photo credit: NYCforyourself
This month marks two years since hundreds of New York City educators and many other workers like firefighters and EMT were arbitrarily terminated for refusing to bow to the Health Commissioner and Mayor’s coercion and take a Covid19 shot. I am one of them. In the six months leading up to our improper termination, we were bullied, insulted, and defamed by people everywhere, canceled by neighbors, kicked out of restaurants, insulted by reporters. Every day of fall 2021 until he left City Hall, former Mayor Bill De Blasio said we were stupid and that we “spread more disease.”
Eventually almost none of what we were told about Covid vaccines and Covid in general turned out to be true. This has been more and more accepted even among those who used to say we deserved to lose everything because we wouldn’t take a Covid vaccine. The ones who bullied us most have moved on, don’t talk about it, and hope no one remembers all of their tweets and everything they said.
This past February 8th, many of us unvaccinated City workers were on the steps of City Hall to remind (most of) the City Council and the Mayor of their grave policy error and the fact that none of us has received an apology, our backpay, nor our jobs back–even though the vaccine mandate was ended back in 2023. Workers like me were there with the Common Sense Caucus of the Council by our side, to urge New Yorkers to support City Council Resolution S7466A, which would create a New York State law reinstating all unvaccinated City workers with our backpay. I urge all reading this to encourage your representatives at the City and State levels to support S7466A.
You can learn a lot from observing how leaders act when they have made a mistake, especially one as grave as mass firing veteran, experienced educators during a time that students had a high need of, well, veteran, experienced educators. Do the leaders admit they messed up? Do they commit to making things right for the people wronged?
Or do they avoid the subject of their mistake (Mayor Adams), stop virtually all public interaction and hide in their office and only do “Zoom” meetings (Commissioner Vasan), or do they double down on doing sensitivity training targeted to improving the behavior of everyone but themselves (Chancellor Banks)?
Born and raised in Woodside, Bayside and Corona, I came from humble roots. There were many things I wish I had learned and didn’t. But I was taught to be kind, and I was taught that greed and vanity were sins. I never in my life thought I would see my career knee-capped after a decade and a half of service to this City by leaders obsessed with cost cutting, with being mean and greedy, and that their vanity would keep them from doing the right thing even now, two years after the vaccine mandate firings further destroyed our troubled public school system. The right thing being to stop preventing unvaccinated workers from coming back to work.
As an unvaccinated (and tenured) educator, I have spent the past two years observing these three and the post-vaccine mandate damage to our public schools. And so I feel confident in saying that these three and too many other councilmembers, school leaders and others, instead of remaining at the scene of the vaccine mandate carnage, have acted like impaired drivers leaving the scene of the crash they themselves caused.
What carnage, you ask? It’s been two years. People got hurt, but it’s over right?
No, it is not. We workers wish that were true, but it isn’t. The damage to our lives continues, and the vaccine mandate has hurt not only us but the students in a few key ways:
Whether our leadership was being intentional or just careless, the vaccine mandate firings reduced diversity in the schools: a majority of those of us fired are over 40 and female, so in removing us from the schools, your children have been deprived of additional perspectives, additional teaching approaches, experience that comes from older workers, and now have fewer female role models. By removing hundreds of educators whose beliefs differed from the crowd, Chancellor Banks (and Meisha Porter before him) reduced the true diversity that benefits the students–diversity of thought.
In fall of 2021, at the same time that I was being told I couldn’t enter my school without a Covid shot, Teamsters President Gregory Floyd, who represents the school safety agents, said that the combination of “defund the police” cuts and the vaccine mandate have “spelled a dramatic drop in personnel — 1,200 agents who retired weren’t replaced and 600 more are not at work because they refused to get the COVID shot.” An arbitrary mandate to take a shot led to your kids having only 3,700 school safety agents, instead of 5,500. In the months following, injuries from fights have increased wildly. There have been fatal stabbings in our schools, and fatal shootings since unvaccinated safety officers were forced out. According to Floyd, in 2022-23, three students died and 18 more were injured. More students had knives or blades confiscated in 2023 than in the previous year. No one in NYC Schools has explained why it was “better” for children to be injured by knives or guns than it was to get Covid19.
Then there’s Dr. Ashwin Vasan, who in March 2022 claimed he wanted to work to end NYC’s “epidemic of loneliness.” He said this with a straight face all that year despite his role in creating that loneliness. You’ll notice he barely makes public appearances since the mandate.
Chancellor Banks and Mayor Adams are spending an ever larger portion of funds that should be spent on students to appeal victorious lawsuits of educators who are fighting our terminations. New Yorkers need to realize that money the City spends on fighting these lawsuits is money diverted from kids’ education. When I was last in court in November, the DOE sent not one attorney, but about eight into the courtroom. The education budget is not finite, attorneys make a few hundred an hour, and there are thousands of cases being litigated by unvaccinated and vaccinated teachers who are fighting to return to work and get our back pay. That Chancellor Banks is prioritizing appeals instead of education should make parents furious.
We terminated unvaccinated educators go through difficult days over what our City did to us, but so do teachers and counselors who complied and are still in schools. I know many who say the vaccine mandate coercion, and all the bullying related to it, has made them resent the DOE and soured the school environment. For some, the joy they used to feel is gone. There is no way these feelings brought into the schools are not affecting the students.
Data indicate that our children are being affected. Chalkbeat had reported in September 2023 that chronic absenteeism in NYC public school students is at 36 percent. That is an emergency. If Covid era policies are “over” and everyone is supposedly “moved on,” why are 36% of our City’s kids missing 15 or more days of school a year? Major studies are reporting our kids are two years behind in reading and math because of Covid era school disruptions, with the NY Times calling the learning loss “devastating.”* Kids self report anxiety.* The Committee on Special Education cannot keep up with all the parent requests for special education services. You’d think these “leaders” would care more about fixing these problems, instead of fighting to keep experienced teachers and counselors from returning to the school system that needs us.
Chancellor Banks, Mayor Adams, and the rest are inexplicably continuing to retaliate against unvaccinated educators by keeping a “problem code” on our files that they put there (or allowed to be put there) two years ago. There can be no justification for the DOE continuing to meddle in the professional credentials of unvaccinated workers. It is harassment and bullying and nothing more. Chancellor Banks still has not responded to a letter from several legislators demanding answers about these problem codes. That he continues to smear our work records behind the scenes, thereby costing us job opportunities when potential employers see these problem codes, even now when we are not presently in the school buildings is harassment and defamation.
Banks subjected us to a campaign of social isolation by refusing to let us work, while at the same time saying he was going to implement programs to decrease social isolation for students. That he is unresponsive to the needs and concerns of NYC parents, whether the issue is bullying, or remote learning, or snow days is no surprise to the unvaccinated workers he threw away.
That neither Banks nor the many well-paid superintendents and administrators of the DOE can see the irony in their recent, Respect For All Week (Feb 12 to 16), their “system-wide response to bullying and harassment” and “to keeping our schools safe, supportive, and free from discrimination” is yet more evidence of how little expertise they have in matters of social-emotional well-being. Banks, Adams and the rest all spent the past 2 ½ years modeling the worst behavior for our children–disrespect, bullying, and discrimination–yet for a week they anointed themselves the moral authority on how not to bully people.
I’ve had two years to watch Banks say nothing while the press and politicians slandered his tenured employees like me for not taking a Covid vaccine, and the mayor said we “spread disease” and should be “denied hospital care.” Banks stayed silent (that is called being a bystander to bullying, which is as bad as being the bully yourself).
Despite all the new-fangled approaches to social-emotional learning, there are still a few key indicators of good character in this world that everyone agrees on. One of them is, when you make a mistake, apologize. Then commit to fixing it. Banks, Adams, and Vasan have a lot to atone for, but they must take steps to repair the damage done to the NYC workforce, and more importantly to NYC’s students. Apologies, the return of our 116 weeks of wages owed, and a commitment to return us to classrooms is what is needed now, not “new initiatives,” fake anti-bullying events, and bluster. If you don’t fix what you broke, no one can heal and the school will continue to get worse. Real leaders put the needs of City children ahead of their egos and their careers.
*https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/24/us/math-reading-scores-pandemic.html published October 2022.
*https://theticker.org/13230/opinions/beyond-advisories-nyc-urgently-needs-youth-mental-health-services/ published February 13 2024
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