Occupy Wall St. on the attack on public education; & Santos Crespo asks, where's the money?

See this video from Occupy Wall St. about the attack on public education in NYC with testimony from laid-off DC37 school aide Cliftonia Johnson and investigative journalist Chris Hedges.  For more on Ms. Johnson and some of the other nearly 700 school aides who were fired this year, and who performed valuable services to our kids, see this NYT article.  The entire Occupy Wall St. session, a people's trial of Goldman Sachs, took place on Nov. 3 at Zuccotti Park, is here. 

Also, see the letter that DC37 labor leader Santos Crespo sent to Mayor Bloomberg last week below, showing how the budget cuts to education have disproportionately hit the classroom and hurt our children as well as the lowest paid school workers.


Where’s the Money Mayor Bloomberg?

            Due to the exuberant contracting out waste in the Bloomberg Administration, school budgets have been slashed and cut to the bone.  On Wednesday, November 2, 2011 the Daily News printed an article titled, “Doing less with less: Budgets and choices shrink at city schools”.

            Department of Education spokesperson Natalie Ravitz stated that “Mayor Bloomberg had actually increased the city’s spending on public schools this year by 2 billion.” REALLY Ms. Ravitz?  The over 2000 Local 372 members that have been laid off in the past few years have a question for you, WHERE’S THE MONEY?

            Did you use it to lower class sizes? NO, since 74% of elementary schools have larger classes.  Did you spend it on tutoring to better prepare our children in schools? NO, since 56% of elementary schools have reduced tutoring. Did you spend it on text books? NO. Extracurricular activities? NO. Teachers? NO. And obviously NOT to add support services to the schools since Local 372 members are always first on the chopping block.

            So where did the $2 billion increase go Mr. Mayor? Did it go to your high priced consultants and out of control contract spending?  Every day it seems the City Council and Comptroller Liu are finding crooks robbing the city to line their pockets with contracting money, which the mayor seems to condone.

            Our schools are suffering Mr. Mayor, the community is suffering and our children will be the ones that pay. This is not about balancing the books, it’s about lowering gun violence and drug abuse in our neighborhoods, it’s about making sure our high school students are academically prepared for college and it’s about making sure our children grow up to be contributing members of society.

-- Santos Crespo, Jr., President, Local 372, DC 37, AFSCME

Happy Labor Day? Not for school aides, or our kids

Happy Labor Day and welcome back to a new school year.  I hope you had a good summer and rest.  Unfortunately, the DOE has not been honoring those who work in our schools.  Instead, they are planning to lay-off nearly 800 school aides and other school-based personnel; people who help our kids every day.

The day before school begins, on Wednesday, at 4 PM in front of Tweed, we are co-sponsoring a protest against the proposed lay-offs; for more on these layoffs, see Juan Gonzalez’ column here.

This year, we also expect to return to a much diminished teaching force; with more than 3000 or more teaching positions lost and/or teachers excessed, While enrollment is still increasing, this is likely lead to the highest class sizes in eleven years  in many grades.  (See how the DOE received an “F”  in the city’s performance reports, largely because of rising class sizes.) 

Meanwhile, DOE keeps adding hundreds of positions in an unprecedented expansion of the mid-level and central bureaucracy, spending tens of  millions of dollars for highly paid educrats called “achievement coaches” , “teacher effectiveness consultants”, “talent managers” and the like, none of whom will ever directly  help a single child.  They also plan to spend more than $36 million for new local assessments,  $12 million for new teacher evaluation systems, $10 million to expand the central “innovation office” and “innovation managers,” and millions more to expand online learning -- even as school budgets are cut for the fifth year in a row.  (For more details on all this new spending, see the DOE document here.)

One of the new achievement coaches was just appointed to that post after the Special Investigator found that as principal, she had  passed 30 students who had failed their courses; this is more evidence of DOE’s deep-rooted pathology, like the way they rewarded Verizon with a $120 million contract after the company was found complicit in fraud.

The entire way this department is  run is the antithesis of Children First – instead it should be renamed Educrats First. 

Please join us in protest against the layoffs and the systematic way DOE is disinvesting in schools and the classrooms -- and further bloating the bureaucracy:

Who:   Parents, teachers, labor and community leaders including Class Size Matters, NYC Parents Union, Local 372-DC 37, UFT, CEP, GEM, the Mothers' Agenda New York, NYCORE, Teachers Unite, ICE, NY Charter Parents Association and OurSchoolsNYC.org

When:  Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 4 PM

What:  Protest & Rally Against egregious School Staff Layoffs

Where:  New York City Department of Education, 52 Chambers Street

Bring your kids! They’re the ones being deprived of a quality education; they might as well get an education in politics and protest, if nothing else.

And on Thursday, please try to count the other students in your children’s classrooms, or ask your children do that for themselves, and report back to me what the situation is at leonie@att.net.