Hundreds and, possibly, thousands of your NYSUT brothers and sisters are lobbying their lawmakers in their home district offices. Above are photos from a group of southern tier activists who met with Assemblyman Chris Friend, R-Big Flats yesterday. Bonnie Strope teaches second grade in Odessa-Montour schools. She spoke against high-stakes standardized tests for students in kindergarten, [...]

This will be one tough week for New York’s third-through-eighth-graders. Here’s a link to a New York Times article that sums up the test anxiety, with several heart-breaking examples. That news article, like others, gives short shrift to the issue that students should not be tested on what they have not been taught. It quotes [...]

Today is the third anniversary of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster that killed 29 coal workers in West Virginia. That tragedy resonates with many of us still. Here’s Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, talking about the mine disaster at a NYSUT Representative Assembly barely one month later. What resonates [...]

There is still haggling to do over the state budget. This Albany Times Union editorial points out a number of problems. Lots of voices are urging lawmakers to take care of their issues. Keep up your good work. Go to NYSUT’s Member Action Center. Tell your lawmaker to fund K-12 schools, colleges and universities, save [...]

With a bone cutter or saw. The process is not pretty, my medical friends tell me. Skeleton schools were the image Elmira schools Superintendent Joe Hochreiter used last year to describe the cuts in that small city district. Well, Elmira is facing more cuts this year, according to this article from the Elmira Star-Gazette. As [...]

If you haven’t contacted your lawmakers in the Assembly or the Senate yet on the state budget, there’s no longer any time to delay. Here’s a link to a Times Union post Thursday about how pieces were starting to fall into place. School boards and administrators are putting next year’s budgets together and the news [...]

There’s a march today from 11:45 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., at the Washington Avenue entrance of the Capitol for the 1.5 million working class New Yorkers who are thwarted from  making ends meet because they earn minimum wage. The ongoing movement to get the minimum wage increased has involved cadres of people busing to Albany, [...]

It’s encouraging that lawmakers are getting the message and restoring many of the cuts proposed in the executive budget proposal in their one-house budgets. That is, except for preschool special education, also known as 4401 programs. Lack of funding has caused the closure of most of the 4410 programs that were run by BOCES across [...]

Danielle Chase and Diane Cornell, officers of The Resource Center United Employees Association, delivered 60 hand-written letters from adults they work with to Sen. Cathy Young of Olean yesterday. They also delivered a handful of letters from union members asking lawmakers to restore $120 million to New Yorkers with disabilities in private, non-profit agencies. Gov. Cuomo [...]

Updated with photos at 4:48 p.m. When Diane Cornell and Danielle Chase first made plans to travel to Albany all the way from Jamestown, their mission was to plead with lawmakers to restore funds cut in the proposed budget of the Office of People with Developmental Disabilities. The executive budget proposal cut $120 million from [...]