Minutes--approved.
Reports from Districts--Rashad Brown--Works with student loan forgiveness program. New info for limited waiver and AFT lawsuit against DOE. Tomorrow will be webinar on this, over 721 registered. Pride committee hosts World AIDS Day event Dec. 1 4:15--virtual--speaker from Northwell will speak.
Karen Alford--Nov. 30 4:30-6 Elementary Town Hall. Please come.
Shelvi Abrams--Reaching out to sub paras 23rd webinar. Please join us.
Rich Mantel--Saturday Thanksgiving event for students who live in temporary housing. Will provide Thanksgiving meal. Will give them winter coat, gloves and scarf. Remaining coats will go to shelter. Delivered over 1K last year.
Servia Silva--Invites people to children and vaccine awareness Town Hall Distict 4r Mon. Nov 22 through Zoom. Students who had vaccine will encourage others.
Tom Murphy--RTC had last general membership meeting, 2900 stayed on, devoted to health care.
Seung Lee--Asian American Heritage committee 6:30 tomorrow.
Mary Vaccarro--20 new teacher center sites as of Dec. 23. Will continue to meet with ELL focus group monthly. Meeting regularly with librarians. Partnership with Monroe College special ed. and bilingual special ed. licenses will offer reduced tuition. 30 above programs available. CTLE workshops running. Apple workshops continuing shortly.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew-- Thanks political action dept. and RTC, says Gov Murphy thanks them and wouldn't have won without them. Working on city council legislation about class size. Has been amended to be about occupancy, not class size. Unrelated to class size limits in contract, which will remain. Had forum with 600 activists, Mark Treyger explained. Always people in City Hall against this. Bloomberg preferred 50 in a classroom.
When city decided three feet was 18 inches, measured nose to nose, opened up argument about health code. This led to this. Our school system unsafe because too many people in classroom. When DOE revised capacity to 50 people, that opened this up. Not contractual negotiation, but city council legislation. Many stakeholders. We've now amended legislation, would drop to classroom occupancy. K could be 21. Admin could place people in larger spaces, but can't do oversized classes because of contract.
Won't be easy. Bill is aging tonight. D75 is important. We need task force to deal with that. Must do that in responsible way. We have enforcement mechanism. Could go to court. Probably up for vote next Tuesday. If it passes, then rollout and implementation is 5-year process. Will be reports and hard targets. Right now 86% of schools have footage. Will require more staff, but not dramatic amount.
This polls highly with both parents and members. Will place supporting council members on our website as heroes. People will try and kill this bill. Will say it's UFT trying to increase membership. We tried to put it on ballot, but mayor killed it. Wanted to charge us for it in contract. Looking at health codes to combat certain situations, we came upon this. Still a lot of work to do.
When people say they won't support this, we will ask why. We don't understand why this would happen after what we've all been through. This is about safety. This could be the one good thing to come out of pandemic. Thanks everyone who worked on this. Wishes everyone great Thanksgiving.
Barr--Resolution to support this bill is placed on screen. Gives history of UFT work on class size. Was first point in pandemic five-point plan. Asks for motion.
Moved, seconded.
George Altomari--This issue older than UFT. Teacher's Guild looked at this. We had no contract, did best we could. Class size was 55, 60. People sat on things. We had no collective bargaining or numbers. Charlie Cogen did everything possible. He analyzed laws on books, found you needed so much space for fire hazard, wasn't successful, but we had a terrific run. Won through collective bargaining.
Anthony Harmon--Time is right, this is our opportunity, thanks union.
?--Read article in medical journal, said up to 5% of students have non-verbal learning disabilities. Could be millions of undiagnosed students. Smaller class sizes will help teachers identify these children. Rises in strong support.
Passes unanimously.
Paid medical leave--Michael Sill--no conversations now. Will be considered in contractual negotiations.
We are adjourned 6:37
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