AFT summer volunteers connect with New Orleans
    —and with the Union

As union families know, a friend in need is a friend indeed. Almost 80 AFT members spent two weeks of their summer vacation working on community service projects: disaster cleanup and rebuilding.

Members from across the country headed to New Orleans to attend to the many public and private structures that are still in need of cleaning and rebuilding.

Two groups of union volunteers signed up for two-week stints in the Crescent City—working on tasks as varied as painting, landscaping, tutoring and building everything from new homes to a playground. The AFT-sponsored project provided the much-needed volunteers to assist ongoing city programs run by groups such as Habitat for Humanity, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Children’s Defense Fund.

One of the first orders of business, however, was an AFT project: painting the hallways at Eleanor McMain High School, which reopened for the 2006-07 school year. Ten volunteers worked at McMain for a week. If this is a school that was in good enough condition to be opened, “I would hate to see the ones that weren’t,” says volunteer Dana O’Kelly Stewart, a field organizer from the United Teachers of Dade (UTD) in Miami.

It wasn’t just the condition of McMain that surprised volunteers. “It was devastating when we went on the bus ride through the city,” says John Amato, a member of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers from William McKinley Middle School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Amato, like other volunteers, knew they had hard work ahead. After all, that was the point of the AFT’s project. But they weren’t prepared for just how much work remained to be done.

Many were jarred by the spray-painted markings that still branded houses nearly two years after Hurrican Katrina struck, indicating such information as the date searched and the number of dead.

Practice what you teach

Civic responsibility is something Megan May teaches her sixth-graders at Roosevelt Elementary School.

Civic responsibility, the Great Falls (Mont.) Education Association member says “is what you do. You don’t do it to be a hero or for a pat on the back. You do it because it needs to be done.”

So when May got an e-mail from the MEA-MFT, the Montana state federation, saying the AFT was looking for volunteers for cleanup and rebuilding projects in New Orleans, she stepped up even though it meant she had to quit her part-time summer job as a waitress.

For her time, May got an unforgettable experience that blended her personal sense of civic responsibility with her union community.

“You can count me in to share my experiences with my colleagues,” she says. On leaving New Orleans, May says she “really wanted to grab everybody I could find and make them do something. It is such an unexplainable thing.”

The conditions in the city are “one thousand times worse than I could have imagined. If I didn’t know, I would have thought the hurricane came through six months ago.”

May notes that during the 2006-07 school year, there were several meetings about the need for renovations or rebuilding at her school in Montana, which is about 100 years old. But “after being in New Orleans,” she adds, “we have nothing to complain about.” Great Falls, Mont., is low income, “but the things that need to be handled as far as the city goes—are handled.”

Money and Mother Nature

Vanessa Gonzalez is familiar with Mother Nature. The fourth-grade teacher at North Miami Beach’s Madie Ives Community Elementary School knows the destructive force of hurricanes and flooding.

Spending two weeks in New Orleans on the ground and in the nontourist areas was a real eye-opener. “Two years later [and] there was still so much that needed to be done. It’s appalling that it is taking so long.”

The difference between Gonzalez’s city and New Orleans is money. Because there is a lot of money in the Miami area, “Whenever something happens, two months later, everything is up and running—unless it’s something like Hurricane Andrew,” she explains.

Gonzalez spent her time in New Orleans painting hallways at McMain, gardening at an elementary school and working on houses in Habitat for Humanity’s Musicians’ Village.

The 2007-08 school year marks her second in the classroom, so the volunteer program gave Gonzalez exposure to the broader AFT community.

“We all came from different areas of the country, and yet there are so many things we have in common—an underlying commitment to people and making their lives better in any way that we can,” Gonzalez says. “We did a little piece in an enormously devastated area.”

Out of sight, not out of mind

“They still need our help, whether it’s financially or hands-on volunteer work,” says Amato, a third-generation physical education teacher.

For Amato, who was recruited for this summer’s effort by his William McKinley colleague Geof Sorkin, who volunteered last year, the project strikes at the core of unionism: teamwork.

“No one person is any more important than anyone else,” explains Amato.

The trip was “a good lesson in humanity,” says UTD organizer Stewart, who “can only imagine” that Mississippi and the other affected areas haven’t significantly recovered yet either.