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Chancellor David Banks wants you to know he won’t be like other school bosses if mayoral control is extended.

Banks made an eleventh-hour pitch at a legislative breakfast Friday for a measure that allows for mayoral control over the city’s public schools to be extended, vowing his approach would involve parent voices’ in decision-making.

“Mayoral control is what is written up in the legislation, but nobody wants to be ‘controlled,'” Banks told key lawmakers, including State Sen. John Liu, who heads New York City education committee, and parent leaders in attendance.

Banks joined Mayor Eric Adams and a team of City Hall staffers in Albany to lobby for the extension this week, as the measure is slated to expire next month.

“We heard from so many legislators different stories, different anecdotes,” he said of the trip. “But it all kept coming back to the same thing — a lack of communication, a lack of respect, not having a voice, not having a seat at the table.”

That kind of parental involvement has been a sticking point for some lawmakers and advocates during the negotiations, The Post has reported. Still on the table upstate are proposals to add more parent representation to the city’s Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), its pseudo-school board.


  State Sen. John Liu said he’s striving to get “some parent voices” into the Department of Education. Hans Pennink State Sen. John Liu said he’s striving to get “some parent voices” into the Department of Education. Hans Pennink

Banks promised to engage parents through groups like the Citywide Council on High Schools, which hosted the event, and the parent-led Community Education Councils in each district — not make decisions on his own, “and then people ask the parents to come in and stand with them as a photo op,” he said.

“I can say I’m the Chancellor, and I can walk around like I’m all that — but you can only move the system but so much if you think it’s about one man, one person, one mayor.”

Liu, who alongside other lawmakers is leading the negotiations, told The Post the majority of members on the PEP should still be made up of Adams’ appointees, but he wants to give parents a “much more meaningful” mechanism for input and to get responses from the Department of Education.


  Mayor Eric Adams admitted in a press conference that he has “no power over” Albany’s final decision over mayoral control. Robert Miller Mayor Eric Adams admitted in a press conference that he has “no power over” Albany’s final decision over mayoral control. Robert Miller

“There have been some parent voices that haven’t been heard,” Liu said.

Adams, too, weighed in at an unrelated press conference in Brooklyn on Friday, saying he has to “run the city based on what comes out of Albany.”

“They make a determination. I have no power over what their final determination is,” he said. “I was up there. We presented, I brought my team up there. We sold a good product.”

Additional reporting by Bernadette Hogan

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