Activist educators meet

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About 35 teachers met at An Beal Bocht earlier this month to discuss an underdog candidate to replace the leader of the United Federation of Teachers.

Nate Schiavo, a social studies teacher and UFT chapter leader at the Milton Fein School (P.S. 7), said he organized the April 15 event to show other educators that longtime incumbent Michael Mulgrew is not the only choice in the upcoming union vote.

Mr. Schiavo is a member of the Movement of Rank-and- File Educators, or MORE, an activist branch of the UFT that has spent the past several years grappling with Mr. Mulgrew and his Unity Caucus.

Mr. Schiavo said the Unity Caucus has failed the roughly 200,000 teachers and educational staff who are in the UFT.

“You go to these meetings downtown and the people in the crowd are classroom teachers,” he said. “But the people on the stage, the one’s making the decisions, they haven’t taught in years.”

MORE has nominated Jia Lee, a special educator teacher. at the Earth School in Manhattan. On April 13, Mr. Schiavo made a pitch on her behalf to teachers from schools including the Spuyten Duyvil School (P.S. 24) and the Robert J. Christen School (P.S. 81).

“For starters, she is a woman, which, in a field that is dominated by women, I don’t see why a man is better for this job than a woman,” he said. “She is a calm and experienced teacher, Mr. Mulgrew is flashy, he’s loud but he doesn’t represent us.”

Mr. Schiavo cited a litany of complaints with the way the Unity Caucus has run the UFT.

“After being chapter leader for some time, I realized that the mechanisms of the Unity Caucus, which now I was all of the sudden a part of, were strange at best. They send you to chapter leader trainings, they put you in a nice hotel, so we get a couple of those every year,” Mr. Schiavo said in an interview after the event. “It all seems like it’s on the up and up, but then once in a while things come up, like for example this election is coming up in a couple of weeks, and to this day no one has dropped off a single piece of literature at my school.”

Mr. Mulgrew and the Unity Caucus declined to comment for this article. Dick Riley, a spokesman for the UFT sent a brief statement saying, “the U.F.T. is a democracy.

Mr. Schiavo planned to carry his message to educators at other locals schools, including at the John F. Kennedy campus, after the An Beal Bocht event.

UFT members will vote for their president in a mail ballot starting Thursday, May 5.

Nate Schiavo, PS 7, UFT, Anthony Capote

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