The city Department of Education is standing behind its parent coordinators.
Despite a city Independent Budget Office call to save $12.8 million by making the position of parent coordinator a part-time job in small schools, education officials say they aren’t giving it a second thought.
“This initiative has been enormously successful and it would not be prudent to cut it to part-time,” DOE spokeswoman Marge Feinberg said.
Parent coordinators were introduced three years ago to serve as a liaison between parents and schools. The position pays up to $39,000 a year and exists at all of the city’s roughly 1,400 schools.
But the IBO, a nonpartisan, publicly financed agency, said in a report last week that the department could trim fat by converting the position to a part-time job in the 613 public schools that have fewer than 500 students.
The report argued that “a lack of concrete responsibilities and measurable outcomes” raise questions about the $57.5 million the department spent on the position this year.