Blog of the Day: My Kingdom for a Parking Space

For those who follow the adventures of Have a Gneiss Day, this blog is a real treat. I found It's Not All Flowers and Sausages through Gotham Schools. Get the scoop on what really goes on in schools. Here, we get the real scoop on the impact of the parking permit amidst the other trials that go along with teaching. Some commenters tell her to go to the union, not realizing it was the union that sealed the parking deal.

Sometimes it feels as if the forces in the universe are alligning to make this job as difficult as possible, just to see if I have the balls to stick with it. Other times, it feels as if teachers (as people) are the absolute last priority on everyone's list...that we will just suck it up and deal with ridiculous situations "for the kids."


If one more person tells me to do it "for the kids", I might throw a kid at them. Seriously. Stop playing on our good intentions and altruistic dedication to the future and treat us like the professionals you so desperately claim you want us to be. It just seems at times as if this job teeters on the brink of being inhumane.

More at It's Not all Flowers and Sausages

And if they can't agree on parking?

Chapter leaders and principals to assign parking placards: The UFT reached an agreement with the city on Aug. 26 that preserves all on-street and off-street parking spots for schools, but limits the number of permits available to a school to the number of available spots designated for parking by DOE personnel. In each school, the chapter leader and principal must agree on how those placards will be used. The story and the agreement are at uft.org. If you as chapter leader have any questions, please contact your district rep.- UFT Weekly Update

Hmmm. Let's see how this works. My principal and I don't agree. So I call my District Rep. Three days later I still haven't received a response. The principal has given out all the permits. Now I read somewhere that when there's a dispute, the issue is taken to the UFT president. Isn't she somewhere racing around the country for the presidential election? No, I forgot. Hillary didn't make it so she has a lot more time to drop everything and deal with my parking issue. I'm still waiting.

In the meantime, I am all of a sudden being observed every half hour and getting U ratings even though I have a perfect record for 15 years. Ok, I'll grieve. Ooops! I forgot. I can't grieve letters in my file. I call the district rep. After a week, he calls me back. "Keep a careful log." After 3 months and 40 U observations, I call him back. "Not enough yet. Keep logging. Maybe we'll file a harassment grievance at the end of the year."

I'm in the rubber room though I don't know why. Rumor is that I verbally abused a kid for telling him he's a bad boy for not doing his homework. I call the District rep. "Don't worry, after all you're getting paid. Sit back and relax and enjoy. It's out of our hands now but you'll have a NYSUT attorney."

If you are having these problems, download Park Anywhere.

Park Anywhere - E. Pluribus Bloomum

Download, print and place in windshield. Tweed guarantees this pass with the same level of assurance as graduation rates.

Click on photo to enlarge.
Based on a collaboration between ed notes and David B, who did the all the photoshopping work. Sort of like the collaboration between the UFT and Tweed.

Parking Rule Comments - Will UFT Staffers get Priority?

From random comments on ICE-mail. Note the assumption that union bigwigs will get priority passes. Now one wouldn't necessarily object if they didn't misuse their positions to attack critics. But they do.

The city will issue at least 1,000 additional placards for those who work in more than one school. I wonder how many of the 1000 placards will go to Unity people visiting schools as district reps or itinerants?
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I'm sure my district rep, who came to my school today, will get one. He told us what a good job the union did by not allowing the city to cut the number of parking spaces. He explained that Bloomberg did it as retaliation against the union (probably true). He also told our excessed paras that they had nothing to worry about. He explained that paras and teachers enjoy being excessed because they can just sit around the school having fun.
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Many Unity people who are out of the classroom, used the uft positions to escape. They have no idea that so many of us entered this profession to teach, to be in the classroom, to develop relationships with kids, to have an impact on their lives, and we are pretty proud of the work we do despite the odds. That is why out of classroom Unity people don't care about parking placards, letters to file, autocratic principals and the rubber room. If they were effected, there would be one helluva fightback and no spin.

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It seems to me that parking permits will be divvied up according to the pecking order in the school. Teachers in the click will get them. The principals spies will get them. Unity collaborators will get them. The hard working staff who earn their pay every day will have to park down the street and have to move their cars for alternate side. I'm sure BloomKlein will issue a regulation prohibiting teachers from leaving the school in-order to move their car for alternate side. This stupid rule will not cut down on green house gasses or encourage teachers to use mass transit. Except for teachers in certain parts of Manhattan all this dumb regulation will do is force teachers to park down the street from their schools and increase parking fines. This is nothing more that a punishment against teachers. I propose that Chancellor Klein
should be made to give up his park anywhere parking permit as an example to everyone.

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A resolution needs to be issued by ICE calling on Randi to give up her "park anywhere" DOT parking permit as a show of solidarity with teachers who are loosing theirs.


Ed Note: Randi and Joel don't need permits - their chauffers just wait in the car. And do you think they have to worry about paying a parking ticket?

Parking permits for teachers reduced by 82%

....63,000 to 11,000 this year, the largest amount in the city by far.

UPDATE:
From NY 1: Weingarten said she's relieved the number of available spots is staying the same. "I'm actually surprised at Ed for talking about it that way," said Weingarten. "Ultimately what has happened here is there are 25,000 parking spots right now in the city of New York for school teachers and as of next week there will still be 25,000 parking spots for school teachers."

Weingarten's numbers don't match - and we need MORE spaces, not less.

The ICE blog has a post with a letter showing the extent of the UFT sell-out. Why did they drop the grievance when this is clearly a reduction in working conditions?

Will the UFT and DOE solidify it's collaboration on merit pay to teachers whose kids score high by giving those teachers preferences for the permits?

We once had a teacher who on the first day had her car stolen. Someone at a school she had been at saw the car go by with someone driving it. She quit the next day.

This is a real hit in working conditions for many. For teachers, especially in elementary schools who do a lot of schlepping from far away, this is a major hit. If I had to take public transportation, my trip would have taken an hour and a half instead of 35 minutes.

And how about the high crime areas? I can't count the number of batteries, radios, broken windows, one alternator, a distributor cap with wires, that I lost right down the block from the school. There's nothing like trying to teach while worrying whether you will lose part of your day's pay for a ticket or worse, have no car left.

Every school seems to be short of spots. Watch the promises to get more go up in smoke. At PS 84K there was a major shortage of spots and the administration and UFT rep worked very hard to free up a few more spots from the dreaded alternate side rules - why not clean before or after school? We finally won a few but some months later the signs were changed back. Let's say the bureaucracy at the Dept of Transportation was not exactly cooperative, if not outright disdainful of teacher parking problems.

But it's not punitive that teachers took the biggest hit by far said a Bloomberg spokesperson who was just thrilled with the way the UFT collaborated :

the teachers union has been "very reasonable...a pleasure to work with" on the placard issue. Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, had been prepared to go to court to block the reductions but said she was relieved that the number of spots remains the same. It's simply fewer placards. "This was at least a rational way of dealing with this," Weingarten said. The principals and a UFT rep at each school will determine who gets the placards. - Daily News.

More stories in the NYPost, NY Times.