That didn’t take long.
Just two weeks after she took the job of schools chancellor, Cathie Black has already put her foot in her mouth — reportedly telling parents that her solution to overcrowded schools is “birth control.”
“Could we just have some birth control?” Black said during a meeting of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s school overcrowding task force on Thursday in lower Manhattan.
“It would really help us out a lot,” she added.
The joke drew some laughs from the audience and came after Eric Greenleaf, a PS 234 parent and NYU professor, presented findings that showed lower Manhattan will need another 1,000 elementary seats by 2015, DNAinfo.com reported today.
In another bone-headed comment, Black told a parent after the 35-minute forum that the impending budget cuts she had to make are like trying to decide which child should be killed.
“I don’t mean this in any flip way. It is many Sophie’s choices,” she said, in a reference to the book in which a mother in the Auschwitz death camp has to decide which of her two children will live, The Tribeca Trib reported.
Parent Tricia Joyce said she was appreciative that Black came to the meeting, but that her answers — and her comparisons to the Holocaust in the case of the ‘Sophie’s Choice’ reference — were worrisome.
“Everybody’s face fell. You don’t want to hear that reference when you’re talking about children,” said Joyce, whose kids attend the perennially overcrowded PS 234 in Tribeca. “She could have been nervous, it could have been the first thing that came to her mind. … I just hope she chooses to do something much better than what she says.”
Some who attended the meeting said Black’s comments were especially inappropriate given the serious context of a community that for years has fought to overcome a lack of access to public school seats.
“Those kinds of comments show a lack of understanding of what parents are going through. It’s a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding,” said Julie Menin, chair of Community Board 1, who added that the latest data showed 970 births downtown last year.
“The parents I spoke with after the meeting were very concerned about the comments she made because we’re grappling with real issues,” she added.
DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz declined comment.
Mayor Bloomberg’s controversial pick drew criticism last month from critics who said the former Hearst Magazines chairwoman had no experience in the field of education to successfully do the job.
Black took over for former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein last week.
“For me, this is a dream. It’s a dream job, a dream opportunity, a chance to make a difference,” Black said at PS 262 in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the first stop on her five-borough tour on Jan. 3.
Despite Bloomberg’s backing, many New Yorkers opposed her appointment. A Quinnipiac University poll showed city voters believed by a 2-1 margin that Black was not qualified for the job.