Newark superintendent Cerf is no show at first board meeting
Christopher Cerf, Gov. Chris Christie’s latest whimsical choice to run the state’s largest school district, was a no-show Tuesday at his first school board meeting. Although no one on the board explained or even mentioned his absence, this site has learned the often luckless private entrepreneur and sometime public official was having a date with his wife to celebrate their wedding anniversary.
“It was planned,” said Brittany Chord Parmley about her boss’s absence. She is the public relations person for the state-operated Newark school district, brought on earlier this year when Cami Anderson, Cerf’s appointee and predecessor, actually believed she had a long future with the Newark schools. Parmley previously worked for Michelle Rhee, the disgraced former Washington DC superintendent mother of all school “reformers,” and Arnold Schwartzenegger who is, well, who he was.
Parmley refused to say why Cerf, the Newark superintendent since July 8, would miss his much anticipated public debut as the latest state overseer of the Newark schools. Board members, however, revealed privately that Cerf had told them he had planned something special to do with his wife on the day he was supposed to introduce himself to the skeptical people of Newark to whom he has, sort of, promised a return to local control in return for a three-year contract worth $250,000 a year–about $100,000 more than he was making as state education commissioner. He had been working for Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify but that company has not done well lately.
The state has run the Newark school district, with varying degrees of failure and ineptitude, for 20 years.
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