Category: School

The city Department of Education has axed another 850 teachers and classroom aids — bringing the total to nearly 2,000 school employees fired for failure to comply with a vaccine mandate struck down in court.

About 1,300 DOE employees who took a year’s unpaid leave — with benefits — agreed to show proof of COVID vaccination by Sept. 5 or be “deemed to have voluntarily resigned.”

Of those staffers, 450 got a shot by the deadline and “are returning to their prior schools or work locations,” DOE officials told The Post. They include some 225 teachers and 135 paraprofessionals.

The 850 let go makes roughly 1,950 DOE staffers terminated since the vaccine mandate took effect on Oct. 29, 2021.

Rachelle Garcia, an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn for 15 years and mother of two, worked fully in person during the pandemic and never got sick, she said.

But she refused

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was heckled on a flight Thursday over gun control and school safety policies, prompting the senator to call the heckler “a partisan.”

The senator, along with his fellow passengers, was preparing to exit the plane landing in Texas when a passenger filmed Cruz and began pressing him with questions.

“We’re in Houston? I thought we were going to Cancun,” the male voice said in a video posted to Twitter. It was an apparent reference to a family vacation Cruz took last year amid statewide power outages.

TED CRUZ’S 2022 MISSION TO NEW HAMPSHIRE FOR LEAVITT THAT COULD ALSO PAY DIVIDENDS IN 2024

The man then got the senator’s attention by saying, “Senator, thank you for everything you’ve done since Uvalde. All those podcast episodes must have raised a lot of money for you.”

ISLAMABAD — The United Nations on Sunday called for Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to reopen schools to girls in grades 7-12, calling the anniversary of their exclusion from high school “shameful.”

The UN said it is concerned that the policy, together with other restrictions on basic freedoms, will contribute to a deepening of the country’s economic crisis in the form of greater insecurity, poverty and isolation.

“This is a tragic, shameful, and entirely avoidable anniversary,” said Markus Potzel, acting head of the UN mission in Afghanistan.

A year after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, hard-liners appear to hold sway in the Taliban-led government. Teenage girls are still barred from school and women are required to cover themselves from head to toe in public, with only their eyes showing. The religious group has failed to deliver on various promises to enable girls’ return to the classroom. The ban targets grades 7-12,