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The UFT gave out $5,000 college scholarships to 200 high school seniors and nine graduate students at the 56th annual Albert Shanker College Scholarship Awards Ceremony on June 3 at UFT headquarters.

“A long time ago, all the teachers in the city of New York, along with your paraprofessionals, counselors, therapists and other educators, came together and said, ‘These are our children, and we want to give back,’” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the scholarship winners. “That’s how this scholarship fund came to be.”

Each year, the UFT gives union-funded Shanker scholarship awards to academically excellent and financially eligible New York City public high school seniors and graduate students. Since 1969, the program has given out nearly $54 million in scholarship money to more than 10,800 public high school seniors and graduate students.

Among the recipients this year were Marieme Diouf and Mame Ndiaye, two seniors at Manhattan’s Liberty HS Academy for Newcomers, who both immigrated to New York from Senegal in 2022. Both are bound for the University of Albany, SUNY, where they plan to share a dorm room, with Diouf studying marketing and Ndiaye studying genetics.

Diouf said she was so nervous about her chances of winning the scholarship that she was afraid to check her email on the day the award letters came. “I’m so relieved,” she said. “I was going to take out more loans, but now I’ll be better able to go away for college.”

Diouf and Ndiaye, together with two of their classmates who also won scholarships, were accompanied to the ceremony by Suzanne Epstein, the college counselor and a teacher at Liberty HS. Epstein described all four students as hard workers who take great joy in learning.

She recalled that Diouf, who was in Epstein’s AP French class in the 2024–25 school year, used to play on her phone or have side conversations with her peers during class.

Jonathan Fickies

Albert Shanker College Scholarship Fund Director Joseph Usatch lauds the winners.

“But I realized that if you gave her something that excited her, no one could distract her,” said Epstein. The two had a series of conversations about “discipline and passion,” and Epstein enjoyed watching her student start to make better decisions in class. By the end of the year, Epstein said she was “blown away” by Diouf’s growth.

Joseph Usatch, the director of the scholarship fund, reflected on the many challenges this year’s scholarship recipients have overcome. He pointed out that this class of students was in 6th grade when the COVID-19 pandemic closed school buildings.

“You had to push forward and endure during very uncertain times,” he told the students. “And here you all are today: resilient, confident and ready to make a real difference.”

Mulgrew told the students to expect to hear from Usatch and his colleagues at the fund throughout their college years, as the college fund staff connect students with resources for academic support, mental health and more.

Epstein sees the Albert Shanker College Scholarship Fund’s support for high school students as an extension of the support that she and her fellow high school educators provide their students.

“This scholarship is a deeper way of teachers saying to our students, ‘We’ll have your back,’” she said. “If every teacher had a million dollars, every one of us would be doing this for our students, and our ����ֱ��is an extension of us.”

While the mood of the ceremony was celebratory, Mulgrew, a high school teacher himself, gave voice to the “bittersweet” feelings that educators experience around graduation.

“Whether you know it or not,” he told the students, “our life’s work is you.”