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发帖数: 33825 | 1 来自NYT：
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/nyregion/new-york-city-lays-o
Some of them spent the past few days scouring the wanted ads on the New York
City Department of Education’s Web site. Others made sure they learned how
to file for unemployment.
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Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Union members held a rally Friday on the steps of City Hall to denounce the
layoffs of school aides, parent coordinators, family workers and others who
work in support jobs. More than 100 who had received pink slips were spared.
Of the 777 New York City school employees who were sent pink slips two weeks
ago, 672 lost their jobs on Friday in the largest single-agency layoff
since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office in 2002.
While the city managed to avert the layoffs of thousands of teachers in June
by brokering an agreement with their union, it could not find a way to
spare the school aides, parent coordinators, family workers and others who
work in support jobs at roughly 350 schools.
In a statement, the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, said the union
representing the workers, District Council 37, had squandered its chances to
make a deal of its own last spring by rejecting a plan to give the city
access to its health care fund to balance its books.
“I am sympathetic to these workers,” Mr. Walcott said. “But in part
because other unions would not work with us to find more savings, schools
have to absorb cuts to their budgets, and from there our principals made the
best staffing decisions for their students.”
District Council 37 made three proposals to the city that included giving up
paid holidays and reducing the maximum number of hours school aides were
allowed to work as ways to save money. The city rejected all of them.
Union leaders, dressed in black as if in mourning, kept the pressure up
until the last minute, holding a lunchtime rally Friday on the steps of City
Hall to denounce the layoffs as political payback, a characterization city
officials have dismissed.
For days, the leaders had been urging elected officials to intervene on
behalf of the workers. Some of them took action. The City Council speaker,
Christine C. Quinn, spoke to Mr. Bloomberg by phone, and 17 of the Council’
s 51 members signed a letter to the mayor that said, “The constant attack
on our education system will continue to burden the most vulnerable
population of this city — our children.”
Officials at the Education Department, meanwhile, combed through the list of
layoffs, seeking to match workers to vacancies at other schools. The
process helped a small fraction of them, but with more cuts due, the relief
may be short-lived.
A letter sent to workers who were spared from layoffs after the department
placed them in other jobs read, “Please note that going forward, there may
be a second round of layoffs.”
The union has vowed to fight on. At the rally, Santos Crespo, president of
District Council 37’s Local 372, which counts most of the laid-off workers
among its members, said, “We are going to continue this fight until they’
re all brought back.”
But Mr. Walcott has said he will not reverse decisions made by principals,
who cut some of the workers while trimming their budgets.
The laid-off workers are among the city’s lowest paid. School aides make $
14 an hour for four to eight hours of work a day, while parent coordinators
and family workers are salaried employees whose pay is about $35,000 a year,
according to union representatives.
This week, the Bloomberg administration asked agencies to cut 2 percent from
their budgets for the current fiscal year, then 6 percent from the budgets
for next year.
The Council has called a hearing on Tuesday to ask officials if dismissing
the workers could have been avoided had the Education Department chosen to
cut other expenses. Henry Garrido, an associate director at District Council
37, said at the rally that the department’s contracts budget had increased
by $700 million last year, climbing to $4.4 billion in the school year that
began last month.
Council members will also examine the disproportionate impact the layoffs
will have on poor students and struggling schools, including 19 that are
receiving millions of dollars in federal financing to improve their academic
performance.
Councilwoman Letitia James, who represents an area that includes a school
district that will lose roughly 15 percent of its school aides and other
support staff, said at the City Hall rally, “The fact is that the decision
this administration is making” will magnify inequalities.
School aides have been a recurrent target of layoffs. In the 2008-9 school
year, 503 lost their jobs. Last year, an infusion of federal dollars averted
layoffs, but some 410 aides were laid off on Friday. The other cuts include
82 family workers, whose role includes helping students resolve attendance
issues, and 66 parent coordinators, who serve as liaisons between families
and school administrators.
Most of the coordinators who lost their jobs were assigned to high schools,
which, unlike elementary and middle schools, are not required to have them
on staff.
Sungmi Kang, 47, is one of them. She had worked at Stuyvesant High School in
Lower Manhattan until Friday, translating materials from English into
Korean for immigrants whose children attend school there. Another, Regina
Dudley, had been employed by the High School for Global Citizenship in
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, since 2003.
“When I’m on lunch, if I see kids in the street, I want to know why they’
re there,” Ms. Dudley said. “I call parents to find out why children don’
t come to school.”
City teachers who are laid off are required by contract to be placed in a
reserve pool and reassigned. This year, for example, teachers in reserve
will be assigned as short-term substitutes, working on a weekly rotation in
different schools under a plan that education officials said would save $40
million.
But there is no holding place for school support workers, who must leave the
system if no school will employ them.
The teachers’ union broke its silence on the layoffs on Friday, when its
secretary, Michael Mendel, joined the lunchtime rally and said: “If it
takes a village to raise a child, then these people are certainly part of
that village. And no one is going to convince me that they couldn’t find
the money to save them.”
Anna M. Phillips contributed reporting. |
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