NTA EBulletin: September 14, 2025

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A Pattern of Violating Our Trust, Part 2

I was surprised and disappointed by Anna’s Sep 11 “Inside Voice” email. In this communication, she implies both that I am “batting you around with conflicting information” and that all of you who do the work of educating Newton’s students don’t participate in “decisions, changes, or ideas,” and thus need to have these clarified to you by her.

She spends the bulk of her email on a point-by-point rebuttal of the concerns I raised in the Sept. 7 eBulletin. I was discouraged to see that, once again, her claims are rife with misleading characterizations and half-truths. I will not dignify these with my own point-by-point rebuttal - I continue to work toward building a collaborative relationship with Anna, so I will model behavior conducive to that - that is what Newton’s parents and students deserve.

Rather, I am going discuss a key issue: staff absences and the lack of coverage, focusing first on the district’s failure to provide data on the overall trends regarding educator absences and, second, on the district’s policy on member absences for religious observance. 

Staff Absences

As background, it is important to say that under Anna’s leadership, the HR office has conducted a wholesale assault on NTA members’ legal and contractual rights to be absent, violating member rights on sick leave policy, access to the sick leave bank, parental leave, and the use of holy days. As is the case with Kindergarten aides, the district can force its will upon us for long periods of time while the legal system slowly grinds along. 

In Anna’s public statements, she says that the Newton Public Schools is facing a staff absenteeism crisis. I am not sure what Anna would like members to do if they or their family members are sick, whether for a day, a week, or for an extended medical leave. Come to work sick? Send their children to their schools sick? Take an unpaid medical leave they cannot afford? Forego their contractual and legal rights to paid time off? 

The Need for Data

In any case, in order to work together to address common concerns, we need the district to provide us the data on absences that we have requested. Anna can say "I can provide absentee data at the click of a button, I cannot provide it any longer in a format that the NTA liked better—on a spreadsheet with the information hand-entered by a person who no longer works with us (retired three years ago). The data is readily available." 

But the truth is, Anna has never “clicked that button”--in fact, last year she bemoaned to me that she herself couldn't get the data she needed on attendance.

Here is a sample from the data the district provided in 2018, which Anna says she cannot reproduce. It spans the period of time from the fall of 2011 to April of 2018. It is presented in a simple, essential form: A year by year record of the total number of each type of absence. 

We haven’t been able to get this spreadsheet updated since 2018. When we asked for an update in 2022, during negotiations, the district simply shared the same spreadsheet that they had shared in 2018. The last time they complied with our request for information on absences was seven and a half years ago. 

The claim that the district could compile this data in the past only because a since retired employee manually entered it into a spreadsheet strains credulity. I ask how, without compiling data in this format, the district can reasonably assess whether it has staff attendance issues. To identify and diagnose the problem, we need to look at the number absences for each specific type of day off, and we need to look at year over year trends. 

In the data we do have from 2018, a couple of trends can be identified:

Even though there is a widespread belief that educational support professionals (unit C members) are absent more than licensed educators (unit A members), from 2011 to 2018, absences among Unit C members was roughly proportional to absences among Unit A members. 

If not actual differences between the number of Unit A and Unit C member absences, what is driving the belief that there are more Unit C absences than Unit A?  

I believe that the district has a coverage issue; they simply do not allocate for or pay enough to attract and retain enough qualified substitute educators to meet their needs. 

In the elementary and middle schools, in order to compensate for the lack of highly qualified substitutes, in each building, Unit C members provide coverage for Unit A members. They are shifted from working with the students to whom they are assigned to cover for an absent colleague. Not only do these students lose out, all do. The absence of a educational support professional in the classroom means a teacher has to do the work of two people: that of the ESP who has been pulled from their own student to provide coverage, and their own classroom responsibilities to all students. 

On top of this, there is rarely highly qualified coverage for Unit C members when they themselves are absent. 

This leaves educators frustrated that they cannot meet their students’ needs. They need district support. Instead, educators come to work sick, send their own children to their schools sick, forego medical procedures they need, and generally do all they can to not be absent. 

Why is this not an issue district leadership is addressing? It is a chronic problem that gets ignored year after year. Why isn’t this something on the list of urgent changes that the Anna is addressing? This is a fundamental problem we need to collaboratively address with Anna and HR.

No matter what we learn, we should not scapegoat our Unit C employees. The district must provide highly qualified coverage for all staff when they are absent, so they can meet their students needs when their colleagues are absent. NPS educators, students, and parents deserve no less.

And we also all need the data to know if then these trend from 2011 to 2018, continue today. Educators and parents deserve to have an accurate picture of why their students’ needs are not being met when an educator is absent. 

There is an issue in the high schools as well, where there isn’t any substitute cover at all. Of course, parents and students are keenly aware of which educators are absent on a given day, because every day absences are publicly posted. But are there factors at work, as in elementary and middle schools, related to coverage? Are there other explantations for why teachers are perceived to being absent too much? These are questions that cannot be addressed without appropriately compiled data, and without true collaboration. Too often, educators get blamed, for addressing their own needs, as if this were incompatible with addressing those of their students. This is unfair. And if their are patterns of abuse of sick leave policies, these individual abuses should be addressed without blaming all educators. 

District Policy on Member Absences for Religious Observance

Anna asked me to review the memo on religious observances that she linked to in her September 11 email. I provided her with extensive commentary. I was hopeful that, since Anna reached out for feedback, we would be able to address these concerns (and help the district avoid breaking the law) before a final policy was implemented. She did not respond to my commentary, but rather sent out the memo with little substantive change. 

Here are the concerns I shared with her:

1. The number of days off members take for religious observance is very small, inconsequential really with regard to overall staff attendance. 

2. Our Jewish educator colleagues take the majority of days off for religious observance, and are inordinately impacted by Anna’s policy.  I told Anna that I did not believe she was intentionally formulating an anti-semitic policy. But I also told her that her policy disproportionately impacts Jewish educators. Once I alerted Anna to this possibility, shouldn’t she have taken measures to prevent this from happening? And once alerted to this, doesn’t the line between intention and impact become more fuzzy? 

3. Her policy violates Federal and Massachusetts law and our collective bargaining agreements concerning an employee’s rights to take a day off as a paid religious day.

On the violation of law and contract:

I am disappointed that Anna chose not to reply.  and to send out the memo with the only substantive change being to offer a legal “justification” that runs against the very grain of Title VII protections and Massachusetts statute on absences for religious observances. Fundamentally, Title VII is designed to expand and protect religious accommodations - not to provide legal cover for restricting them, as Nolin unfortunately has chosen to argue. 

On the disproportionate impact on Jewish Educators. Over the past year, I have received a number of emails asking for union advocacy around religious day absences. These mainly concerned the celebration of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover, but there are other Jewish religious days some Jewish members observe.  On the other hand, I received only one email regarding a non-Jewish holiday. Based on this, I make the inference that the policy disproportionately impacts Jewish educators. I have submitted an information request for data in order to substantiate this claim. 

On this policy not addressing any real problem with staff absences. Over the 7 year period for which we have data, Unit A members took off nearly 54,000 days for maternity leave and personal and family illness. Over that same period, Unit A members took off 843 religious days. As I said, limiting holy days addresses a problem that does not exist.

In short, I told Anna that she is violating law and contract in a way that disproportionately impacts Jewish educators in order to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. 

Please know that the NTA will defend the right of our members to take legally and contractually guaranteed days off for religious observances. Please share any concerns you have with me or Ryan.

What’s next?

I now zoom back to the larger picture.

Both Anna and I have stated our desire to work together collaboratively. We both are aware that this is in the best interest of educators, students, and families. But collaboration requires trust, and it requires power sharing. Anna and I will not always agree, but there is a meaningful disparity in how she exercises power and how the NTA does. Only Anna has the managerial prerogative to immediately enforce her perspective. The union too has power - the power codified in our collective bargaining agreements and the law. The power to legally challenge violations of contract and law. The power to disengage from voluntary activities. The power to refrain from trusting.

The power of union solidarity.

Under Anna's leadership, our contracts and the law have been routinely ignored. Our members are regularly denied voice. The legal system is slow and has little teeth to enforce labor law. The pace of the change, meanwhile, is overwhelming. 

What is perhaps most frustrating to members is that, under Anna’s leadership, they find their ability to educate and support students to Newton’s standards undermined.  

As Ryan and I both said on opening day, it is on all of us to enforce the contracts - they represent the fruit of fifty-five years of collective bargaining. They are the records of our victories, expressing our rights, our responsibilities, and our benefits. When these are threatened, we must use whatever legal means are within our power to enforce them. But when that proves insufficient in the face of widespread, rapid-fire assaults on our rights and voices, as is happening now, we must turn back to our fundamental source of power: our solidarity.

Part of this is to say to Anna Nolin: You have not yet earned our trust. What will you do differently to earn it?

In solidarity, 

Mike Zilles, President

Newton Teachers Association