Though Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña spent the day visiting schools and programs that work for students and families, there are dozens of schools where students are less successful.
The city has corralled several of those schools into a group and begun to develop a scheme for turning them around, Chalkbeat reported Wednesday. But principals from some of these schools said that they came away from an introductory meeting unsure about what, exactly, the city is planning to do.
Fariña disputed that claim on Thursday, and said the city has been straightforward with the school leaders, though she wasn’t yet ready to disclose those details.
“First of all, let me be very clear. There is a coherent plan,” Fariña said at a charter school in East Harlem, the final stop on her five-borough tour on the first day of school. “Anyone who was in that room was very much aware of the coherent plan.”
De Blasio added that a moratorium on school closures, a strategy that the Bloomberg administration embraced in its final years in office, was very much still in effect.
“What you’ve not seen in the last 12 years is a coherent, energetic, purposeful effort to save schools,” said de Blasio, who said his vision “will start to be felt literally in the coming weeks.”