By going to arbitration about the exploding SESIS workload for speech teachers and other union members, the UFT helped us get back to why most of us went into this field: to support students.
Things really got tough for us when my school was chosen to pilot the Special Education Student Information System (SESIS) Encounter Attendance program back in 2010. Taking attendance for one day used to take two minutes. After SESIS launched, it started taking me an hour. It was so time-consuming — it really changed the job.
And that’s when the UFT stepped in to help us.
The union filed a grievance arguing that members should be paid for the time outside the regular workday they spent doing SESIS work.
Without the UFT, we would have had no bargaining power at all. Ultimately, the arbitrator did rule in our favor, which was pretty amazing and really rewarding. Some 30,000 members were awarded more than $38 million in back pay in 2013.
When the DOE did not fix all the problems with SESIS that the arbitrator had pointed out, the union went back to arbitration and the DOE had to pay out another $33 million to UFT members who had to put up with the headaches and frustration.
I was asked to testify in the first arbitration — which, honestly, was a little intense — but I knew I had to do it. I knew something had to change.
It was amazing to see how many people at the UFT there are whose job it is to support us. The grievance reps were just so supportive and really wanted to understand what was going on and what the problems we faced were and how they could help.
Not only did the union get us a lot of money back for the time we put into SESIS, they also got the DOE to make system upgrades and got the time written into the speech teachers’ contract to be able to do SESIS work.
It was very vindicating that the UFT was able to get this done. Now, I can concentrate fully on my students’ needs.
Blake Rose is a speech teacher at PS 321 in Brooklyn.
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