On June 30, Yonkers Public Schools officials made an announcement that many parents, students, and teachers were breathlessly anticipating, but that perplexed many.
An official announcement was made that city officials miraculously found some of the funds that were and are desperately needed to keep Yonkers Public Schools from having over 700 lay-offs for the 2011-2012 academic year. A resolution was passed that rescinded 367 of the lay-offs, including 17 administration positions and 350 Civil Service employees.
Although the positions that were saved are incredibly important to the running of the Yonkers Public Schools, one might wonder why no teacher positions were salvaged. With the recovered funding, part of which is being collected from Yonkers Raceway/Empire City, no teacher positions were reinstated; not even those in the area of the desperately needed special education positions. The reason no teacher positions were recovered was due to negotiations, or lack thereof, between Yonkers Federation of Teachers and the Board of Education. The YFT voted down a one-year pay freeze in June, which at the time gave no guarantee of reinstating teaching positions. At the time of the vote, the Yonkers Board of Education “could not commit” to any number of jobs that the freeze could preserve, and only later announced that it would have saved 240 teaching positions, roughly two-thirds of the total teacher lay-offs.
However, it seems that the Yonkers Public School system is up to their old tricks, once again. A contributing factor to the reasons why the Yonkers Federation of Teachers voted down the pay freeze is because they are still waiting to be paid from an arbitration that they won entitling them to a step raise which was previously denied unlawfully. Due to the fact that the step was withheld two years ago and that despite the arbitration being decided in the YFT’s favor, the funds still have not been paid, the YFT shrewdly refused to strike another deal with the Yonkers Public School System and Mayor Phil Amicone.
Many of the teachers in the Yonkers Public Schools system are well aware of these bait and switch tactics. Many of the most hard working and talented teachers in Yonkers have too many times been laid-off in June and hired back in September after sorely needed funding is somehow "found". Yet, teachers receiving the run around annually will put up with these antics time and time again because a job in Yonkers is better than no job at all. It is no secret that the teaching market is highly over saturated both in the Westchester and Tri-State area.
Visit the Yonkers Federation of Teachers website http://www.yftonline.org/
Visit the Yonkers Public Schools website http://www.yonkerspublicschools.org/
Contact the Westchester Education News Examiner at WestchesterEdExaminer@gmail.com
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