New Election Ordered For Teachers Union President

A challenger who was 20 votes short of becoming the teachers union president successfully overturned the results of last year’s closely contested election.

But not for any of the reasons he’d alleged in an appeal to the national union. Instead, a technicality that left 27 private school teachers and nurses off the local’s rolls invalidated the results.

Along the way, the challenger inadvertently found himself accused of blackmail and barred from mounting a rematch.

Those surprise turns sre detailed in a national American Federation of Teachers’s report, released on Tuesday afternoon, about its investigation into claims that last year’s three-way election had been run improperly.

AFT ordered a new election to be held early this fall, after teachers return from summer break. It could possibly include every contested position, even those down-ballot from the union presidency. But that outcome could also depend on whether another investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor, which is also wrapping up, reaches the same conclusions.

(Click here to download the eight-page report and a two-page summary.)

After a debate about the extent to which teachers should collaborate with Superintendent Carol Birks, who’d laid off and involuntarily transferred their members to close budget deficits, the four-term incumbent New Haven teachers union president, Dave Cicarella, was narrowly reelected.

In the preliminary results last December, Cicarella, who has held the presidency since 2006, won 392 votes. Tom Burns, the outgoing vice-president, earned 372 votes. Cameo Thorne, a trainer in restorative practices, earned 122 votes.

Burns filed a complaint arguing that the elections firm might have lost ballots and that the incumbent had unfairly campaigned through the union newsletter.

In a Tuesday email to union members, AFT President Randi Weingarten and AFT Connecticut President Jan Hochadel reported that the investigation turned up no evidence of the election tampering nor financial mismanagement that Burns had alleged.

“There were no improprieties in how the election was run, and no evidence of misuse or mismanagement of union funds by Mr. Cicarella,” Weingarten and Hochadel wrote. ​“There was no evidence of ballot tampering or ballot security issues, or of improper use of the union newsletter or other union perks to advance Mr. Cicarella’s candidacy.”

But it did uncover a bloc of more than two dozen private-school teachers and nurses — just enough to tip the race — hadn’t been given access to the ballot. That was enough, they said, to call for the election to be re-run.

The 27 members who didn’t get a chance to vote work as private-school teachers at the Cedarhurst School of Yale University’s School of Medicine, a middle and high school for students with severe special needs, and as visiting nurses in the New Haven area.

Usually, they all bring any workplace issues directly to the state chapter. ​“In 12 years, I have never taken one single phone call by a nurse,” Cicarella said. But they’re technically listed as members in the local chapter’s bylaws.

“We can’t know if these roughly 27 votes would have made a difference in the outcome of the original election, given the 20-vote margin,” Weingarten and Hochadel wrote. ​“The AFT has decided that the election must be rerun.”

While he didn’t expect the outcome, calling it ​“a little bit surprising,” Cicarella said AFT had handled the matter the right way.

“In ordering the re-run, it’s really ironic that every single issue of [Burns’s] election challenge — that I said he used drugs, that teachers didn’t get absentee ballots, that I paid people with gift cards — one after another were found to be without merit. But they went with the one thing that wasn’t even part of Tom’s challenge,” he said.

But that wasn’t the end of AFT’s ruling. As the leaders added, ​“Unfortunately, it gets more complicated.”

Amid the fall-out after the election, Burns had asked union higher-ups to open an another investigation, saying he had proof his opponent had been embezzling funds. Cicarella filed a police report of his own, saying he was being extorted.

Asked to intervene, AFT sided with Cicarella, saying an independent lawyer couldn’t find evidence that he had misappropriated funds.

“We found no evidence for Mr. Burns’ claims that Mr. Cicarella mishandled [or] misused union funds,” Weingarten and Hochadel added. ​“In fact, Mr. Cicarella’s expenditures as president are well-documented and are regularly approved by the NHFT Treasurer, Vice President (the position Mr. Burns previously held), and Finance Committee.”

Instead, they went after Burns, saying he was attempting to coerce Cicarella to step down.

“We believe such behavior by Mr. Burns constitutes extortion,” Weingarten and Hochadel said. ​“What should the consequences be when a candidate for union office uses threats to try to settle an election dispute? Our union and its leadership will not abide illegal activity of this nature by anyone for any reason.”

Burns called those claims ​“unbelievable,” saying he felt he was ​“entrapped” at a meeting with Cicarella, the union’s vice-president and a lawyer. Cicarella said that defense is ​“just plain silly,” saying Burns is trying to find an excuse because ​“he did it in front of witnesses, who are two friends of his, and he’s angry.”

AFT’s leaders said that Burns would be disqualified from running in this revote and the next election, as well as from holding any appointed office in the union during that time period.

“AFT Connecticut and the AFT will be monitoring this situation closely and working with NHFT until a new election is held successfully,” Weingarten and Hochadel concluded.