The Chalkboard feels for teachers who have to work for a bureaucracy as nutty as the city's Department of Education. The latest case in today's Daily News reminds me of the scores of new city teachers who weren't put on the payroll until Thanksgiving a couple of years ago, and how uncaring such a large dysfunctional bureaucracy can be - not only for families, but for the grownups who work in them.

Naomi Lehrer, 35, a math teacher from Marine Park, put her newborn son on her DOE medical plan after he was born in August. But when she took him for his vaccination shots in November, she was informed that she and the rest of her family had been dropped from the health plan. These paragraphs in the story are so typical of the city schools:

Lehrer said she complained repeatedly to the city, only to get the same
response: Regional educrats blamed the Education Department's central medical
office, and the medical office blamed the educrats. No one stepped up to solve
the problem.

"I became a teacher to help children and now my own child is
getting ditched," said Lehrer, who teaches at McKinley Junior High School in
Dyker Heights.

Medical bills and letters from collection agencies - one
addressed to "Baby Lehrer" - have been piling up in Lehrer's home, she said.
The last straw came Tuesday night when she and her husband, Steve, rushed
Marcus to the hospital with a 103-degree fever. As they sat in the emergency
room, a nurse told them, "Your insurance is no good."

The story doesn't say whether Lehrer called her politically potent union for help. Luckily for her she was smart enough to call a reporter, who ended up getting the problem solved with a few telephone calls (and the obvious threat of public ridicule.)

With all that our nation's urban teachers have to worry about on a daily basis, none of them should ever have to put up with this kind of educrap.

UPDATE: Perhaps the person who was handling the paperwork for the insurance plan was playing solitaire on his computer or something. (This story is amazing!)

ADDITIONAL POINT/CHARTER SCHOOL ANGLE ON THE NYC HEALTHCARE STORY: The Daily News story notes that NYC teachers are entitled to up to four months of approved leave after they have a baby. They are not paid, but they are allowed to keep their health insurance while they are caring for the newborn.

When she was chairing the New York City Council's Education Committee (and drawing the wrath of teachers union leaders,) Eva Moskowitz criticized the city for not offering (and the union for not demanding) paid maternity leave for the teaching force.

Now that Moskowitz is running a charter school that will open in Harlem next fall, The Chalkboard zapped her an email this morning asking (1) whether she had worked out the details of the contract she will use with her teachers at Harlem Success Academy, and (2) whether they would be offered paid maternity leave.

Her response: "Yes, paid maternity/paternity."