Unity Never Learns

When December 23rd falls on a Monday, schools should close. But Unity, totally focused on their patronage gigs, can't be bothered worrying about those of us who work and study.

Unity is now, finally, making a little noise about battling over attendance on December 23rd, 2024. The problem is they should have known about this over a year ago (and I’ll get back to that).

A reflective 7th grader started a petition to keep schools closed that date. You see, it falls on a Monday. This means schools would open up for the one day, and ruin the week for families who might leave town, take a vacation or just relax.

You should sign the petition. I did. It’s a good cause. There is a long history of the city closing on December 23rd when it comes on a Monday. But guess who negotiated a contract, including several years of school calendars, back in the 2022-2023 school year? That’s right, it was our good friends over at the UFT Unity Patronage Cult. They were quite proud of this achievement:

So let’s see—they’ve had the calendars for well over a year, and they just noticed it now, when a smart seventh grader decided to protest. Call me madcap, but it seems to me that UFT President Michael Mulgrew and his army of Unity Sycophants ought to notice these things first.

Maybe they should, you know, check the calendars upon which they agree. Instead, they make the same mistakes they failed to learn from in the past, hope for the best, and do nothing until a student notices their blunder.

Here’s a novel idea from me, a lowly retired teacher who’s never been a member of the Unity Caucus—you write into the contract that, if December 23rd occurs on a Monday, schools will close. Mulgrew and his Unity ducklings are ever so proud of the contracts they create. You’d think they’d learn from their past mistakes.

When was the last time this happened? Well it was in 2019. The late James Eterno wrote about it on the ICE Blog, and garnered 37 comments. Predictably, teachers were just as unhappy as the seventh grader who took it upon himself to write the petition.

2019 was eventually worked out. However, the lesson you take from it is to not let it happen again. If DOE and UFT agreed upon the school calendars over a year ago, it means Mulgrew’s Very Smart People had not learned from 2019. (This is not atypical. After they made terrible health deals in 2014, they compounded them in 2018.)

Unity wants to fix this and be big heroes. However, if they had learned from their past mistake, they wouldn’t need to fix it at all. If they had written into the contract that December 23rd, should it fall on a Monday, would not be a school day, there would be nothing to fix.

Unity screwed up. Again. Chronic screw ups aren’t heroes.

I understand mistakes. But we need to learn from them. Now, in fairness, we’ve made repeated mistakes too, and we aren’t heroes either. Over and over, we voted for the Unity Caucus as our leadership.

Let’s never make that mistake again.