Letter from the Bronx UFT meeting

Marjory Stamberg, a longtime UFT activist, filed this report from the UFT's meeting for members of the ATR in the Bronx. The meeting was held on Monday, October 3, 2011, at 2500 Halsey Street.   

I attended the UFT ATR meeting for the Bronx borough yesterday (October 3). This is by no means a full report but a brief summary of the contentious issues and burning questions that were raised.

The UFT leadership people presiding were Amy Arundel (Special Representative), backed up by LeRoy Barr (Staff Director), who stepped in to try to cool things out when tempers started to rise, as they did frequently.  Arundel attempted to justify the June agreement on ATRs, which grew out of the deal on no layoffs of teachers. In exchange for that, it appears the ATR situation was used a bargaining chip. To save the DOE money, they agreed to use the ATRs in place of day-to-day subs. Those who are not given permanent assignments will be moved from school to school on a weekly basis (!) UNLESS a principal takes the affirmative action of alerting DOE central that he or she wishes to keep the ATR for more than a month. 

Time after time, the ATR teachers at the meeting spoke out and said that in this way things were made worse for them than before. Before now, many had the possibility of being in one school for a length of time, even if denied the rights of an assigned teacher. Now they must move every week to a new place and begin the wrenching process of adjusting to a new school--everything from locating keys to the bathroom, lockers, copiers, as well as relations with a new set of teachers and supervisors.

Arundel explained that no teachers will be forced to accept an assignment out of their district; she said that teachers should call the union if they receive such an assignment. Arundel also said that no teacher can be forced to do hall duty or cafeteria duty all day; ATRs must be treated as every other teacher on staff.

The important issue of evaluations was raised: how is an ATR teacher to be evaluated if the teacher is in a school for only one week? Arundel said that this is being negotiated with the DOE and the UFT position is that the teacher cannot be evaluated by any principal who has worked with that teacher for only one week.

Arundel and Barr kept coming back to the UFT default positions, which were two:  

*Regarding the weekly trek from school to school, Arundel said the UFT wanted this because the principals have been gaming the system, using an ATR like a full-time staffer without any rights and without paying for them. This, they hope, will force the principal to pay up and assign the teacher if they want that person around. (This, by the way did not work in District 79 last year, where the ATR teachers from Rikers worked all year and all but a very few were NOT assigned after the year of work in our school).

*If you don’t like any of this, the UFT bottom line is you still have a job and a paycheck. You could be in Chicago or Los Angeles and have a cap of a year or 18 months to get an assignment or you’re out.  

There are several points that needed to be raised and answers to questions that were not heard from the UFT officials:

1) Data: Arundel stressed that the union is amassing data, but the fundamental data questions were not addressed. How many ATRs have been given assignments this term, and how many ATRs are in the pool?

2) Since everyone in the room was demonstrably over 30 years old (many far over), there is clear evidence of age discrimination. Why is this not being fought directly?

3) If ATRs are to be treated as every other teacher, why are the ATRs not given a UFT chapter, with voting rights, delegates and chapter leaders?

The meeting was handled in a very bureaucratic way. Teachers were asked to speak only to the specific point at hand, without discussing the broader picture: the desperate situation of ATRs who are in this situation due to the UFT’s capitulation and give-away of seniority transfer rights and creation of the open market in 2005, and the union-busting attempts and school-closing patterns that are creating new ATRs every year.  If a teacher did speak to the specific point at hand, they were told that their questions were too detailed to raise in a group setting and to see the representatives individually after the meeting.

I was only allowed in the meeting after a prolonged interchange with a union representative, even though I explained that I was a UFT delegate and had spent a large number of hours advocating for ATRs in the past.  I mentioned that my District, D79, was probably the poster child for the mass excessing that took place following the “reckless reconstruction” of D79 in 2007, when hundreds of teachers were thrown out of their classrooms and hundreds of students lost in the process. Even then I was only allowed to observe, not speak.

Photo credit: http://www.uft.org/files/photo/bronx_boro_office_1.jpg

Civil War Brewing in UFT Ranks

The following observations were sent to NYCATR by Marjorie Stamberg, a UFT delegate and long-time activist.  They are a call to battle with the DOE--and with the UFT.    

Below are some notes based on conversations with teachers who have been living in the surreal world of ATRland. According to the UFT’s latest figures, some 1,500 of our colleagues are caught in this limbo, where their rights are trampled on. 

In the 2005 contract with the NYC Department of Education, the UFT agreed to allow principals to select the staff at “their” schools. It was also agreed to abolish the UFT job transfer list, where a teacher whose school was closed, or who wished to change schools, could transfer to an opening on a seniority basis, by license area. 

Many of us opposed this at the time as a dangerous attack on teachers’ job security. The upshot was the ballooning of the Absent Teacher Reserve consisting of teachers who have been “excessed” through no fault of their own, as the DOE capriciously shuts down and reorganizes schools as part of its program of charterizing, corporatizing and privatizing public education. 

Teachers in the ATR pool have been made into scapegoats by the media which claims that they are “bad teachers” who should be fired and are supposedly costing NYC taxpayers millions of dollars to sit around doing nothing. These claims are bald-faced lies in the service of a union-busting agenda. 

In fact, as a recent audit by NYC Comptroller John Liu’s office shows, 95 percent of all ATRs are working in schools, three-quarters of them are teaching, and almost half of those who have been in the ATR pool for two or more years have been assigned to the same location for at least two consecutive years! (“Audit Report on the Department of Education’s Utilization of the Absent Teacher Reserve Pool,” September 6, 2011). They are only in the ATR limbo because principals don’t want to pay their salaries. 

Our ATR colleagues need the support of all teachers. As every teacher knows, “If You’re Not an ATR Today, You Could Be Tomorrow!” 

Last spring it was urgent to fight against Mayor Bloomberg’s threatened layoffs of thousands of teachers. Due to our fight-back, the mayor was unable to change the “LIFO” (“Last In First Out”) seniority rules which are a basic union protection. Bloomberg had to back down on his layoff threats which would have paralyzed the schools and been disastrous for students. 

Today we must demand that the more than 800 school aides and other staff who have been laid off be returned to work. And we need to come to the aid of our ATR colleagues under attack, out of elementary solidarity and to protect the jobs of all teachers and staff. 

At recent so-called “job fairs,” ATRs turned out in the hundreds, but the principals refused to even bother to turn up to interview or hire. This profound contempt for ATR teachers is part of an organized media campaign instigated by the DOE. 

Starting on September 15, principals have been told to place ATRs in all vacancies and long-term absences in the schools. So one thing we can do right now is to report all vacancies to the union chapter leaders, especially where there are ATRs in the same school. 

According to the citywide agreement, after one year ATRs who have provisional positions should be offered a permanent assignment if the principal and the teacher agree that there is a “good fit.” However, many principals don’t want to hire an experienced teacher, conscious of his or her rights, when they can get two new hires for the same price. There are many ATRs who have been working in the same position year after year, and yet the principal still refuses to give them permanent assignments. 

ATRs who are not given provisional positions are to be treated as subs, and moved from school to school wherever there is a need. Clearly this is an agenda to harass these teachers out of the system! 

Back in 2008, when the DOE recklessly reorganized the GED program in District 79, “excessing” hundreds of teachers, we demanded that every teacher in the ATR pool must be given a permanent position. We must continue to demand that today. After the 2008 fight in D79, including a demonstration of more than 200 UFTers in November of that year, the ATR issue has not gone away, despite the toothless “Side Agreement” with the DOE. 

The UFT must insist that: 

Schools place all ATR teachers before any new hires are placed. 

ATRs should be given permanent assignments with full rights. 

There are also a number of things that the union can and should do, now. 

There should be regular citywide UFT meetings for ATRs to discuss together, and to get the latest information from the UFT leadership. In addition, we call on the UFT to form a special ATR functional chapter so that teachers placed in this terrible situation have representation and advocates to demand that they be placed and their rights be respected. At present there is no body in the UFT that has this task, and ATRs are mostly left to fend for themselves. 

Even within the framework of the present contract, the union can and should provide oversight and encouragement to principals to request the ATR be kept in the school, and not bumped from place to place. This requires advocacy on a case by case basis. It is obvious that this is only good pedagogy to have a teacher familiar with the school administration, the faculty, the students, and the individual curricula. 

In addition, ATR teachers have raised a number of the many unresolved questions about their situation: 

What provisions are being made for ATRs to express their rights as full dues-paying UFT members?  Where are their voting rights in the UFT chapters? This is particularly acute if these teachers are being moved from school to school. 

If ATRS are in numerous schools throughout the school year, how will they be evaluated? It is hard enough to be in a single school without a permanently assigned classroom; but when one is never in a school long enough to develop rapport with the students as well as collaboration with a principal, the other teachers and the school staff, how can a teacher possibly get a satisfactory rating? 

Many teachers do not have direct deposit. What is the procedure for receiving their paychecks in a timely fashion? Who is responsible and where will the bi-weekly checks be sent for pick-up? 

What evidence is there for assuming the statistics will be any better by June 2012? It is clear that principals still have huge economic pressures on them which forces them to go for the lower-paid and lower-seniority teachers. There is also evidence of systematic age discrimination which the UFT has not directly fought. 

Overall, we must make clear:

With the budget cuts, there has been much talk about larger classroom size. There is no need for overcrowded classrooms with almost 2,000 teachers available to fill full-time positions. There is talk of lack of space. Again, except for certain districts in Queens where the DOE has failed to build new schools despite plenty of forewarning, this is an artificial shortage, created by the DOE’s campaign to hand over available classroom space to charter school “co-locations.” 

Even though thousands of students and parents, particularly from the African American, Latino and Asian communities most affected, have loudly (and repeatedly) denounced this attack, Bloomberg and his minions at the DOE keep up their school-wrecking operation. But they can be stopped if we use our power and act together. 

Picture credit: http://www.soldierstudies.org/images/webquest/civil%20war%20soldiers.jpg