Union volunteers from California to New York gathered in the city Aug. 23 to fan out into neighborhoods to talk to UTNO members and assure them that the union is continuing to fight for their interests and for the needs of students in New Orleans. UTNO has been particularly critical of the chaos that has characterized the opening of schools in New Orleans, and the union has called for a centralized body to handle essential services for schools in the parish—including the hiring of teachers and school employees.

In just four days, the AFT and AFL-CIO volunteers made 3,000 house calls to UTNO members, reports AFT director of field services Ann Mitchell, who helped coordinate the effort with UTNO president Brenda Mitchell.

Before Hurricane Katrina, Orleans Parish operated 128 public schools. By the end of this September, 53 public schools were expected to open under several separate “systems,” most of them charter schools and some regular schools administered by the state as “Recovery District” schools. The New Orleans school district is operating just a handful of regular public and charter schools. The state has admitted that there are not enough teachers available for the Recovery District schools—as of Sept. 2, officials said 180 teachers were still needed—and says it will fill the shortfall with substitutes, reports the Associated Press.

But virtually all of the city’s certified teachers and other school staff were terminated in February, the union points out, and were given no assurances that they would be called back. “After months of promises that the new New Orleans school system will be a model for the country, the state is debuting an utterly chaotic and dysfunctional system,” says UTNO’s Brenda Mitchell.

Meanwhile, UTNO members have had plenty to say about their treatment by the bureaucracy. “Never have I heard such incredible stories of anger and betrayal by an unscrupulous and despicable employer than I heard in late August of 2006,” wrote San Antonio, Texas, union volunteer Bob Comeaux of his experience making house calls. “Teachers, even those with double master’s [degrees], are having to apply for their old jobs, not at one location, but at the multiple bureaucracies being created to siphon education dollars away from the schoolchildren.”

Teacher after teacher talked about the humiliation of having not only to take a proficiency test, but also to write a paragraph about why they wanted to work for a charter school, he added. One teacher working in a charter school, he said, told him she still has no books, no manipulatives and no support, but “she refuses to provide her own since these schools are better funded than they were pre-Katrina.”

The house call blitz “demonstrated to not only the school employees in New Orleans but also to the larger community that the union is not gone,” says AFT’s Ann Mitchell. “Regardless of which system teachers and school employees work in, they deserve a voice in the workplace—and UTNO is that vehicle.”