Finding out that that there’s somebody fighting for me was amazing.
Growing up in Oklahoma, you tend to only hear about unions in a negative light. They get a pretty bad rap. So when I made a career change six years ago and became a teacher in New York City, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the UFT.
I taught here for four years, and then I felt like my mother and father needed some help. A middle school in their town had a position in my field and I thought “perfect,” and I moved back to Oklahoma.
Then I got my first paycheck. It was less than half of what I made in New York. I started to listen to the faculty members at my school, and I heard them talking about their evening job or their weekend job or their seasonal business. I honestly didn’t know one single teacher out of 40 who didn’t have a second income to help them. I was teaching with people who had been teaching 25 years, and they couldn’t make ends meet without a second or third job.
The English teacher was a caterer. The teacher across the hall from me ran a snow-cone stand with her husband. That same teacher had started her career in Oklahoma but had lived in Texas for 30 years and had taught and retired in Texas. But she drove up from Texas every day to teach in Oklahoma in order to be eligible for a second pension, because neither pension was going to be enough to live on.
After a year, I decided to move back to New York. I watch really carefully what the union is doing for teachers here. As a special education teacher dealing with SESIS issues, it means a lot that somebody cares enough about me and the job I do to represent me in my needs.
In every school I’ve been in in New York, 98 percent of teachers I’ve met are hard-working and care about their students. You can’t find that level of commitment in any other field. That was true in Oklahoma, too, but teachers there were worn out, absolutely exhausted. They were numb to the situation.
I think everybody would agree that a three-stranded rope is stronger than a piece of string. When you gather teachers together to negotiate what’s only fair, they’re stronger.
Larissa Clark is a teacher at Marble Hill HS for International Studies in the Bronx.
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)