“If city government can’t take care of them, I don’t know who is going to...The teachers union is not there to protect our kids. The teachers union is there to protect members of that union. They may use children as pawns, but the bottom line is, protecting the public is the obligation of the government...If there’s going to be a mistake, I’d rather have it on the other side than on this side. Our first responsibility is to our children.”
You see, the evil teachers don't care about kids, only Bloomberg and the Tweedies care about kids.
That's why it is so important for Bloomberg to get the power to overrule arbitration decisions - it's for the kids, you see.
But I seem to remember some decision just a year and some months back where parents and environmental groups had to shame Bloomberg into agreeing to remove PCB's from 800 schools after some schools actually had cases of dripping toxins in classrooms.
Oh, yeah - here's that case:
The Bloomberg administration announced on Wednesday that the city would replace light fixtures containing the toxic chemicals known as PCBs in nearly 800 city school buildings over the next 10 years, after months of pressure from federal officials and worried parents.
City education officials said they had allocated $708 million to the effort, which would also involve broad improvements in energy efficiency, and would open bidding for a contract this year. A total of 772 schools have fluorescent light fixtures that must be replaced because they contain PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, the officials said.
For months, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has been pressing the city to assess and replace older fixtures containing PCBs in all of those schools because of the danger of leaks. With so many buildings involved — nearly two-thirds of the city’s 1,200 school buildings — the Bloomberg administration balked at the cost, which it initially calculated at about $1 billion.
But advocates for environmental improvements countered that the city would recoup the investment through savings in electric bills because modern light fixtures are more energy-efficient.
The new plan immediately drew criticism from school advocates who said the problem was too urgent to be addressed over a decade.
“The work can be completed in two years if they decided to make it a priority,” said Miranda K. S. Massie, director of litigation and training with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which has represented parents in a lawsuit against the city over PCB contamination from caulk used in school buildings. “There’s no reason to subject schoolchildren to PCBs contamination for an extra eight years.”
...
City officials cast the plan as a broad effort to make school buildings more energy-efficient and save the city money in the long run. In addition to the lighting retrofits, they said, the buildings will undergo energy audits. The audits are expected to result in recommendations on how to improve each building’s overall energy efficiency through additional upgrades, including the replacement of outdated No. 4 and No. 6 fuel oil boilers when necessary, the officials said.
The 10-year period for making the improvements will be revisited in 2014 “to see if the timeline can be accelerated,” the Department of Education said.
“This is a progressive plan to increase energy efficiency at our schools and simultaneously address the issue of PCBs in old light fixtures,” the city schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, said in a statement. “Given that both the E.P.A. and the Department of Health have said there is no immediate health threat to students in these buildings, we believe this is the most responsible way to proceed.”
“This plan can be accomplished without any significant interruption to student learning, and it will generate significant energy savings in the long run,” she added.
But Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, called the plan “frustrating.” “It’s pretty clear that the mayor is kicking the can into the next administration,” he said. “The idea that they are prioritizing boilers and energy efficiency — how about prioritizing the hazardous materials first? There’s a health hazard inside the buildings. That’s the priority right now.”
How dare the evil teachers union declare the ten year timeline to remove the cancer-causing PCB's be accelerated?
Don't these evil mothers know only Bloomberg cares about kids and knows what's best for everybody.
So what if toxins are dripping from the light fixtures?
So what if some kids come down with headaches, vomiting and other illnesses in a toxic school?
What's important here is remembering that the mayor knows what's best for everybody, and right now what's best is giving him the power to override arbitration decisions on teachers.
Removing toxins from schools?
Not so important.
Firing teachers, even ones found innocent in arbitration?
Very important.
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