LIVE BLOGGING FROM MAY DELEGATE ASSEMBLY

 Mulgrew Report

Looking at way to keep hybrid DA's for next school year. Resolutions are backing up with a half hour question period.

Federal

Recognizing nurses, teachers, and others. Nurses went through a lot last year. They got through it and they deserve the appreciation they should be getting.

Infrastructure package turning into a big deal. Trying to make it bipartisan. Infrastructure includes schools. Rich Mantell working with construction unions and others. Trying to get schools in any package. Voting rights playing out in each state. Vote is a precious thing. Craziness based on lies is a shame on the country at this point in time.

State

The big ugly at end of a legislative session may be coming. Legislators have to vote for everything. No assurances that our health care will work with the state healthcare bill. Nothing out there for homelessness.  Mayor counts things as he wishes but many people don't have homes. Homeless students growing. State budget best we've had for education but the complete abdication of responsibility on homeless situation. city should hang its head in shame. Albany blames city, city blames Albany. Enough of that. Big challenge but it would help if we could get tens of thousands in a permanent housing situation.

Summer School

Can we get enough members who want to work in summer school? Most of summer school will be done in person with a few exceptions for 683 students who have heavy-duty medical issues. Posting up for 683 but nothing else. It's better than it was at this time last year but worried that everything will have to go through City Hall. Medical accommodations sunset at the end of June. Regular process in effect for next year. Vaccination status is a personal choice; it is not part of a medical accommodation process. We will see how many students and teachers we get for summer school. If we have 100,000 more students, we may need to go to city to negotiate a package to incentivize summer school teaching.

PD Days at the end of the year: unless city can prove that there is a need to have people coming in the building, we can stay remote. On the clerical day, people working remotely not on a medical accommodation can be asked to come in. 

Next school year

If we continue on our current path, there is a real possibility our school system will be fully open in September. 3 foot distance might be gone. Country moving toward 70%. At 70%, herd immunity should have virus dissipate. CDC should change regulations for schools before school starts. Biden predicts this by July 4.  The calendar is out. We have exactly 180 aidable days. PD days count as part of the 180. No room to change it. SBO's to move Parent evenings and days can be done. Trying to get preapproved DOE-UFT menu for preapproved SBOs. If we are back to the regular collective bargaining agreement, there are no cameras. We won't approve SBOs to have people teaching on camera. The School system should be told to program as if all are coming to school in September. We need to stop silliness now. Want mayor to announce that decision is made that we are open. "Our children need....." campaign. We have our five-point plan. DOE talks about CBO's. Debbie Poulos comes on that SBOs are going to be on election Buddy should be up within next two weeks. No votes yet but the information will be coming shortly. 

Mulgrew again: It's our SBO's, not the principal.  Training with college and career counselors to make sure graduates get an hour. CUNY and SUNY have partnered with us. Curfuffle with DOE. Intervention teams have started. Likes new chancellor a lot but DOE is in the last year with the current mayor. We can make some changes in the middle of the school year but we don't want to lose this year. Pushing agenda forward. 

Healthcare report: Municipal Labor Council worked with NY Presbyterian so we can see bills and audit them to see what is inside them. 1.3 million covered by healthcare that MLC covers. RFP stalled on retiree healthcare. We won't agree to something that does not include every doctor that accepts Medicare. Retiree Chapter forming committee. Active people should do the same. 20% retiree healthcare covered by the city. It is important to have a standing healthcare committee to talk about the negative and positive aspects of it. Overall healthcare plan sunsets next year.

3% raise on May 14. Different titles get paid at different times. That is the last raise for this round of bargaining. We have to form a negotiating team for the next contract. This contract runs out in September 2022. We need a large negotiating committee with each chapter (bargaining unit) negotiating. We need that in place in October. If there is an opportunity to get a contract, we will move. Final retro check will be in the middle of July. Retiree trustees will get information out on upping TDA for this pay period. People want to know how to up percentage for that check and that check only but there are limitations on summer payroll so trustees are investigating what can be done. Member Assistance hotline is open. People are struggling. Will send out in Chapter Leader Update. We want people to use the hotline for others too. Spring Conference on Saturday. It will be mostly digital with a small group at the union on the second floor.

Politics

At this moment, three front candidates. Mr. Yang, Mr. Stringer and Mr. Adams. They poll who is first and second because of ranked-choice voting. We don't know when we will get the results. It took three weeks to get city council results on one race. Bloomberg had an anti-public school agenda. Schools set up to have the neediest students called failures. Schools closed and new ones took higher achieving students. Accountability system set up to fail certain schools. The whole thing was a shell game. Other issue was the expansion of charter schools and the lack of accountability. Bradley Tusk ran this for Bloomberg and is now running Yang campaign. Adams working with Jenny Sidelis from Students First. Yang's inability to answer questions and Adams' relationships and donors are a problem. Stringer has a sexual harassment complaint against him. We support anyone's right to make an allegation. There has to be due process after that. A Group of unions has funded an independent expenditure group on behalf of Stringer. Race is a big mess but now there are three people who right now look viable. Some lower-tier candidates moving up but our people are looking at it closely. Yang and Adams working with people who are proven enemies of public education who want to get back into City Hall.

We have a real shot at having a regular school year next year. We hope that optimism comes true. It would be nice to get past this pandemic. We should be proud of what we accomplished.

Staff Director's Report

Leroy Barr gave some dates of events. Teacher Appreciation week, nurse appreciation day, and provider appreciation day. Chapter leader elections are underway. For uncontested seats, send in CL certification forms. June 13 5k walk to raise money for UFT disaster relief fund. Spoke to reso maker on tax the rich who withdrew it. Recognizes Ed Al_Fitr

Question Period

Question: CL from D 24, staff conference and faculty conference, will we go back to extended day and are September and May parent conferences still happening?

Mulgrew Answer: We are working under the regular contract for next school year unless something changes. SBOs coming. Parent-teacher conferences in the calendar. We want to consolidate SBO votes.

Question: Google classroom plus digital portfolios and what about June 22 primary day?

Answer: Schools are open on primary day. We had to adjust the calendar as we started two weeks late. We pushed for DOE to move voting out of the schools. Many ballot locations moved out of schools. Leroy Barr will follow up. If a teacher wants to do Google classroom, that is okay. We can't agree to that being mandated. That has to be part of a collective bargaining process. Money attached to each school to set up asynchronous learning on election day because DOE can't mandate a digital classroom. This has to be ironed out in a collective bargaining process. Classic collective bargaining issue. We have to deal with snow days too. We need real negotiations.

Question:  Harbor School CL, early retirement incentive, do you have anything you can share?

Answer: Yesterday, was not in a good mood on the ERI. We had dialogue with the city today and we will be talking to them tomorrow and Friday as well. We will see where it goes. There was movement in the right direction from yesterday's town hall to today. This is going to be tough.

Question: Para rep in Queens, do we have two days less on our calendar because there are no snow days?

Answer: Yes because all of the holidays fall on the calendar so there are less days. The two days after labor day are holidays. For 2022-23, it looks like we are going to be down to 179 days. There are less reporting days.

Question: Brooklyn CL salutes her DR, will there still be COVID testing in September? They only tested 8 today.

Answer: How many they test is based on average attendance. Positivity rate below .3. It was .6 from December through a few weeks back and now it has dropped to .3. Can't say if there will be testing in September. Stopping real spread in school is about testing. We have more testing in our school system than any system in the country. We get a report every morning and now feel confident we are heading in the right direction. Reading test reports was a sickening feeling when during the second wave. We will wait and see what doctors say.

Question: D75 teacher is pretty confused about 683 for summer school. How will it work for staff? Students not vaccinated. How do we maintain social distancing? 

Answer: Building was tight to begin with. Mary Vaccarro will put it top of the agenda for consultation. Vaccination is a tough issue. We can't mandate seeing a vaccination status. New building coming for this school as these are some of the neediest students. 

Question: Bronx delegate, union battling with hospitals and now we are privatizing healthcare for retirees. Why aren't we supporting healthcare act in Albany?

Answer: MLC against this. Senior care plan we have is managed by a private provider that is not for profit. Bill in Albany does not work for us. We have 300,000-500,000 people uninsured in NYS. It's not a lot in terms of the state. We will try to work with anyone to get everyone insured. Something is wrong with our entire system. We are not going to give away tens of millions with a bill that doesn't work for our members. We are all in a private service that manages our healthcare. That bill will cost you a lot of money.

Question: Guidelines for graduations?

Answer: Last year they said no graduations and graduations still happened. It can be done safely in places like football fields. This is aggravating. We should get City Council to yell at them too.

Question: MOA for this year is up June 30, is there going to be another one?

Answer: Once we are out of our health emergency, it automatically sunsets June 30. We are going to work under our contract after that. If DOE wants something else, they have to bring it to the table. We will work with them on snow day issue because we could lose days where we were scheduled to be off.

Question: Vaccine and asking about it. If someone is vaccinated, do they have to quarantine?

Answer: Vaccination program worked quite well. We shut down principals who tried to keep vaccinated people in buildings when there was COVID in a classroom. Privacy issues. If a classroom is closed down and you want to come to work, you can come in. If you want to stay out, you can. Up to you.

New Motion Period:

Celebrate Provider Appreciation Day for this month's agenda. Maker of the motion reads the motion. The resolution had 94% yes and 6% no

The next motion was to celebrate Nurses Appreciation Day. Maker reads the motion. 94% yes and 6% No.

David Pecoraro has resolution to support David Weprin for next month's agenda. Talks about us opposing candidates. We have never supported a comptroller candidate who does not have a BA. Like Liz Cheney I stand on principle. Leaving DA because of backing David Weprin. He is the most qualified person to be Comptroller. He stands up for our members including his 91-year-old mom. We support a candidate who is not leading in the mayor's race but we should support the candidate for the comptroller who is not looking to eventually be mayor. We could be in a fiscal crisis. We need the most qualified person to be comptroller and that is Weprin. 

VP Karen Alford spoke against who rose to speak against Weprin. Weprin is not the most qualified candidate. Corey Johnson oversees an $88.2 billion budget. Corey Johnson has been our friend. Appointed former teachers to be there for what we need. Corey has supported us. He made sure that all of our members to keep our jobs. He has supported all of our UFT supported programs. 

25% Yes-75% No.

Leroy Barr suggests a motion to extend to do endorsements. It needs a 2/3 vote.

77% Yes-23% No

Karen Alford speaks again for Corey Johnson. UFT treasurer Tom Brown follows up. Then another in favor. Mulgrew asks for a speaker against. Someone from D24 opposes Johnson. Credible sexual assault allegations for mayor is one and one is opposing defunding the police and increasing social services. That was followed by a DR speaking in favor.

82% Yes-18% No

More endorsements followed for the ones that were rejected last month. 

They passed easily.