A former Rochester City School Superintendent has died. According to the website of a Washington D.C. funeral home,Clifford Janey died last week at the age of 73.
He was Superintendent of the Rochester City School District from 1995 to 2002.
Rochester Teachers Association president Adam Urbanski worked with Janey. He says at first, the union relationship with Janey wasn’t going all that well, but then, Urbanski says they got a lot better.
“After about a year into his tenure, things improved dramatically and we were able to make some real progress; he came up with some very good ideas that we supported, that served the students very well.” And Urbanski praised what he says were some of Janey’s innovations in terms of allowing students to take 5 years to finish high school if they needed to, and he also says Janey implemented a more flexible policy in dealing with the teacher’s union.
“So that not only, we didn’t have to wait for 2 or 3 years to negotiate items that were problems, but we could actually address things before they became problems, that was called a ‘living contract,’” Urbanski says.
After working in Rochester, Janey also worked as a superintendent for the school system in Washington DC and in Newark, New Jersey.
