Michael Mulgrew has left UFT headquarters at 52 Broadway and a union official confirmed that any chance that a deal could be salvaged in the final hours tonight are “dead.”
And the other side also appears to have thrown in the towel. A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said they “called the UFT a couple of hours ago and tried one last time with a proposal and they rejected it.” She did not say what the specifics of that proposal were.
Micah Lasher, a former aide to Mayor Bloomberg who lobbied hard for the evaluations, was optimistic that a deal could happen earlier in the day, even after the city and the union exchanged blows. But his mood had soured in a statement released late tonight.
“Today is a sad day for New York City’s 1.1 million schoolchildren, who will lose out because the adults couldn’t stop fighting and get their acts together,” Lasher said.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has insisted that he will not amend a law that he wrote into last year’s budget, which gives education funding only to districts that submit and implement evaluation plans this year. The deadline for both is midnight.
“Please hear me – there will be no extensions or exceptions,” Cuomo said of the few districts that had not submitted plans to the state ahead of midnight.
For New York City, that means that it will not receive $250 million in aid, money that city officials said would result in midyear cuts and could affect school funding for school staff, technology and after school and arts programs.
The absence of an evaluation means that the city will also not be able to claim up to another $200 million in state and federal grant money.
“We don’t have an exact timeframe but it has to happen soon,” Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky said of the cuts.