New Schools Chancellor Cathie Black hit the ground running this morning on her jittery first day on the job — touring a Bronx school and saying that she is “going to learn more” by visiting with parents and teachers in the coming year.
“We had a great visit here,” Black said after visiting PS 109 in the Morris Heights section. “It’ very exciting for me, but it’s all about the PTA, the principal and the great teachers.”
Principal Amanda Baltter said Back told a first-grade class, “This is new, this is my first day on the job and I’m nervous just like you would be on your first day of school.”
Black’s visit came a day after State Education Commissioner David Steiner granted Black a waiver to become the city’s next schools chancellor — ruling that her business and financial expertise trumped her lack of education credentials.
The approval — which the publishing executive needed to serve as schools chief because she doesn’t have a superintendent’s license — caps a tumultuous three-week period during which supporters and opponents battled over whether her proven business acumen was enough to run the city’s 1,600 public schools.
In his 12-page letter, Steiner indicated that Black’s willingness to appoint veteran educator Shael Polakow-Suransky as her second in command played a role in approving the waiver.
Asked about the waiver and the process that led her to get the job, Black said, “The mayor has said right from the beginning in our first conversation [is]: ‘What I need is a very experienced manager whose used to complex organization, who’s a decision-maker and is a very good people person,’ and he chose me.”
Black also said she plans to visit more schools, calling herself “an outreach person historically and I look forward to it because that’s where I am gong to learn more.”
She said her biggest challenge in the foreseeable future is the budget.
“Those are hard decisions, but I’ve got a great team,” she said, referring to Polakow-Suransky.
Although half the members of an eight-person state advisory panel voted last week to deny Black a waiver, Steiner said the other half viewed “positively” the appointment of Polakow-Suransky as the city’s first-ever chief academic officer.
It was a solution Steiner lobbied for early last week as a middle ground between simply granting or denying the waiver.
Mayor Bloomberg agreed to it and tapped Polakow-Suransky by week’s end.
Critics like State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) and other elected officials said they’re mulling a legal challenge to the waiver approval — arguing that Polakow-Suransky’s experience shouldn’t have been considered in the process.