UFT Admin
- Retired teacher
Jackie Bennett, a former special assistant to UFT President Michael Mulgrew, PROSE program director and English teacher who was the architect of the groundbreaking teacher evaluation matrix, died on June 23 from the effects of frontotemporal dementia. She was 67.
Jackie was a high school English teacher for 18 years, first at Abraham Lincoln HS in Brooklyn and then at the Michael J. Petrides School on Staten Island, where she was chapter leader from 2003-2009. She was also a UFT Executive Board member and a NYSUT/AFT Convention delegate.
Jackie was a part-time UFT staff member from 2002 until 2009, when she became a special representative in the Staten Island borough office. In September 2014, Jackie was appointed UFT staff vice president, assistant to President Mulgrew and director of the new PROSE (Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence) program. She retired in September 2021 with 32 years of service. On Teacher Union Day that year, she received the David Wittes Award for the instrumental role she played in the UFT’s response during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“One of Jackie’s many gifts was the ability to look at a problem that had stumped everyone else and come up with a solution that not only protected UFT members but uplifted our profession,” Mulgrew said. “She was uniquely talented, and we all are feeling the loss.”
Former Staten Island Borough Representative Emil Pietromonico said he met Jackie when he was a district representative and she was chapter leader at the Petrides school. She was a kind, caring person, but she did not hesitate to turn into a pit bull to advocate for members, he said. “She was one of the best chapter leaders on Staten Island – ever,” he said.
Jackie also stood out for her brilliance, said Pietromonico, a former math teacher. While she was developing a new teacher evaluation system that incorporated student learning measures beyond standardized testing, she called him on a Friday and told him she needed to learn differential calculus quickly. He gave her some resources. “By Monday morning, she understood it,” he said.
“She was a very unique individual, and there should be a plaque somewhere in the building for her,” he said. “She was that special.”
Tom Bennett, her husband and a recently retired UFT special representative, said the two met at SUNY Stony Brook University in 1979. She led the way into teaching, and he followed and became a history teacher. They both had a love of scholarship going into the field and became devoted to their students and their practice, he said. Jackie pursued her love of literature and won a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England one summer.
Jackie was an expert on teacher evaluation, testing and accountability. In negotiating the teacher evaluation system in Albany, she convinced the governor and legislative leaders to combine other measures besides student test scores and developed the matrix, he said. “Thousands and thousands of teachers are evaluated under Jackie’s system.”
In 2014, Mulgrew charged her with developing PROSE with the city Department of Education. The program allows school communities to modify aspects of their contracts to support teaching and learning, allow for experimentation and innovation, and give educators a meaningful role in developing policy and solutions. “We’re really encouraging schools to be more thoughtful” and “to share that thinking with us so that other schools could benefit,” Jackie said in a 2017 AFT American Educator article.
Current PROSE program Director Sally-Ann Bongiovanni-Famularo said Jackie was a mentor who taught her how to write contract language and imparted her extensive knowledge of APPR. Jackie, a diminutive figure, was “small but mighty,” smart, principled and “beyond meticulous,” Bongiovanni-Famularo said. She painstakingly evaluated issues through the lens of how members would be affected and ensured they would be protected. “If she thought something was wrong, she went after it with a vengeance,” she said.
Bongiovanni-Famularo said Jackie was the boss, but she never insisted that her way of doing things was the only way. “She gave me the room to figure it out, which is why she was such an incredible mentor to me,” she said.
Christina Collins, UFT director of educational policy, worked with Jackie to develop the PROSE program and how contracts and approvals would work. Jackie was a ball of energy and had a rapid-fire brain, Collins said. “She would really be a high-energy advocate arguing for things that she thought would be best for students and our members in the schools.”
The process was not always a smooth one, but Jackie was recognized as “somebody who was very authentically who she was” and “really believed in what she was arguing” on behalf of members and students, Collins said.
Michele Le Coz, UFT chief operating officer, said Jackie “had a rare ability to take complicated policies, contracts and evaluation systems and measure them against what educators were actually experiencing in their schools and classrooms,” and she consistently brought educators’ voices and their day-to-day realities to her work.
“Her legacy can be seen not only in the programs and protections she helped create, but also in the educators and school communities whose working lives were made better because she was willing to listen, challenge assumptions and insist that policy reflect reality,” Le Coz said.
UFT Assistant Treasurer Tom Brown said Jackie had a brilliant mind and was a wonderful and inspiring human being, he said.
“When she spoke, people looked at her in awe,” he said. “She was a well-loved, well-respected individual.”
The two bonded at a managerial training on people skills they attended in the late 1990s. Part of the training involved participants practicing eye contact and winking at one another, which they thought was a little silly. Afterward, an exaggerated wink became their signature greeting whenever they saw each other. “It’s amazing how a wink just brought us together,” he said.
Bennett said his wife was “filled with abundant joy” and love; she was also blunt and had very little filter. In fact, said Bennett, Pietromonico called Jackie and him “pathological truth-tellers.” Jackie wrote poetry and music and penned two novels, and she had a mathematical brain that could recognize patterns. In her free time, she knitted “the most magnificent sweaters,” he said.
The couple shared a great love for Sweetie, a stray cat they rescued. In addition to Bennett and Sweetie, Jackie is survived by her brothers, Sal and Angelo Costa, and a sister, Josephine Lake.
A memorial service is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, Matthew Funeral Home, 2508 Victory Blvd., Staten Island.
