Teachers and support staff at the Mary Cariola Center have voted to form a union under the umbrella of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT).
Workers at the school voted Wednesday morning. The final tally came in at 82-61, or 54% in favor of unionizing under the banner Mary Cariola United (MCU). The union expects to enter into contract negotiations in the new year.
Founded in 1949 as the Day Care Center for Handicapped Children, the Mary Cariola Center is a special education school which serves students from 10 counties around Rochester ranging in age from 5 to 22 years old. It serves students with emotional problems, behavioral issues, autism, cerebral palsy, and other conditions which make traditional school atmospheres difficult to thrive in.
Classrooms are typically comprised of students within two years of each other.
Trevor Francis, a member of the organizing committee, has been a schoolteacher at the Mary Cariola Center for over 10 years and currently teaches students in third through fifth grade. He said the push to unionize was necessary because Mary Cariola faces the same difficulties hiring and retaining staff as schools around the state.
“Over the last few years, staffing has been the biggest issue here,” Francis said. “We’re not able to give children a lot of the education they need or support they need to achieve their goals. Staff are getting burned out, and a lot are leaving for other work.”
New York officials have estimated that over the next decade schools need to hire about 180,000 new teachers to meet their workforce needs. For example, in March the Rochester City School District reported it was short of just under 200 teachers, spurring a heightened call for recruitment in the district.
At the Mary Cariola Center, the issue is more complex. Most of the classrooms at the center operate under a model of seven students to one teacher and four aides, or a 7-1-4 model. Aides, Francis said, are particularly difficult to retain due to the low pay. According to job listings from the school, classroom aide pay starts at $17. The job has few prerequisites beyond a high school diploma.
Francis had started as an aide before getting his teaching degree.
“It’s difficult when a lot of people come in and don’t understand the population or how severe the needs are, and how intense the work can be sometimes,” Francis said, adding that they quickly end up overwhelmed or burnt out. "So, we do lose a lot of support staff, the turnover rate is high.”
Francis stressed that unionizing was not in response to any actions by leadership at the Mary Cariola Center itself. Instead, the move was a means to gain more support in the current teaching climate.
Greg Kamp, a spokesperson for the Mary Cariola Center, declined to comment in depth on the union vote.
"Mary Cariola’s priority remains to continue educating and caring for students with intellectual developmental disabilities and medical complexities just like we have for the past 75 years," Kamp wrote, in a statement provided to WXXI News. "We value all of those we serve as well as the staff that serves them."
Many of the staff backed forming a union "hoping we can make the job a little more attractive to get more support for work,” Francis said. “And then, it’s more of a say in how the classroom is run.”
Francis said the staff plans to begin electing representatives and surveying staff on classroom issues beginning in January.
