Public Employee Press

Union mourns Harper‘s passing

DC 37 and Board of Education Clerical Employees Local 1251 mourn the loss of Local President Carolyn Harper, who died March 27 after a long illness. She was 66.

“Carolyn Harper was a dedicated union leader who always put the members first,” said Chris Wilgenkamp, assistant director of DC 37’s White Collar Division. Local president since 1999, she had also served as a vice president on the DC 37 Executive Board, a trustee of the union’s Health and Security Plan and treasurer of the Walt Whitman Houses Tenant Patrol Association.

As a labor leader representing all clerical-administrative employees of the Dept. of Education, Harper was on the front lines in the union’s fight for justice and jobs and against contracting out at DOE.

“My members feel like the city has knocked them down when they are starting to stand on their own,” she once said as members faced possible layoffs. “The Department of Education uses temps and consultants. We cannot let them undermine the civil service process, so we have gone to court to protect members’ jobs.”

Harper came to New York City from West Virginia and worked her way up through the ranks, starting as a provisional Typist in 1968 and becoming a permanent civil servant a year later as a Clerical Associate. She said she believed deeply in “the public education system and the members who make it work.”

Carolyn Harper is survived by her two children, Yvette Blackmon and William Harper Jr., four grandchildren who reside in New Jersey, her sister, Lilly Wooley, and two brothers, Jackie and Amos Wooley.