On his first school day as head of New York City’s public school system, Chancellor Dennis Walcott visited a school that is slated to be closed and promised students he would not forget about them.
“Just because a school is going through a transition doesn’t mean that we’re going to forget about our students at all,” Walcott said at Paul Robeson High School, which will be phased out starting in September. He said he would create a network of people to support schools while they are being closed. Details, he said, will come later.
Earlier Wednesday, Walcott answered questions on the John Gambling radio show and then visited Public School 69 on Staten Island.
Walcott’s appointment was announced April 7 after publishing executive Cathie Black resigned from the chancellor’s post. Black made few unscripted public appearances during her rocky three months on the job and rarely seemed at ease among schoolchildren. Two polls pegged her approval rating at 17 percent.
Walcott, a one-time kindergarten teacher and former head of the Urban League who spent the last eight years as a deputy mayor under Bloomberg, has said he hopes to calm the rhetoric on contentious issues like closing schools and forcing traditional public schools to share space with charter schools.
“We have to focus the debate on what is in the best interests of our children,” he said on Wednesday’s radio show.
One of the Department of Education’s most controversial policies under the Bloomberg administration has been its campaign to close schools that it deems are failing, often replacing them with clusters of smaller schools in the same building. Two fledgling schools will occupy the Robeson campus as Robeson shuts down.
Walcott said he was spurred to visit Robeson by student Lizabeth Cooper, who is the nonvoting student member of the Panel for Educational Policy, the citywide body that makes the final vote to close schools. Cooper made an impassioned plea for Robeson at the meeting where its fate was sealed.
“I made a commitment to her that I would come to the school,” Walcott said.
Cooper, 17, said it’s hard for students to learn that their school is closing.
“Honestly, the spirit is down,” she said.
Fellow student Ninoshka Leguillo, 16, said closing Robeson is “a bad idea.“
“We’re actually like a family in the school,” she said. “Shutting it down, you lose your confidence.“