AFT Vice President
Aida Díaz Rivera is a former high school biology, science and ecology teacher, and retired president of the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, an AFT affiliate in the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. As a champion of students and educators alike, she has taken steps over four decades to organize teachers and alleviate child hunger. She established professional development programs for teachers, directed the teachers’ credit union, founded summer camps for teachers’ children who couldn’t afford private camp, and led a program in which retired teachers learned to develop their own businesses. Watch as she describes, at a meeting of the Albert Shanker Institute, the condition of Puerto Rico’s education system before and after Hurricane Maria. For decades, Díaz Rivera has championed a future for Puerto Rico’s public schools free of privatization, chronic underfunding, widespread school closings, and obstruction by elected officials. Based in San Juan and tracing its history to 1911, AMPR affiliated with the AFT in 2017. Its mission is to promote and defend the right of every person to a free, secular public education. Díaz Rivera served as its president from 2003 to 2019. She continues to fight for high-quality public education, community schools, social and emotional care for every student, respect for educators, and pensions so that they can retire with dignity.