A team of teachers, speech therapists, occupational therapists and other related service providers create an environment where students with autism and general education students can learn in their 5th-grade Nest classroom at PS 682 in Brooklyn.


UFT President Michael Mulgrew is calling on the city to fill vacant school-related professional positions in order to fulfill the special education requirements of at least 9,000 students across the city.

Thanks to a three-year effort by audiologists and their union, public school students now have access to hearing loss assessment in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and at two locations in Brooklyn. 


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.

The UFT has asked the State Education Department to investigate the city Department of Education for its continued failure to provide mandated special education services to students.

More than a hundred 3- and 4-year-olds with disabilities at the Mosaic Pre-K Centers in Queens will now receive the related services they need to thrive, the culmination of a two-year organizing effort by the union and the broader school community.


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.

New special education teacher Emily Hang Duong, who teaches math and science at IS 234 in Brooklyn, motivates her students by never letting them forget that they have every opportunity to grow.

Integrated co-teaching (ICT) classes are taught by two teachers — a general education or content-area teacher and a special education teacher. A co-teaching relationship needs two willing partners who are communicative, collaborative and cooperative...

Amanda Dutton, the chapter leader at PS 134 in Manhattan, has stood up again and again for students with disabilities and the UFT members who work with those students at her school.