. Nobody ever mentions the complete lack of enthusiasm or ability for Unity to organize it's own faction
Motion to temporarily suspend DA and SBO voting until thorough explanation of process is done. does not pass. 25% of us think that we should know more about the provider and the process. Apparently blindly choosing a remote voting platform is ok
This is who we depend on?
New York City’s health commissioner blew off an urgent NYPD request for 500,000 surgical masks as the coronavirus crisis mounted — telling a high-ranking police official that “I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops,” The Post has learned.
Dr. Oxiris Barbot made the heartless remark during a brief phone conversation in late March with NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan, sources familiar with the matter said Wednesday.
Monahan asked Barbot for 500,000 masks but she said she could only provide 50,000, the sources said.
“I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops,” Barbot said, according to sources.
“I need them for others.”
Infected droplets can stay in the air for 8 minutes. Yeah, sounds safe.
No layoffs - only excessing?! So teachers will lose their positions and become ATRs. Thus, as there is a 30 - 50% reduction in the individual school budget, but there will be a 30 - 50% increase in DOE salary costs because excessed teachers will continue to receive salaries and as well as their replacements. Fair Student Funding. The public, politicians and most teachers don't know about it or understand it. The UFT hasn’t fought it because it allows them an increase in dues via the new replacement teachers. When NYC discovers this scheme it will end and it will end fast. Good. Again the complicity of the UFT will be on full view for never fighting it, while lay-offs will be threatened because of it.
Almost nobody cares about any of this Dr Dru. That is why it is so easy to fuck us over. NY teachers are NY's dumbest. Most delegates fit that category.
The lack of solidarity in the face of DOE intransigence, no matter who is chancellor, mayor, governor is not simply a matter of will, of courage.
To keep beating this dead horse or drum is counterproductive. As many have pointed out, the UFT is not a union that will be easily converted into a union that strikes. And a strike, a walk out, a major labor action is, at this point, the only option we have to reduce, for we can't stop, the continued losses of jobs, wages, benefits.
Clean schools and safety, what happened in early March, these make titillating social media stories but are really distractions. Not that they are not super important all the time, but at this time, they are distractions that we should not focus on.
There is a kind of dance going on here that those who oppose Unity should disengage from in the interest of finding a new partner in a larger, much larger solidarity.
If that larger solidarity does not form, we will muddle along. As others have said, there is no solidarity in chapters even if the Union calls for chapters to follow chapter leaders and avoid unsafe conditions until the Union sends people to negotiate a safer solution.
We are in an economic depression. I know it doesn't look quite like the Great Depression but this Depression is, by many measures, Greater so far, and it has the potential to exceed the Great Depression in every savage statistic.
Yesterday, Jerome Powell pleaded with Washington for massive fiscal stimulus. We need this desperately. Today we go a report that 2.9 million Americans their lost jobs last week and applied for unemployment insurance. So far we have lost 36.5 million jobs. Our labor force at peak, before the virus, was 174.5 mm. That suggests that basic unemployment is north of 20% Of course it's worse and it's going to get worse.
In his talk, Cuomo warned about corporate welfare and corruption in the so-called bailouts passed and present. He wants his money because without it he can't do much. I hope he gets it.
While we will continue to see jobs lost and cuts will continue in private and public jobs, the devastation to large corporate America is the greaest threat to our work and to workers generally. While the stock market and some corporate profits disguise the devastation to industries, these are the powers that successfully crushed labor. And they have more political power, more power to suppress what is left of labor, and better access than ever to corporate welfare capitalism. Mulgrew's position that teachers are the experts in teaching with tech is fog. We are not experts in tech. More important is the fact that the UFT has no plan to control what tech is used and what provisions need to be in place to protect teacher skill and autonomy. Out Union is no match for the sophisticated power that opposes us. I have little hope that teachers will figure this out while focusing on safety and communications systems.
During the early years of the Great Depression the labor movement in the United States continued its steady decline. A decline that started after the First world War.
In this Virus Depression or Greater Depression labor, nearly decimated, is losing ground.
Maybe by September things will be at critical mass. Maybe it will take another year of pain.
But reforming the Unity UFT or challenging them from within will fail.
The Street is all we can hope for.
We can't hit the street now. It is too dangerous. Unity would never encourage it. Teachers wildcatting? That's a hot one. The sheep rebelling.
Labor started its greatest acceleration during the Depression.
We can't hit the streets yet, that is true. And, we may never do it. Who knows? But only a massive movement of workers will make any significant difference. I can hope for this. But I find comfort in the distractions now over what happened and what a safe school will be come September, how we might bend Unity to do anything but take a seat at the table where we are the dinner.
11:22:00 AM said "Labor started its greatest acceleration during the Depression."
The key word here is *during* and, as I stated, it did not begin to recover in the early years of the Great Depression. History never repeats itself, and obviously, this is a very different time. We have no great financial crisis. We still have inflated asset prices (Stocks, bonds, real estate). No market crash yet, although the government has propped up industries like oil by buying their debt--jun bonds, to offset a collapse in the capital markets. We entered this depression in decent shape (household and corporate and public balance sheets were improved somewhat from the recovery mechanisms put in place to address the Great Contraction), we have better tools and so on. But the response of governments has been poor at the federal, state, and local level. Biden is not FDR, so we can forget about the democrats sweeping in and saving us. The Fed has done a decent job, but it's money tools are weak and can't be aimed at the areas of the economy in need. But sometimes history rhymes and hear a lot of notes in minor keys. Labor may react by summer or it may take a year or two. Maybe labor will continue to flounder and flail and fail.
The sooner labor hits the streets the better. But it will take a tipping point or an anarchist moment or something that none of us can foresee and I just hope it doesn't take years of depression before labor hits the streets but, as I said, the distractions are not helping but delaying what is not inevitable but possible.
The uft has been an indefinite failure, this is not the fault of the virus. I opted out in summer of 2018, long before the virus. The 2005 and 2014 contracts had nothing to do with march 2020.
HA. You bozos are gonna be back in the building. UFT wont help. A federal court has issued a landmark federal ruling that students in the Detroit school system have a constitutional right to expect to learn to read and write in their public schools.
Same I opted out comment for every posting. How has your oping out done anyone but you any good?
If you opted out, why are you commenting on a union meeting? Shouldn't you stay out of union forums altogether if you have even a shred of integrity?
Two Essential Questions:
1) Are teachers Essential or are they only Sacrificial?
2) Do our students' lives matter?
Depending on your answer to these questions, decide on continuing to paying UFT dues.
How was your staying in done any good?
Noting is changing whether we pay or not. If things were gonna be good, they would've been good all these years the uft had 100% membership. If we opt out, things will be bad, because they are already bad and unity isnt changing.
Is this all out of context?
1.3% raises over 11 years, retro held back with no interest for 11 years
WE are the only group who had TDA reduced from 8.25% to 7%
no discipline code
fake grades
fake grad rates
fake suspension rates
higher medical co-pays
absentee chapter leaders
abusive admin
abusive students
cell phones in buildings
open market fraud
no travel hardship transfers
getting blamed for students not caring, not being present, being in poverty
screwed observation system
2014 contract extended twice with 0 raise
Tier 5
Tier 6
Waiting out bloomberg just to sign the worst contract in union history with de blasio
March 17-19, leading us to slaughter
I plan to opt out this month. You guys who keep asking what has anyone accomplished by opting out...That can easily be swung around. The uft has proven to betray us at every turn. Obviously, the choice is up to each individual. I ask this...What would make you opt out if what they have already done to us hasn't?
There's a good opinion piece about "Cuomo is letting Billionaires plan NY's future"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/14/andrew-cuomo-bill-gates-eric-schmidt-coronavirus
Also, I heard in France that schools are open now, but attendance isn't mandatory. I don't know the answer, but it doesn't hurt to see what others are doing.
This is a PRO-UNION SITE. You oppose the union. Why are you here? It is not to organize a better union but just to try to make the very weak one we have even weaker.
That guy is a principal.
I am pro union, just not this garbage we are getting. James is pro union, right? He reached his breaking point.
1. How did we do with 100% membership?
2. What will be your breaking point?
3. What is paying dues getting us?
4. What about the list above? All of those failures...
How have all the dues payers made this a better situation?
@ 10:00 attendance isn't mandatory
lol, it hasnt been in nyc for many years. in fact "mandatory" is a sexist term or something.
please check your privilege mkay.
"A federal court has issued a landmark federal ruling that students in the Detroit school system have a constitutional right to expect to learn to read and write in their public schools."
Please remember we are a sanctuary city and state. We protect those who dont wanna learn.
9:30,
While I have mixed feelings about the admins I worked with, I know I was lucky to be a teacher.
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