Will The UFT Do Anything About Friday's Mandatory PD Day?

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott have decreed teachers must come to school tomorrow to "prepare" their classrooms.

Many teachers live in areas still devastated by the floods.

Many have suffered destruction from the storm and lost homes, cars and other possessions.

Some are still stuck in the flood waters in Hoboken.

Many are still without power and water.

Those who live in NJ have no way in to the city and may have to swim the Hudson to get there.

Many who live on Long Island and Connecticut have limited ways into the city, but travel time may be as much as four hours each way.

Those who live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan will have to take shuttle buses over the East River crossings and navigate Manhattan gridlock for hours to get to work.

Governor Cuomo has decreed Friday a "travel emergency day," and cars cannot come into the city with less than three passengers.

Nonetheless the NYCDOE and the man who owns, er, runs the department have decided that nothing is more important than getting teachers and staff into work tomorrow to "prepare" their classrooms for Monday.

The rationale for this absurd decision is that students have never been out of school so long and teachers will have to work really hard to get them back up to speed.

This too is absurd.

We have three long vacations a school year - Winter, February and Spring - and teachers are never brought back the last day of the vacation for students to prepare their classrooms.

So really, the reason behind the mayor's decree that teachers need to come back to work tomorrow, even if they work in a school building damaged by the storm or without power, is to show how much control he has over city employees, how much he values putting the peons to work (even if there really is no way any productive work gets done, given the circumstances), and how little he values teachers.

Now to the question of the moment - where is the UFT on this?

Their page remains down due to the power outage downtown, their Facebook page merely updates teachers that they are expected to work tomorrow and will receive additional information from the DOE about where they are to report, and UFT President Michael Mulgrew remains MIA.

Currently there are 94 comments on the UFT Facebook page, the overwhelming majority of those comments are negative toward both the DOE decision to bring teachers in tomorrow/penalize those who don't come in and the union's lack of response to the mayor's decision.

I called the UFT office in one of the outer boroughs (the Manhattan office is, like everybody else downtown, without power) and somebody told me there that the UFT is aware of the situation, aware of how angry many teachers are about this, and Mulgrew is working on this.

All I can say is, he had better.

This is a bread and butter issue, like snow removal for the mayor.

Many teachers may not get upset with the union's inability to get teacher evaluations right or refusal to fight the Danielson rubric nonsense.

Some may even agree with the UFT's handling of these issues.

But when it comes to the DOE's forcing teachers into school when travel into the city is still precarious (or non-existent), when many teachers are still dealing with the aftermath of the storm or are without power, water or a car to drive in to work, most teachers seem to agree that the UFT ought to be doing something about it.

I know it's not good to assume anything when it comes to the UFT leadership, but I have to assume that even Mulgrew and the geniuses around him understand that if they don't push back on this and at least make it look like they're fighting the mayor on it, they take a heavy hit from the membership.

Let's see if they really do something about this or if they're simply, as usual, blowing steam.

More later.