Education

Ryan Saavedra graduated from Felix Varela Senior last Friday at the age of 20. For most students, graduating two years behind the rest of their classmates would be a source of humiliation. For Ryan, it was a triumph.

During the 2005-2006 school year, Ryan, an honors student enrolled in AP courses, was a senior playing offense, defense and special teams for the Coral Reef Senior High football team.

But during his school's Sept. 30 homecoming game, he walked off the field complaining of nausea and told his coach, "I just got banged." Then he collapsed on the sidelines and had to be airlifted to the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he fell into a coma that he would not awake from until October 25, his 18th birthday.Read more

Miami-Dade County Public Schools is paying the United Teachers of Dade more than $1 million this year to subsidize the salaries of 18 union employees, according to an official M-DCPS document. Although the UTD has to reimburse the district for four of the salary subsidies -- a total of $171,827 -- it does not have to repay over $800,000.

The UTD represents the interests of more than 38,000 district employees, mostly teachers, and is currently battling the district for better salaries and benefits for its members. The revelation that the district is subsidizing the salaries of UTD employees, including President Karen Aronowitz and Vice-President Arthur Leichner, has raised eyebrows.

"The people who have to be upset are teachers," said school board member Marta Pérez. "There might be a conflict of interest where the union is representing teachers while being paid by the district."Read more

Representatives of the Miami-Dade County School District and the United Teachers of Dade met with a special magistrate Friday to decide the fate of Aralis Arca and her 12-year-old daughter.

Arca, a sixth-grade language arts teacher at Glades Middle School, has a congenital heart defect and her daughter has Type I diabetes. For four hours, she sat patiently in a conference room in M-DCPS headquarters downtown, listening to UTD lawyer Mark Richard make the case that she and the 38,000 members of the UTD bargaining unit should receive full health care coverage.

"We are down to bone marrow," Richard said in his opening statement. "They keep saying we can't impact this, we can't impact this, we can't impact this, but we can impact all these people."

In the end, he said, "the choice [is] always to take from the teachers."Read more