Ofelia San Pedro
Unhealthy Proposal: M-DCPS could take away full health care for teachers
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