Take the Money and Run
I'm friendly with a pretty saavy ATR. I won't tell you his name, I won't tell you precisely who he's connected with, but I will tell you he knows people. In June, he met with a financial adviser and decided to take the ATR buyout. This way, he told me, he'd get not only the 19K or whatever it was, but he'd also get the retro pay that isn't retro pay. (It's explained a littlehere--not calling it retro in the actual language is how UFT and DOE rationalized excluding those who resigned, were fired, or moved into admin.)I was pretty surprised when he told me last week he'd changed his mind, and had decided not to take the buyout. I asked him why and he told me he was no longer taking the deal. He told me that he'd come to the conclusion Bill de Blasio's second term, at this point, was not precisely a sure thing. He'd decided that if de Blasio did not make it to term two, the person who defeated him could be particularly vile, up to and including Eva Moskowitz.
Although the city may be sitting on a surplus, despite Michael Mulgrew telling teachers the "cupboard was bare" when presenting us a clearly substandard contract, there is a longstanding tradition of the city pleading poverty before the surplus appears.
In fact, while Bloomberg, for years, was denying us the 8% raise most other city unions got in 2008-2010 (most of which we'll get, interest-free, in five years), he used his fake budget crisis to rationalize and threaten layoffs. That's why ATR teachers were sent week to week school to school. I couldn't vote for this deal despite assurances from multiple UFT Unity acquaintances that the city was not competent enough to pull it NYC Educator: Take the Money and Run: