Voting on union leadership for the Rochester Teachers Association begins Friday.
This is the 42nd consecutive year that union president Adam Urbanski has held his title, though he said this election cycle may be his last.
“If I'm elected, I would like to focus on a transition from the current leadership,” Urbanski said. “And to help mentor and guide the tremendous number of people that we have ... who I think will begin where we left off and lead the teaching corps in Rochester to a greater and more successful future.”
In other years, Urbanski has run unopposed. This year, sixth-grade teacher Audrey Sowell is also vying for the union presidency as part of a slate of candidates running under the banner ROC Teachers in Action.
“'Right Out of the Classroom' is what the ROC stands for,” Sowell said.
Sowell wants to push for community schools, solidify a mission statement for the union, and build stronger connections between union leadership and teachers.
She’s familiar with uphill battles. Before becoming a teacher, she worked as a community advocate for people with HIV/ AIDS in the mid-1990s at a time when AIDS was a leading cause of death for 25- to 44-year-olds in the U.S.
She had studied the virus in college as a biology major.
"It was a lot of stigma," she said. "So some people weren't able to be buried at their churches. They weren't getting family care, and to solve that problem, that's why I organized the Pastoral Care Committee."
Before that, she was a city school student with her own family struggles.
“When I was 13, I was tasked with raising my younger brother and trying to attend Franklin High School and buy groceries,” she said. “I was a little girl trying to be a grown woman.”
Sowell’s homeroom teacher stepped in and found her a mentor, she said.
“If Miss Roy had not seen me in need, I would not have gotten what I needed,” she said.
She said the district is now losing teachers — and students are losing these kinds of opportunities for intervention.
Urbanski has also raised a red flag over teacher resignations. So far this year, more than 160 teachers resigned, breaking last year’s record of over 130.
He said the most common reason given in exit interviews that the RTA conducts is “a lack of safety.”
That echoes back to one of his earliest memories as union president — when in 1983, a 16-year-old student fatally stabbed a teacher.
“That was a very difficult and sobering experience for all of us, and it underscored how important safety is,” Urbanski said.
He said a similar feeling came over him when teachers and students were directed to return to schools during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We had concerns that the air filters in schools were not up to acceptable standards and insisted that that be confirmed and rectified before we supported our call to return, early on, to in-person learning,” he said.
Urbanski said union leadership hired an engineering firm to inspect air filtration systems in buildings and found that many were not adequate.
“This was a matter of potentially saving lives. I'm so glad we did that,” he said.
From within the classroom, so much has transpired from that time until now, said first vice president candidate Kristen French with the ROC Teachers in Action slate.
French is a speech therapist who has worked in the district for 21 years. She said a lack of substitutes on top of many students’ ongoing unaddressed trauma has added to what she described as a standard level of chaos and turmoil that students and staff had come to expect before the pandemic.
“I truly believe if we could have people that are in central office type of positions in schools, and seeing our children and knowing how their conversations and their decisions are impacting our students and their families and the staff, then I think that would make a real difference,” she said.
French is running against incumbent John Pavone, who has been involved in union leadership since the 1980s, initially part-time while he worked full-time as a teacher.
Pavone said he and the other incumbents have a wealth of experience to back up their candidacies — something he said their opponents lack.
“They haven't got as much experience that we do,” Pavone said. “We've been around for a long time.”
Union members have until May 8 to vote for their candidates of choice.
