At last night's Executive Board meeting the UFT leadership stated that 135 ATRs took the inferior buyout offer that the UFT secretly negotiated with the DOE, without ATR input.. This was significantly lower than the DOE's hopeful projections of 200 or more ATRs. In fact, if you include the provisional appointments, who were also eligible for the buyout. The 135 ATRs are only 10% of the over 1,300 ATRs who were eligible for the buyout,
Moreover, on any given year approximately 60 to 70 ATRs retire or resign, either due to age, years of service, or under 3020-a charges. If we were to exclude those ATRs who were leaving anyway then the ATR incentive only encouraged 70 ATRs to take the incentive, who may have otherwise stayed. That is only 5% of the ATR pool.
Finally, because of the union negotiated contract that allows the DOE not to pay the teacher his or her lump sum payments if the 3020-a arbitrator finds the educator guilty of termination, also encouraged some teachers to take the incentive, rather than risk losing up to $50,000 dollars of the money still owed to them.
While our union leadership will continue to claim a victory, when it came to the ATR incentive. The fact is the ATR incentive was a failure since only between 5% and 10% of the educators in the ATR pool actually took it. Maybe the next ATR incentive will be a year's salary and then you might see many in the ATR pool take the bait and take the money and run.