Coincidence or ironic that this is a vacation week for me? So while I am weeding and harvesting, or canning or catching up with friends and family, I have ample time to hear about what some want to do to our future. Cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. It bugs me how all the cuts seem […]

It was a sweltering Sunday as hundreds of minor league baseball fans gathered in Troy’s Joseph Bruno Stadium to see their Tri- City Valley Cats — sporting pink jerseys — take on the Staten Island Yankees in a game to benefit the Capital Region Action Against Breast Cancer (CRAAB). NYSUT, a longtime flagship sponsor of the American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer fundraising walks, was a proud sponsor of this NY-Penn League game.

NYSUT’s first Tweetup or Twitter town hall had locals sharing about how they use social media. We’ve got a summary, tips and a full archive of the discussion.

LAPers have already had a week’s worth of info packed into sessions, or so it seems to me. Today features communications and its various forms. How do unions get messages out to their members? to parents? to their communities? One of the questions Bryan Thomas and I will be talking about will be social media. […]

It is day 3 for some NYSUT LAPers, day 2 for most.  Today is all about political action and so fortuitous that so much is going on. Lawmakers will have to return for session to act on public employees’ contracts. So let’s make this worthwhile. Tell your lawmaker to extend the millionaire’s tax. Remind them […]

It’s Monday and the second-year and third-year locals join the Local Action Project folks working away in Saratoga. LAP, started in 1994, brings together teams to exchange ideas on political action, community outreach and union activism. Just like kindergarten or homeroom, there’s show and tell. Today the Rochester TA, Alexandria Central TA, Buffalo Educational Support […]

Toni Cortese,  a well-known and respected leader in both NYSUT and the AFT for four decades, is retiring Sept. 8. A former teacher, she was a founding officer of NYSUT and many, many members and staff remember her for her hands-on approach. She became an expert on education issues. She is heralded for her “fierce […]

Jon Richard Flemming, an essential member of NYSUT’s Communications team for decades, died July 13, 2011 at St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany after a valiant battle with a long illness. He will be remembered as an experienced labor photographer and designer, and as a family man whose deep devotion to his wife, Anne, and their four children was apparent to all who knew him.

Happy Sunday. So it’s 1 p.m. on Sunday July 17 and teams of NYSUT locals are arriving for a week of work in the Local Action Project. Today is just for the newbies to the program. They are Altmar-Parish-Williamstown Faculty Association/Pulaski Teachers Association, the Amsterdam TA, Chatham Central School TA, Indian River Education Association, Sayville […]

Something is really wrong when a group called the American Center for Voting Rights is a group that campaigns to make it harder for Americans to vote or a group called the Americans for American Energy campaigns for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and accuses those who bring up environmental concerns as […]