Leslie Blatteau at WNHH FM: “If our students have stable housing, our job is going to be less hard in the classroom.”
Leslie Blatteau noticed that 70 percent of New Haven’s teachers live in the suburbs — and saw an opportunity to boost state-level support for New Haven’s schools.
Those same teachers, Blatteau realized, are also constituents. Of more conservative suburban state lawmakers.
Blatteau is beginning her second three-year term as president of the 1,750-member-strong New Haven Federation of Teachers. She said she ideally would like to see more city teachers live in the city where they teach. In the meantime, she has enlisted some of those suburban-dwelling teachers to lobby their state legislators to support increasing aid to city schools.
That fits in with her broader work as a leader (steering committee chair) in a statewide community-labor coalition — CT For All — urging the legislature to raise taxes on the wealth, broaden “just cause eviction” legislation, boost state aid to urban schools, revise spending-limiting “fiscal guardrails,” and help more workers earn living wages, in the session that began last week.
Blatteau delivered the coalition’s call on the first day of the session in a “State of the People” address in response to the governor’s “State of the State” address. (Watch the address here. Read the CT For All plan here.)
Her coalition work reflects the broader vision she has brought to the union president’s job: She sees teachers’ quest for better pay and working conditions linked to tax reform and the quests to tackle the affordable housing crisis and free up more state revenue. New Haven’s teachers union in the past worked less with other unions and activist groups.
“If our students have stable housing, which is something that we can use our union muscle to advocate for, then our job is going to be less hard in the classroom,” Blatteau said Thursday during a conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“It is easier to teach a young person who has stable housing versus trying to encourage them to stay focused when we know they don’t have enough rest, when they’re dealing with the trauma of having just moved. We know that stability matters when it comes to attendance. So these issues do connect back to the needs of our union members.”
Blatteau called for revising the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) Formula that governs state aid to struggling schools, by raising the per-student basic payments and adding special education to the formula.
New Haven’s schools need more money not just to pay teachers comparably to suburban counterparts, but to reduce case loads for school psychologists, social workers, and special-ed teachers, Blatteau argued.
“As the student population in Connecticut does trend down, the special ed population is trending up. So we have more and more students with more complex needs. If we don’t do something to provide some relief to the professionals who are providing the supports, we’re going to keep losing folks.”
Under Blatteau’s leadership, the teachers union has been showing up locally as well to help fellow unions push for salary increases for paraprofessionals and cafeteria workers: “My members benefit when every para position is filled in New Haven Public Schools. It makes our job harder without paras. Without cafeteria workers, we can’t do our jobs. So to me, it makes sense that we would insert ourselves into the broader labor movement.”
Click on the video below to watch the interview with New Haven Federation of Teachers President Leslie Blatteau on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”