UFT President Michael Mulgrew reminded the Delegate Assembly on March 20 that the new citywide safety standards called for in the DOE-UFT contract are in effect and he urged chapter leaders who hadn’t gotten the necessary training to do so as soon as possible.

The UFT unveiled its new app a year ago. With UFT-Mobile, members can handle much of their union business, from registering for CTLE classes to checking what the DOE-UFT contract says on key topics to calling a union office or Welfare Fund program.

A substantial increase in state funding for New York City public schools topped the agenda for the more than a thousand UFT members and public school parents who traveled to Albany on March 18 to meet with their state representatives for the UFT’s annual Lobby Day.

About 100 musicians in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have traded their instruments for picket signs, striking to demand a contract that protects their pension plan and provides fair wages.

The UFT began an expedited process of contract arbitration to resolve oversize classes in five chronically overcrowded high schools as the class-size reduction provisions in the new DOE-UFT contract took effect.

Charter school teachers and paraprofessionals in Chicago ended their two-week strike on Feb. 18 after the Chicago International Charter School network promised to increase their salaries to the same level as educators in traditional public schools — a raise of nearly 35 percent over the term of the contract.