UFT Townhall 9/17/24 – Notes and Analysis

Major Takeaways from Tonight’s Town Hall  (semi-minutes, unofficial, with some notes, mostly in italics):

• Meeting starts over 5 minutes late with an odd ‘elevator music like’ intro that made me feel like I was entering a PD in suburban Lubbock.
• Mulgrew is shown with signs behind him about class sizes, school funding, fix tier 6, and a Harris/Waltz campaign sign.
• Teachers Choice: Confirmed, same as last year (which was a reduction, for teachers, from the year before, despite inflation (mainly because they carved out some money for other titles, particularly paraprofessionals – that at least is a good thing).
• Existing COVID leave policy confirmed – due to a law that is in effect. (Mulgrew claimed some advocacy on this, which is possible, but notably the law covers far more people than teachers). Haven’t had many issues with testing requirements, but keep your test and contact UFT if you have an issue getting COVID leave approved. May depend on type or length of leave requested. Up to 4 hours can be taken off for a vaccine or booster. New Covid vaccine that the CDC is recommending from Pfizer – Mulgrew mentions not to get political about vaccines.
• Cell Phone ban – issue is back not because of discipline but because of harm for adolescents. A lot of research about harm on us also there, but research on harm on children is why back. Biggest mental health crisis. Survey – this cannot become a teacher issue. Has to be when students enter and leave. If about students doing in each classroom, that’s a joke. Then it leads to all sorts of disciplinary problems. Instructional time too important to waste on phone issues. We’ve always had emergencies, even before cellphones, school contact numbers. Last thing you want according to law enforcement is using cellphones during a crisis like a school shooting.
•  Union committees: class size, 3k, virtual learning, regents, health care, technology – because hot topics in schools. Class size big piece that I’ll spend more time on. (note: known healthcare activists who aren’t in Mulgrew’s caucus, like myself, were excluded from the healthcare committee, so I hope that changes this time).
• Class size law – a lot of questions, misinformation. Need to make sure that 40% of schools are in compliance. We will reach that. Next year it becomes 60%, where real work starts. How many staff members needed for compliance, etc. Next year will receive double the amount for class size reduction, must be given directly. Do need a waver process given some areas are changing in population, but must be a plan (and things like building annexes). Most charters, other than Success, don’t want to be in public school buildings. Still would need 60-40 ratio (compliance) for ICT classes. Note: the ‘waiver’ point could be cause for concern.
• Politics – how it affects our profession. Direct correlation between political process and our profession. Why education is so political is crazy to me. Make your choice of course. One party after us, but hasn’t always been that way, blue dog democrats we had to fight at one point. Most of that has stopped, but other side is coming against us. Black and white, because Trump policy agenda is to cut social security and Medicare, allow employers to stop paying overtime, strip health care from people with pre-existing conditions, replace federal civil servants with conservative appointees, dismantle civil rights protections, end efforts to combat climate change, cut taxes for the wealthy, weaponize the national labor relations board against workers. Strangely, Mulgrew doesn’t mention tying funding to ending tenure, which is right on Trump’s website: “President Trump will reward states and school districts that abolish teacher tenure for grades K-12” Mulgrew notes we don’t want to be in politics, but they force us to be – don’t want to be at will employees, have standardized test scores define everything, don’t think we’re better off without public education, don’t’ believe members should be tied to tier 6 (note: that was done by a democrat politician at the state level). Talks about volunteer opportunities like phone banking.
• Tier 6: illegal to negotiate pensions. Misleading graphic shown suggesting we’re halfway to fixing tier 6 (3/6 things checked off, but things checked off are somewhat minor, albeit welcome: reduce vesting requirement from 10 to 5 years (but vesting for what?), automatic enrollment for paraprofessionals (paraprofessionals could previously enroll manually, but often didn’t know for sure if they were enrolled, so this is good, though some paraprofessionals have commented to me that they wish they didn’t have to contribute since they don’t intend to stay in the DOE long enough to retire and can’t afford the contributions), higher final average salary calculation (yes, but minor). Mulgrew pushes the need to reduce pension to 30 years of service at age 55 (currently requires 63 age no matter what, unless you want big penalties), decrease early retirement reductions, and lower member contributions (but the contributions are far more major than UFT leadership lets on – see NAC’s presentation, principally led by Ben Morgenroth, here for more information.
• UFT Mobile app – download.
• New UFT Swag Shop, union-made and made in the USA: shirts, hats, bags, accessories. Goes live next week. Chapters can design their own kind of swag.
• Healthcare – MSK-Anthem negotiations. MSK may drop out of network. Priority in UFT that they don’t. Letter sent multiple times over the years. Healthcare contentious. Legally you have to be informed when this might happen. We feel responsible to tell you the same. Amazing that we still have premium free healthcare. Interjected ourselves in many fights. Consumer never at the table and we need to be at the table. MSK to me is the most important hospitable in network. MSK does great work and doesn’t charge the most. Have transparency laws, so now MSK is asking for more. (This is interesting, because it implies one of Mulgrew’s strategies has backfired – transparency has actually hurt members if good hospitals have now started to charge more in response to seeing what other hospitals charge). Mulgrew says we will see more of this. Thinks it’s part of a strategy. Doesn’t want us to be used as pawns. Healthcare negotiated by MLC, all municipal unions, whereas welfare done here. Confident we’ll get MSK settled.
• Hospital for special surgery, number one for orthopedics, we want to have same service that we have for MSK. Today, we can announce, just finished negotiations, and now we have HSS direct. HSS Perform. Treatment will go much easier now, take away a lot of red tape. See https://www.hss.edu/uftwf.htm . This will be managed through the welfare fund.
• Question on Curriculum: teachers mandated to use curriculum with bad results, why mandated to use it despite poor results – talking about illustrative math. Mulgrew says any principal forcing curriculum is a moron and shouldn’t be in education. You have to be able to modify, diversify to meet the needs of your students. Pile on that that we’re in NYC, most diverse school system in the entire country. Chancellor is apparently on board with Mulgrew. Direct correlation between if you’re getting consultant support or teacher-teacher. You want the curriculum to work, we need to be able to modify. Schools doing it well are getting good results. (Note: UFT as of now has mainly focused on getting PD, often through the UFT teacher center, over fighting curriculum mandates. Nothing Mulgrew said today made me think he plans to change that approach. Though he does suggest Illustrative Math may be a different story than the literacy curriculums, it isn’t clear he’s doing more than raising concerns).
• Another question: Dec 23, are we getting it off. Mulgrew says at this point it’s in our calendar, we only have one extra day. Don’t do snow days anymore so don’t have to worry about it, so should be moving towards it. Rules around how do you make a calendar. Main piece here is we don’t have snow days. Talking to parents and students. Some supportive. Others think any day students in schools are a good thing. Parents an integral part. More to come.
• Paraprofessionals: a lot with fix para pay, won election, when will paras get livable wages. Paras underpaid and given more work. Need to do something to do this, but people who made these promises don’t understand that we have things we need to deal with – collective bargaining, pattern bargaining. Last two contracts were able to get more money to paras, but pattern bargaining…multiple unions have tried to break it, such as right after NCLB when schools became understaffed because teachers were deemed unqualified. Arbitrator said they agreed but said NYS/NYC where pattern bargaining must prevail. This is how we ended up with more money in the work day. So in pattern bargaining, everyone gets the same percentage. Higher you on the scale, there’s an inequity. So negotiating committee agreed to take 10k and try to put that in every para’s base bay. Still have to get city to agree. Said tried. Inequity has grown over decades. Not going to get it by screaming fix para pay. Know that under the rules that we work in. Have to be educated – can’t just scream something and get more pay. (Mulgrew leaves out that UFT did nothing to stop the pattern from being set by DC37 to be as low as it was, and that members of UFT leadership commented that doing so would be interfering with another union. Also, coming against non-Unity people in the way that Mulgrew did felt inappropriate, especially in an election season. It felt like he was campaigning, on our dime. Suggesting the paras who won or voted for the winners were not ‘educated’ was particularly appalling).
• Teeth: when will dental improve. Majority of dental done through welfare fund. Also supplies drugs. Paid parental leave also, and optical. Still in process for RFP on dental. Dental costs have gone up significantly. Dental in welfare fund is regulated. Just because we started RFP, we’re getting movement from companies we work with on the dental side. We make decisions in the welfare fund – have a board there. Drug costs are important right now – we are only union covering some drugs. But negotiating and we will have better benefits when done. Also want to work with Albany about regulation of costs.
• Chancellor mentioned he wanted to use AI to assess children  – Mulgrew says didn’t know, it makes no sense. We just passed law about not using algorithms for children. Don’t know why he would say such thing. Also said we should use it for lesson plans, so… I have no idea why he said that, ridiculous to assess with AI every day.