NYC teaching jobs safe… but what about the rest of the school staff?

By VERONICA O’BRIEN

Recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg publicly threatened to cut over 14,000 city teaching jobs because of proposed budget cuts due to the city’s deficit. New York City teachers can now breathe a sigh of relief as Mayor Bloomberg  announced their jobs are safe. But that may just be for the time being. I’m sure teachers just love the bureaucratic job safety cliffhanger.

“At the moment, those jobs would be safe,” said Bloomberg.

At the moment? Thanks, Mayor! What does that mean to a teacher, exactly? That their job is safe until the end of the year? End of the month? End of the period?

(For the latest on the New York State budget and how it affects schools, click here. And for more on those teacher jobs being safe, here’s a NY1 article about it.)

This seems like good news, and it is, don’t get me wrong, but there’s always the flip side, isn’t there? Yes, its true, the jobs will be safe, but at what cost? In this case, the positions are safe due to a switcheroo of funds. The money will come from the federal stimulus package, of course. Bloomberg explained in a news conference that he will leave the current teaching positions alone, but the “non-teacher jobs” are not so safe. Could this mean the safety/school police officers, lunch crew, janitors will be cut back in September?

Sure, teachers are the ones in front of the classroom, but as Gehry’s post on cafeteria food made abundantly clear, it takes an entire school staff to prepare a student for learning. The student needs to be well fed by the lunch crew; she needs the security guards to help her feel like she’s learning in a safe environment; the cleaning staff lets her feel comfortable that she can learn geometry without ‘catchin’ something.’And this says nothing of the utterly essential work done by our school counselors, coaches, librarians and everyone else that makes up our (semi/pseudo/sometimes) happy school family.

The Mayor is so flippant in saying that “non-teaching jobs may be cut,” just as he was flippant in threatening that 14,000 City teachers might get pink slips. I know times are tough financially, but how the Mayor thinks an entire school can function on the chopping block is beyond me. Our jobs are just too hard to also be worrying about line-items on budgets.