Do ATR Guidance Counselors Need To Prepare Lesson Plans? Yes They Do!

This year guidance counselors and social workers are being send weekly to schools which makes no sense to me..  How can a school use a guidance counselor that has no experience with the school's student and be expected to do their job?  The answer is that they can't.  Therefore, the schools are using these guidance counselors as co-teachers in the classroom, push in/out teachers, and day to day teachers in the classroom and yes! They are required to have a lesson plan!.  What a waste of talent!  Just like teachers it's the highly-paid veterans that are being sent weekly to different schools.  Age discrimination?  I think so.

I thought it was terrible that the DOE and UFT agreed to waste the services of "great veteran teachers" by making them day to day subs but to use guidance counselors as glorified substitute teachers is ridiculous and  a massive waste of talent. How, in this time of tight City budgets, can the DOE be paying up to 160 million dollars yearly for ATRs while allowing principals to hire "newbies" with no experience with students. Worse, some principals were using the guidance counselors as paras until the UFT complained about using them inappropriately.

It's time that the union get a commitment from the Mayoral hopefuls that they will end "fair student funding" and bring back the unit system for a school's staff.  Furthermore,  eliminate the ATR pool entirely by requiring principals to hire excessed staff before a "newbie" can be hired by the school.  For the union to fail to receive such commitments along with a moratorium on closing schools and a contract with full retroactive raises as the minimum requirements for these mayoral candidates to get our support is a union that is not representing its members.  Nothing less is acceptable.