172 More Teaching Positions Eliminated from Schools On September 8, the Buffalo Board of Education unanimously adopted the 2004-05 budget imposed on it by the Control Board. As previously outlined by the Control Board, the budget eliminates 268 more positions from the schools, including 172 teaching positions. Since 2000, roughly 800 teachers or nearly 30 percent of teachers have been eliminated from the school district. According to the School Board, 20 teacher aides and four teachers will lose jobs they hold now. The remainder of the cuts will come through not filling the positions left vacant by teachers who retired or sought jobs elsewhere, part of the mass exodus of many veteran teachers from Buffalo provoked by the Control Board’s wrecking. Statements made during the budget vote brought out just a few examples of the state of the City’s schools: physics and chemistry classes have been eliminated from Grover Cleveland High School; Spanish 4 has been eliminated from Leonardo Da Vinci High School, meaning even students who have taken three years of the language will be unable to complete the full sequence; there are more high schools than attendance teachers; and on and on. Class sizes are necessarily growing huge and even the most basic resources, like books and chairs, are ever more scarce. Even while capitulating to the Control Board’s usurping of their power, and the big lie of "no money," School Board officials again highlighted the path of ever greater wrecking being imposed. Jack Coyle, chair of the School Board finance committee, was quoted as saying, "It’s like asking which toe you want to cut off — the left one or the right one. I’ve been here nine years and we’ve done the same thing each of those nine years." Students, parents, teachers and city residents continue to call on the School Board to stand with them in defense of the rights to education and a livelihood, including demanding a freeze on debt payments. The Control Board has increased debt service payments by 250 percent, while always claiming there is no money for teachers and students. The School Board has previously shown the ability to stand up, such as when the Control Board was first imposed. School officials’ first response to the Control Board’s demands was a report putting forward the necessity for increased funding and opposing more cuts. "We need to look at how to increase revenue. We are at the bare bones in terms of programs, and we obviously don’t want to cut them any more," said Roy W. Rogers, the district’s chief operations officer at the time. The report repeatedly raised the level of debt servicing as a major drain on resources. Teachers Forum urges the Board, with its new members, to reject the wrecking of the schools and take their stand against the Control Board and for the rights of teachers and students. In related news, School Board officials said at the meeting that the offer by M&T Bank CEO and President Robert Wilmers to buy off the new school superintendent was still being considered. Wilmers, the main representative of the big financiers on the Control Board, said he would fund the search for a new superintendent and subsidize their salary. The School Board also set a September 20 meeting to take up the proposed district-wide charter school plan. The meeting will hear proposed new charter schools as well as a proposal by West District board member Ralph Hernandez to enact a three-year moratorium on district-sponsored charter schools. That meeting’s recommendations will come to the full School Board at its September 22 meeting. [TOP]
City
Workers’ and Teachers’ Contracts Buffalo’s ruling Control Board recently posted its official review of the four-year plan for the wrecking of the City of Buffalo. A centerpiece of the review is the no-negotiations dictate for the contracts for City and School District bargaining units, all of which are currently expired except that for police. The Control Board again takes aim at the teachers’ healthcare, as they have done with firefighters and City workers. They are demanding that teachers also submit to the BlueCross BlueShield (BCBS) monopolization of healthcare coverage. "The School Board needs to move expeditiously to bring its employees under a single health insurance carrier as the City recently did," the review states. Saying that "it is also time to address those onerous provisions that have made past contracts so costly," the Control Board then itemizes it demands, to be imposed like the wage-freeze without negotiations. These include eliminating: "- No-layoff clauses that limit control over workforce size; "- Lavish fringe benefits that pay teachers significant lump-sum severance packages upon retirement; "- Exorbitant health insurance plans that provide for items like cosmetic surgery; and "No-outsourcing rules that restrict the possibility of privatizing services where it can save taxpayer money." The Control Board is stepping up its efforts to blame workers, claiming they are an "exorbitant cost." At the same time the growing claims of the Wall Street financiers and healthcare monopolies like BCBS on the wealth produced by the workers are considered untouchable. What is needed is to restrict the claims of the monopolies and increase the claims of the workers and people so as to provide for their rights. [TOP] The Elimination of the Norms of Labor Relations According to recent news reports, six of the nine members of the Buffalo Common Council are sponsoring a resolution that threatens City funding to the schools unless teachers submit to giving BlueCross BlueShield (BCBS) a monopoly on their healthcare coverage. The resolution threatens the Board of Education, saying there will be no increase in funding and possible cuts to funding if teachers, like firefighters, refuse to accept the attack on their health care through implementation of the single BCBS provider plan. The Council, rather than standing to oppose Control Board dictate, including elimination of their own powers, is again acting as the Board’s mouthpiece against the workers. The resolution also highlights the active campaign of the Control Board to secure a monopoly for BCBS over all public sector workers in the region. The monopoly has already been imposed on all City employees, against the overwhelming no vote of the firefighters rejecting the scheme and without even discussing it with the Police Benevolent Association. Before that, the monopoly was extended over all Erie County workers and NFTA transit workers. All the workers are rightly concerned about BCBS securing a complete monopoly and driving smaller providers with cheaper plans out of business. The unionized workers recognize that many other workers have no healthcare and desperately need the cheaper plans. None believe the "promises" that BCBS will not utilize its monopoly position to lower coverage and drive up rates and out-of-pocket costs to the workers. This was underscored in the recent Control Board review of its four-year plan for more attacks on the schools and city. While claiming the single-provider plan is "yielding significant savings at no cost or benefit loss to any employee," it then immediately targets "exorbitant health insurance plans" as "onerous provisions" of past contracts. Under previous norms of labor relations, all parties were expected to uphold the contracts. For the teachers, school workers and administrators, the contracts were negotiated between the School Board and the unions, such as the Buffalo Teachers Federation representing the teachers. Contracts were a matter of negotiation, based on those two parties coming to the table and reaching agreement. The Council has no business interfering, much less dictating the content or the terms of those negotiations and using blackmail to secure their dictate. Neither does the Control Board. Both are making clear that contracts are no longer contracts and the law is no longer the law. The actions by the Common Council are an expression of the elimination of the post-World War II "social contract" by which labor relations had been conducted. The new arrangements taking its place are most sharply seen in the Control Board itself. The Control Board is dictating all the shots using unilateral actions, like the wage-freeze, and no negotiations. Contracts are being ripped up and unions marginalized as the Control Board not only refuses to come to the table but has basically eliminated it. The Council then backs up this wrecking with its threats. All those concerned with defending Buffalo, its unionized workforce and all its residents face the necessity of firmly opposing these new arrangements imposed by the Control Board and organizing for its elimination. [TOP] The
Government’s Notion of Preparedness Consistent with efforts by governments at all levels to get the public used to police state measures, including criminalization of the youth, on Monday, August 2, police and school officials at Hall High School in the Little Rock School District (LRSD) staged a three-hour live terrorism exercise. The exercise involved large numbers of police, using students to stage a mock shooting involving mass killing. The police exercise also involved first responders and 100 students from several different Little Rock schools that were paid $20 to participate in the drill. A sniper positioned in the woods yelled, "Get down or I’m going to kill everybody." Streets were blocked off and gunshots could be heard blocks away. Students described the drill as chaotic with a lot of people screaming. According to news sources, Sgt. Terry Hastings with the Little Rock Police Department said, "School violence is something that has been on the increase in the last few years and especially with the terrorist threats and other such things. Everybody, every law enforcement agency, every school needs to be prepared for a situation like this because it can happen." Sue Ellen Vann with the Little Rock School District says, "We just want to do everything we can to be prepared should something terrible happen on one of our campuses." According to police the drill was designed to "prepare" for the "unthinkable." Utilizing people’s concerns about the possibility of violence at schools, the exercise is being used to prepare the public, through repeated threats about terrorism and police drills, for more police violence and attacks on democracy—something many among the public consider "unthinkable." These drills also prepare school officials to join in the attacks on students, including targeting the youth as the problem and source of violence. Cases of mass shootings by youth at high schools are rare (37 since the early 1970’s in a school population on average of 50 million youth). Police violence against youth is common and increasing. The drill is part of increasing government efforts to prepare the public to accept these attacks on rights. This was evidenced at the recent conventions of the Democrats and Republicans, where everyone was subject to measures like highway and subway closures, roadblocks and pedestrian searches and mass pre-emptive arrests and detentions. [TOP] Public Seen as Threat by Government Using the 3rd anniversary of September 11 as context to build support for the broad criminalization of city residents and visitors, the Chicago Sun-Times reported last week that "Chicago will become a world leader in Big Brother technology when the city links 2,250 surveillance cameras to the 911 center to spot ‘suspicious and unusual’ behavior." The high-definition, motorized remote-controlled cameras can rotate 360 degrees and include night-vision capability. They will be mounted on buildings and utility poles across the city. The new surveillance system was initiated with a $5.1 million federal Homeland Security grant for software designed to detect "suspicious" activity. The system already includes cameras in all 600 of the city’s public schools. The government provides no definition of "suspicious behavior" but did give some examples, such as "walking in circles at an airport or downtown parking garage" or "leaving a package untended in a public place." Such descriptions could easily include a school bag left on a cafeteria table. Any such action would prompt a change in color on the video image and set off an alarm. "The software would engage any camera within range and alert a worker at the emergency operations center," AP reports. The AP goes on to say that "A series of cameras could track fleeing criminals, and 911 operators would be able to give police descriptions of suspects." In this way arbitrarily determined "suspicious" behavior becomes "fleeing criminals." The spy system is part of the government’s elimination of the norm of a crime actually being committed and that people are innocent until proven guilty. Instead everyone is made a criminal that the government can spy on and hunt down, 24/7. In developing this plan, Chicago officials studied how Las Vegas casinos monitor their gamblers and examined how the U.S. Department of Defense uses cameras during combat and to protect its facilities. They also went to London to check out its 200,000-camera surveillance system. Great Britain has more than 4 million such cameras, one for every 14 people. The average resident is viewed by 300 cameras a day. Despite the use of cameras in London, crime has gone up in the last 10 years, said Cedric Laurant of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. Reflecting the government’s drive towards a police state, Chicago Mayor Daley said the "Cameras are the equivalent of hundreds of sets of eyes…. They’re the next best thing to having police officers stationed at every potential trouble spot." Reflecting that the government considers the people a threat to its security and its move to eliminate the concept of public altogether, Mayor Daley justified the cameras by saying "We’re not inside your home or your business…. The city owns the sidewalk. We own the street and we own the alley." Government officials expect the system to be in use in early 2006. The city will install 250 cameras at locations "at high risk of a terrorist attack, link them and 2,000 existing cameras to the 911 center and expand the network with an unprecedented invitation to the private sector," the Sun-Times reported. The police department uses 30 of the existing cameras while another 1,000 are found at O’Hare International Airport. The remaining existing cameras are on elevated train platforms and the city’s 600 schools. The city will spend another $3.5 million for a facility to operate the network. Thirteen employees stationed at a soon-to-be-built operations center at the 911 facility will continuously monitor the cameras. Businesses that pay an undisclosed fee can have cameras installed outside their entrances and even inside their stairwells monitored by the 911 center. "Our members will embrace this," said Jerry Roper, president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. The cameras do not yet have facial recognition technology. Police in Tampa tried such cameras, using a mug shot database and facial recognition software to identify criminals on the street. It abandoned the effort after two years because it never identified a wanted criminal. Ron Huberman, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management said Chicago considered similar technology but rejected it as "inefficient and immature. But, he said, it’s a possibility in the future," the AP reports. [TOP] Getting the Public Used to Police State Measures Beginning August 30, 2004, police and Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) security officials will begin arbitrarily stopping and searching Chicago’s public transit trains, used daily by hundreds of thousands. The sweeps are part of national efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to train and put in place specialty teams, including K-9 dog units, for searches of public trains and passengers. The CTA is among those who are participating in and implementing DHS plans. The searches of trains and people are being done "to look for suspicious packages and passengers," news sources report. Four eight-member security teams, including K-9 dog units, target randomly selected stations, stopping every train to search every car. The average search takes three to five minutes. The definition of "suspicious" is not provided and left completely to the arbitrary judgement of the police teams. As part of preparing public opinion to accept these arbitrary police measures as a regular part of life, Commander Ed Gross, who heads the Police Department’s public transportation division, said "We use the coordinated effort to reduce delays to a very minimum." Revealing the arbitrary nature of the searches and impunity of the police to conduct them however they see fit he added, "The only time you’ll have a long delay is if we find something that doesn’t belong there." The
searches are also being connected to the "election season" and
the many repeated threats by the federal government of terrorist
attacks. These same threats were used to justify the militarization
of both Boston and New York City and continued arbitrary police
actions in both cities. For Chicago, the arbitrary searches of
trains and passengers were originally planned to last until the
Nov. 5 presidential election, but will likely continue past that
date, Gross said. "This will be part of our normal procedure
of policing the CTA," Gross said. "Random searches will
not stop." [Home] [Education Is A Right] [Teachers Forum Updates] [Upcoming Events] |
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