NEW YORK – Richard Carranza, the current New York City’s Schools Chancellor announced his resignation Friday and said Meisha Ross Porter will be taking the role.
Porter will be will become the first Black woman to lead the nation’s largest school district.
“This is the great privilege of my life at this moment,” Porter said in a press conference.
“She eats, drinks, sleeps and thinks at all times about New York and the children of New York,” Carranza said of his successor.
Porter takes the role after the schools’ reopening amid the COVID-19 pandemic has largely been heralded as a success. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that New York City schools have done a “pretty good job in terms of showing the way” for the rest of the country’s schools to reopen.
Carranza cited the need for time to grieve his eleven family members and close friends who died from COVID-19.
“I feel that I can take that time now because of the place that we are in and the work that we have done together,” he said.
Carranza said the system reopened safely for children of essential workers, distributed over half a million electronic devices for remote learning, and delivered 80 millions meals to its students.
“We have stabilized the system in a way no one thought possible,” he added. “The light, my fellow New Yorkers, is truly at the end of the tunnel.”
Porter, who has been a teacher, assistant principal, principal and school founder, is currently the Bronx Executive Superintendent and the daughter of a teacher growing up in Queens.
“At the end of the day, it’s about the tireless dedication we have to every student every step of the way. It’s about early mornings and late nights, doing all the work that no one will ever see you do so that we can show up, so that we can create opportunities at schools so students can learn every day,” Porter said.
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