To help children focus, the Positive Learning Collaborative—a joint UFT/DOE program—provides sensory tool kits to more than 16,000 public school classrooms.

The New York State Education Department requires all teachers who are seeking initial or permanent state certification to take this workshop. School staffers learn techniques and practical approaches to avoid and defuse violent situations in school.

The UFT traveled to IS 145 in Queens on Sept. 4 to celebrate the school's achievement in bringing all 6th-grade classrooms into compliance with the state class size law limits. This year, 6th-grade classes will have a limit of 23 students, down from...

Leading with the positive, focusing on a student's specific goals and having parents be assured that an educator has a plan to further their child's needs are among the best ways to have more effective parent-teacher conferences.

UFT members hit the phone lines and fanned out from New York City to Philadelphia and Scranton, Pennsylvania, this fall to campaign for Kamala Harris for president, as well as other pro-union, pro-education candidates down the ballot on Nov. 5.


New parents—including by birth, adoption and foster care—who are DOE employees in titles represented by the UFT are eligible to apply for Parental Leave, and meet the following criteria: You are a full-time employee OR an H-bank/non-pedagogical...

As a hearing officer for the city's Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, Aubrey Lee adjudicates cases involving summonses issued by the city’s regulatory agencies. "I can’t imagine what this job would be like without a union," she says.

With New York City facing a chronic shortage of bilingual special education teachers, the UFT was able to negotiate a new incentive program to encourage tenured special education teachers with a bilingual extension to combine those two specialties.

UFT Welfare Fund members, both in-service and retired, and their families now have special access to Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) thanks to a new partnership between the UFT Welfare Fund and the hospital.

The school-based special education committee — created as part of the 2023 DOE-UFT contract — gave Naing the tool she needed to fight to ensure special education students in her school receive the services they are entitled to.