City officials named an education administrator and parent to head its most prestigious public school in the wake of a widespread student cheating scandal.
Jie Zhang, who started her schools career as a teacher in 1988, was tapped as interim chief of Stuyvesant HS in Manhattan.
Zhang’s 15-year-old daughter is a junior at the Battery Park school, and her son is a 2008 graduate who this year earned a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.
The 52-year-old recently had a five-year stint at the helm of Queens HS for the Sciences at York College — which, like Stuyvesant, is one of the city’s nine specialized high schools that requires an exam or audition for entry.
Last year she served as an education administrator at a group that supports 30 schools, including Stuyvesant.
On Friday, Stuyvesant’s long-time principal, Stanley Teitel, announced his pending retirement amid a city probe into how his administration handled a cheating incident by more than 70 students in June.
It took the Department of Education a week to learn of the incident.
The scandal has shined a light on the school’s long-running problem with cheating, an issue Zhang said she intends to address.
“The incident, this kind of behavior, is totally not acceptable,” she told reporters by phone. “We’re not going to tolerate that.”