GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

With fewer dues-paying members, the United Federation of Teachers is renting out space in its downtown headquarters to help cover its operating costs. (Photo via Flickr)

The bags of swag at the city teachers union’s regular conferences might be lighter this year, the catered dinners less lavish. The recession has caught up with the union and it’s beginning to cut back.

Hit with the combination of a two-year hiring freeze and typical teacher attrition, the United Federation of Teachers has lost roughly 2,000 members in the last year. With them has gone about $2 million in dues.

On top of the membership decline, the union is now funding programs that the state used to support. This year, the state legislature cut all $16 million of its funding for the Teacher Center, a professional development program that trains teachers at over a hundred city schools. To keep a cut-back version of the program going, the UFT has had to kick in $5 million of its own money.

“In many respects, you can say the economy caught up to us,” said the union’s Chief Financial Officer David Hickey. “We’ve done okay in the last couple of years. And so it did, it got us.” (more…)

A teacher named Mandy Kwan submitted this entry to Brian Lehrer’s Uncommon Economic Indicators project:

In the elementary school where I am teaching, I’m noticing an unusual surge of students enrolling in our school at this time of the year. Many of them are coming from private schools — with tuition costs that parents can no longer afford.