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To serve on new Board of Ed, deputy mayors needed waivers

The mayor's signature on waivers allowing deputy mayors to serve as Board of Education members.

The mayor's signature from one of the waivers he signed.

The newly reconstituted Board of Education is stacked with three deputy mayors — but before the officials could serve on the board, they had to get waivers from Mayor Bloomberg.

That’s because of a statute in the city charter that prevents people from holding two city jobs without receiving a waiver from the mayor. Bloomberg wrote letters (read them here) authorizing Patricia Harris, his first deputy mayor; Dennis Walcott, his deputy mayor for education; and Ed Skyler, his deputy for operations to serve on the Board of Education on the same day that it met for the first time in seven years.

A deputy mayor sat on the school board as recently as the Giuliani administration, when Giuliani appointed a board member, Ninfa Segarra, as his deputy mayor. But it’s not clear to me whether three deputy mayors have ever served on the board simultaneously. (Knowledgeable readers?)

In each letter, Bloomberg explains he is waiving the prohibition because the deputy mayors won’t be compensated for their service on the board. (State law outlines $15,000 salaries for board members and $20,000 salaries for the board president, but all board members right now are waiving the salaries.) Bloomberg appointed two of the deputies to the board, Harris and Skyler. The Queens borough president, Helen Marshall, appointed Walcott, who is now president of the board.

In other new-world-order developments, Chancellor Joel Klein is declining to transform a second parent council into a community school board. The parent councils, known as community education councils, ceased to exist legally when mayoral control expired. But Klein has said he is not capable of transforming them into the community school boards that the law requires.

“There is no provision in the law for the chancellor to appoint the CEC to act as a community school board,” a spokesman, Andrew Jacob, said. “We’re urging CECs to continue meeting and are continuing to support their administrative assistants.”

Members of the CEC in District 15, which includes Park Slope, Brooklyn, and surrounding neighborhoods, asked Klein to name them as “trustees” of a community school board in a resolution passed last night (read it here). CEC members in District 1 in Manhattan also requested to transform into a community school board last week but were declined.

People familiar with the pre-mayoral control education law have told us repeatedly that it is possible for the chancellor to appoint school boards, despite Klein’s claim. They have said that chancellors before mayoral control routinely appointed “trustees” to fill under-enrolled or dysfunctional community school boards.

  • Michael M.

    “Hey Moe, can I have a waiver? Can I can I pleeeeze? I heard Larry say we’d only meet for 15 minutes. Curly bid 12. If you sign mine, I’ll make it 10, and no more meetings till September.”

    As if… the conflict of interest is about whether Bored of Ed members get paid. Given their 10 minutes of work, I say give them each a gold watch. It’s only fair. After all, it only took them 10 minutes to make the PEP look like a bunch of activists, while banking on SOME kind of Albany settlement before the nominal September meeting.

    Last, irony strikes again. Klein gets rubber-stamped (with effectively additional financial power, given the abdication of the Bored of Ed), but refuses to extend the same favor to the CEC’s. Sheesh.

    Then again, this is the same guy who tried to ban SLT members from serving on CEC’s. And those parents don’t get paid for EITHER job.

  • canwetalk

    It goes without saying that “Justice is blind”. But, justice here is also mute! Why aren’t the stakeholders and politicians confronting this abusive mayor who has used his unchecked power of breaking or twisting state education laws to his constant convenience? Everyone is complaining, but no one coming up with a solution to stop this Castro-type of stronghold on the unions and politicians, social-policy manipulation of the truth, double-talk guises of the charter laws where citizens must abide by the city’s laws except the mayor and the chancellor. This disgrace of the mayor and the chancellor misleading the people, the citizens, the children, and those who have a great deal of stake in this city should be chronicled in the annals as the Boss Tweed’s reincarnation. Corruption and deceit in any form is corruption and deceit at its best! If we do nothing about this historical travesty, the children of NY will reap what the mayor has insidiously sown – every child used for his political gains!

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