UFT: Why weren’t we remote today?

Today, I’m writing with a bit of a headache, having breathed in exorbitant amounts of smoke and toxins both at work and on my commute. Due to an injury that makes standing/walking risky, I don’t have much of a choice but to bike twenty miles round trip. Teachers, after all, can’t afford to live anywhere near District 2. For the most part, breathing felt fine at work until the end of the day, when the infected outside air made its way into the building, bringing all learning to a halt. My school has decent ventilation due to solid chapter organizing during early Covid. At other schools without the right equipment, I understand the air was bad all day.

There are rumors that tomorrow we might get a remote day – as we should. Tomorrow is Chancellor’s Day, so the City can’t use ‘the kids just need to be in school, period’ as an excuse, like they do during floods, blizzards, and—now—catastrophic air quality events. In fact, seeing as the City wants to reduce their spending on our healthcare, I have no idea why they’d bring us in. Do they really want to see a surge of visits to urgent cares, pulmonologists, and oncologists because of a day when we could all be on Zoom anyways?

Probably not. On the other hand – it’s interesting that Chancellor’s Day was even originally set up as a fully in-person day. There was a time, not long ago, when UFT leadership would proclaim loudly ‘there’s no need for us to be in the building when the students aren’t there.’ But when it was announced that the DOE expected us all to work in person on Chancellor’s Day, there was little fanfare. There tends to be very little said by our leadership when the UFT loses. But, DC-37 recently won up to two remote days a week for certain titles, so it’s strange that even without a catastrophic weather event principals didn’t even have the option to make all-day meetings remote tomorrow.

One last point. Whether we get tomorrow to be work-from-home or not, school should have been remote today, at a minimum. That’s the whole reason we set up Google Classroom at the beginning of the year – to prepare for possibilities like today. The fact that we didn’t move to remote also shows that the DOE has no reason to have so many extra days in the next calendar. If we aren’t even going to go remote when it’s in the best interest of staff and students, there’s even less of a chance that we’re going to cancel school entirely.

We need to push on this. Sacred days have been stolen from us to arbitrarily extend the school year for 2023-2024. The fact that school wasn’t cancelled today proves that the City has no intention of using any one of those days for an emergency closing. With the likelihood at exactly 0% that we ever cancel a single day of school, there’s no reason not to have Passover and various other holidays on the calendar next year.