AFT Summer volunteers connect a community

As union families know, a friend in need is a friend indeed.

Almost 80 AFT members spent two weeks of this summer 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 of them. After all, that was the point of the AFT’s project. But they weren’t prepared for just how much work still needed to be done.

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

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Professional Staff Congress/AFT member Robert Putz, a professor of math and computer science at Kingsborough Community College. The PSC sent a small contingent of volunteers. Speaking to the New York City-based paper, The Chief, he added, “I expected there to be construction and rebulding. But compared to the need, it’s nothing.”

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.”

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.

This school year marks her second in the classroom, so the volunteer program gave Gonzalez exposure to the broader AFT community, which as a novice teacher she had not had a chance to experience. “We did a little piece in an enormously devastated area,” Gonzalez says.

Ann Batiuk, who works in the provost’s office at the City University of New York Graduate Center, was one of the six volunteers who came from CUNY. She did painting in three different schools and worked on a Habitat for Humanity project in the Ninth Ward. “Our work was not as efficient as professionals’,” she says, “but it showed that we cared.” Batiuk also signed a petition to ask the government to get more help there.

“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.

---

Let Us Count You In, Too
An active and engaged memebership is essential to the effectiveness of a union and its ability to address the needs of members and improve the insitutions in which they work. The aim of the AFT Count Me In campaign is to strengthen the union by making members aware of the many opportunities there are to be "counted in." To learn more about the Count Me In campaign and how you can help advance the union's priorities and the issues that affect you, visit www.aft.org/CountMeIn.