Catholic School Teachers Wrestle With Faith and Obedience in Negotiating a Contract
Rosemarie Beitz, a teacher at a parochial school in Manhattan, handed out leaflets last week.
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: September 4, 2011
Wednesday morning, on the first day of the new school year at St. Paul’s Roman Catholic School in East Harlem, Gertrude Zagarella expects to arrive, as always, at 7:05. By 7:45, the children — mostly Hispanic, black and poor — will be done with breakfast, and then it is Ms. Zagarella’s responsibility to lead all the students, from kindergartners to eighth graders, into the gym for morning prayers.
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The rest of Wednesday she will spend in Room 11, teaching the new first graders where to find the bathroom, when to wash their hands and how to properly stand in a lunch line. That first day, they feel smaller than they expected, but lucky for them, no one is more experienced at calming first-grade jitters than Ms. Zagarella.
Of the 56 years she has taught in Catholic schools, 55 have been in first grade. At 77, she can think of little that she does not love about it. First graders learn to read. First