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  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 28, 2002
PR-235-02
www.nyc.gov


MAYOR MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG AND CHANCELLOR JOEL I. KLEIN ANNOUNCE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION SENIOR STAFF

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein today announced five appointments to the Chancellor's senior staff at the New York City Department of Education. Joining the Chancellor's staff are:

"Chancellor Klein has assembled an extremely qualified and dedicated team of senior staffers with broad experience and superb education and management credentials," Mayor Bloomberg said. "These individuals possess the skills to effectively guide the Department of Education and share our commitment to providing the first-rate education that the children of our City deserve. I thank these capable men and women for accepting the challenges of this vital public service and look forward to working with them as we continue to improve New York City's schools."

"I am thrilled that these five renowned leaders have decided to join me in assuring that each child in this city receives the education that he or she deserves," Chancellor Klein said. "Turning around the New York City schools requires the dedicated work of nothing short of an All-Star team. With these five people, I am confident that we have assembled the greatest collection of education and management talent of any school system in America. This team is united in its commitment to provide every single student in the public school system with the tools to become productive citizens and future leaders."

Diana Lam will serve as Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning. Ms. Lam is a true visionary with a sophisticated grasp of education policy and change, and has a strong reputation for having an unrelenting focus on teaching and learning. She comes to the Department of Education from Rhode Island where she served as Superintendent for the Providence Public Schools. In Providence, Ms. Lam outlined her vision for sustained improvement by implementing a citywide literacy initiative and worked on the redesign of Providence's high schools. She overhauled the administration of Providence Schools and worked closely with the community in the development of a detailed Strategic Five-Year Plan for the Providence school district that has already produced significant results. Ms. Lam won national acclaim for her accomplishments as Superintendent in San Antonio, Texas, where she was credited with increasing student achievement dramatically. When Ms. Lam began her tenure as Superintendent in San Antonio in 1994, 42 schools were rated as low performing by the State of Texas. By 1998, only two of those schools received that rating. State tests showed as much as 30% improvements in math, 15% in reading, and 14% in writing. She also served as Superintendent in Dubuque, Iowa, and Chelsea, Massachusetts. In Chelsea, she restructured Chelsea High School to "schools-within-a-school" to eliminate tracking by race and gender, thus ensuring all students an equal access to a good education.

Kathleen Grimm has been appointed to the position of Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Administration. Ms. Grimm joins the Chancellor's team after nearly five years at the Office of the State Comptroller, where she was the Deputy Comptroller assisting H. Carl McCall in all facets of municipal fiscal monitoring. Her agency-wide responsibilities include Chair of both the IT Portfolio Management Committee and the Affirmative Action Advisory Committee. Prior to her time at the Comptroller's Office, Ms. Grimm was First Deputy Commissioner at the New York City Department of Finance, where she was responsible for all departmental operations. Ms. Grimm managed a departmental downsizing of 35 percent and played a key role in state legislative efforts to create the Tax Appeals Tribunal, an independent adjudicatory body that hears appeals of New York City business and excise tax cases. For the past seven years, Ms. Grimm has been an adjunct professor at New York Law School, teaching a course in municipal finance that provides a detailed study of the financing of state and local governments, including state and local taxes, user charges, special assessments, state and local borrowing, debt and expenditure limitations, impact of federal tax policy, and related issues of litigation. Earlier in her career, Ms. Grimm briefly taught English at Collegiode Vera Cruz in Obregón, Sonora, Mexico. Ms. Grimm has a B.A. from Manhattanville College in Westchester and graduated cum laude from New York Law School and has an L.L.M. (Tax) from New York University.

Anthony Shorris has accepted Chancellor Klein's offer to stay on with the Department of Education and will not be resigning to teach full-time at Princeton University as was previously announced. Mr. Shorris will serve as Deputy Chancellor for Operations and Planning. He will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Department as well as for overseeing the long-term planning for the Department. Prior to today's announcement, Mr. Shorris served as Deputy Chancellor for Management and Policy. For the past eighteen months, Mr. Shorris led the management re-structuring of the former Board of Education, including working with private sector teams to implement the largest reduction in central administrative staff in Board history while reducing operating costs by hundreds of millions of dollars. He also directed the creation of the schools' performance accountability systems. Mr. Shorris has served as Commissioner of Finance for the City of New York, as well as Deputy Director of the City's Office of Management and Budget. At the State level, he was the First Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In Washington, Mr. Shorris served as a member of President Clinton's first transition team. Anthony Shorris graduated from Harvard College and has a M.A. in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University.

United States Air Force Major General Marcelite (Marcie) Harris (Ret.) will serve as Chief of Staff to the Chancellor. General Harris was most recently the Director of Operations Support and Logistics Processes for the United Space Alliance, the company contracted by NASA for the launch and recovery of the space shuttle. General Harris was commissioned as an officer in the United States Air Force in 1965 and retired in 1997 as a two-star (Major) General. At the time of her retirement, Marcie was the highest-ranking female officer in the Air Force. An established leader and manager, General Harris served as the Director of Maintenance and the Deputy Chief of Staff at Air Force headquarters in Washington, D.C. She was responsible for organizing, training and equipping a workforce of more than 125,000 technicians and managers while managing an annual budget of $20 billion dollars. She was also responsible for maintaining the Air Force's $260 billion dollar Global Reach - Global Power aerospace weapons system inventory. During her tenure in the Air Force, General Harris restructured its technical training programs as Director of Technical Training and was one of the first two women air officers commanding at the U.S. Air Force Academy. She also served in President Carter's White House. General Harris has a B.A. degree in speech and drama from Spelman College in Atlanta and a B.S. degree in business management from the University of Maryland.

Michele Cahill will join the Department as Senior Counselor to the Chancellor for Education Policy. Ms. Cahill comes to the Department of Education with over twenty years of experience in youth development and community and school based collaborations to improve public education. In her last position as a senior program officer for education at the Carnegie Corporation, Ms. Cahill spearheaded the New Century High School Initiative that played a vital role in transforming a number of larger high schools into smaller, personalized learning communities that are slated to open next week. Prior to her position at the Carnegie Corporation, Ms. Cahill served as vice president of the Fund for the City of New York and director of school and community services at the Academy of Educational Development, an organization conducting education research and demonstration projects throughout the world. She was co-founder of the Academy's Center for Youth Development and Policy Research and previously directed the Communities Project at the Women's Education Institute in New York City. Ms. Cahill has a degree in urban studies from St. Peter's College, an M.A. in urban affairs from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and has also done doctoral work in Social Policy and Planning at Columbia University.

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Contact: Edward Skyler / Jerry Russo
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Thomas Antenen (DOE)
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