Accord Makes It Profitable To Hire Veteran Teachers; Salaries Had Been Drawback

Principals will be urged to consider hiring excessed Teachers, with financial savings a key incentive, after the United Federation of Teachers reached an agreement with the Department of Education to improve placement procedures for the Absent Teacher Reserve.

JOEL I. KLEIN: Kept prerogatives, may save money.

UFT President Randi Weingarten had been pushing Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein to address the growing ATR, which numbers more than 1,000 Teachers. Any tenured Teacher who cannot find a new job after his or her position is eliminated by a school closure or consolidation enters the ATR and works as a substitute on full salary.

Hirings Now Less Costly

Under the compromise, schools that hire an educator from the ATR receive two subsidies: the DOE will pay the difference between the ATR's salary and that of a starting Teacher's salary, continuing to match this difference on the steps up the salary scale for eight years; and schools will also receive an additional lump sum equal to half a new hire's salary.

ERNEST LOGAN: Should expand opportunities.

"This is a terrific agreement," said Ms. Weingarten in a statement. "These experienced and qualified people have essentially seen their careers put in a holding pattern due to student enrollment patterns or the closing of schools. They have been struggling to find permanent jobs in large part because schools have been opting for less-experienced personnel at lower salaries. By eliminating the financial obstacles, we should see more ATRs being permanently placed, which will be good for children and save the school district money."

Klein: Nothing But Upside

"This agreement is part of our very serious effort to minimize cuts to schools and classrooms during these hard economic times," said Mr. Klein. "At worst, if no additional Teachers are hired from the ATR pool, it's cost-neutral. At best, if Principals find qualified Teachers in the ATR pool to fill vacancies in their schools, it could save us millions of dollars. And, importantly, it preserves Principals' right to choose the Teachers in their schools."

RANDI WEINGARTEN: 'A terrific agreement.'

Under the agreement, ATRs can also be hired on a provisional basis by Principals, in which case there will be no subsidies until the Teacher is permanently hired. The agreement will be revised in one year by the DOE and UFT to assess whether it is benefiting schools.

Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan was less convinced that the agreement would solve the ATR problem. "People are making it sound like it's new, and that's what I'm missing," he said in a phone interview. "The only thing that's supposedly unique is that the Chancellor is going to ask [Principals] aggressively to ask people to come in for interviews."

Mr. Logan said that he had been pushing the DOE to make the ATR list, as well as the list of excessed Principals, public so that hiring would be easier. "Nobody knows who they are, because before [they] had to self-apply. If you didn't look every single day where the postings were, you would never know where to apply," he said. Part of the new agreement will make the citywide list available.

Says Most Can Do Job

He could not predict whether Principals would take on ATRs in greater numbers, but he did comment that while "some of the problem [with ATRs] has to do with the people themselves; whether they truly want to go to workplaces," he thought that "the majority of the people are satisfactory. If they were not, some people would have done some paperwork on them."

Mr. Logan applauded the decision to make ATR lists public, but said that Principals were still faced with huge budget setbacks, while at the same time being prohibited from laying off any Teachers. "My members are laying off the school aides. People in cafeterias, watching the halls, the doors, the restrooms," he said. "All this is doing, we still have this old issue of a lot of people. And we need to look at it. And you can't keep hiring people."