Carmen Fariña on Thursday visited her first school as Mayor de Blasio’s chancellor, and dodged questions about how she would carry out his promised policy to restrict charter schools.
Asked if she was for or against charters, Fariña said, “I think for or against is very strong — so stay tuned and we will have a protocol on that.”
She said changes are coming at the Department of Education but “at this moment, there have been no decisions made about any personnel issues.”
Fariña visited three classrooms at MS 223, The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology, in the Mott Haven section of The Bronx, explaining that she chose it because one of her first-year priorities is middle schools.
“They are very dear to my heart and this is something I can get really going fast,” she told reporters. “I really believe if we get middle school right, the rest is going to be a piece of cake.”
“We know by the seventh grade who is going to graduate in the 12th grade,” she said.
In one of the classrooms, she pointed out how noisy it was — which she loves.
“Guys, you hear the noise around the room?” she asked reporters. “That’s good. I only like schools with kids talking and buzzing and when they are actually learning and when there are two teachers in the room.”
Fariña, 70, a former teacher in Brooklyn, a principal in Manhattan and deputy schools chancellor, is known as an advocate of early education and a longtime adviser to de Blasio on education matters.
De Blasio campaigned on a pledge to begin a citywide pre-K program, and also criticized the Bloomberg administration’s focus on student testing, the closure of failing schools and the expansion of charters that share space with public schools.
But Fariña wasn’t ready to talk specifics Thursday. “Give me a break, it’s my first day on the job,” she joked to reporters.
She began the day, the first after the school system’s holiday recess, by going to DOE headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
And how did she spend the rest of her full day running the nation’s largest school system?
“I drank a lot of coffee. I skipped lunch,” she said. “And I tried to figure out how do I talk to everybody in the building in a very programmed way.”
“So I’ve had many, many conversations,” Fariña added. “And for at least the next week I will be having a lot more conversations . . . to get smarter about what’s going on and also that people can share with me what they are doing that they really feel successful about so we can start thinking about how to duplicate more of those successes.”