Last week the Supreme Court issued it’s ruling in the Janus Case, deciding in a 5-4 decision, that public sector employees across the nation can no longer be required to pay fees to a union as a condition of employment. In light of this ruling, we thought it necessary to alert our member to recent activity designed specifically to alienate in-service teachers and urge them to quit their union. Within hours of the Janus decision, a $10 million campaign was launched with the goal of breaking teachers’ unions across the United States.

The Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy has flooded public-school teachers emails nationwide advising them how to leave their unions. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is a Michigan-based think-tank, which in December of 2017  filed a 55-page amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court in support of the Janus suit. What is even more troubling is that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her family have been major donors to the Mackinac Center.

Please alert your friends and family who are in-inservice NYSUT members about these potentially harmful emails, and visit the NYSUT Website  for more information on NYSUT on the issue.

A note from the R-UTN Executive Baord — The R-UTN is made up of individuals who retired from the Northport – East Northport district as members of the United Teachers of Northport. We are all very different people, with differing political views, and as such this website strives to avoid posting overt political messages. We do, on occasion, publish information of a political nature that is sent to us from NYSUT as it relates to the quality, and protection, of public education in the state. We do not directly endorse or comment on individual candidates, or make comments or claims about candidates or members of the state or national administration. The naming of the Secretary of Education is not something we do lightly, but this issue is too important to the future of American public education to be ignored.