Tough decision for teacher with OK to work from home

The announcement last week that teachers living with vulnerable family members are eligible to work from home should have come as a relief for Bronx elementary school teacher Tashnima Chowdhury, who shares a home with her elderly, ailing father-in-law.

Instead, the news presented an even more impossible choice.

Since the Friday announcement came so late — in-person elementary school starts Tuesday — applying for the coveted medical accommodation would mean throwing a wrench into the school’s delicately arranged staffing schedule where Chowdhury (inset) works. She teaches at Public School 536 in the Bronx.

And it means a major lastminute change for the eight third-graders she’s committed to teaching.

“It just feels like I’m abandoning them” to push for the accommodation so close to the start of class, Chowdhury said. “I don’t want to do that to them, even through I should be thinking about my family.”

“It really is frustrating,” she added. “The last-minute things they throw at us, they don’t understand how it affects us.”

Friday’s staffing agreement between the United Federation of Teachers and the city Education Department sent shock waves through a school system already stretched to the max preparing to welcome back hundreds of thousands of students to in-person school starting Tuesday.

The agreement expands the eligibility for teachers to work from home, allowing staff with no in-person responsibilities as well as those living with vulnerable family members to request remote accommodations. That means staffers whom principals were counting on to teach in-person courses, supervise lunch and help out with arrival and dismissal may wind up working from home.