When Martine Guerrier was named "chief mom" by Mayor Bloomberg last year, relations between parents and education officials were at a frosty standstill.
A year into the job, Guerrier believes she has opened avenues of communication and parent participation - but critics maintain friction still runs deep.
"I think she's trying, but she's attached to the word DOE [Department of Education]. She's getting the backlash," said Brooklyn parent and activist Zakiyah Ansari.
Some parents say they believe Guerrier has abandoned her watchdog role and instead walks in lockstep with the administration.
"It's a difficult situation to serve two masters. Part of her wants very much to be an advocate for parents, but at the same time, she is a staffer for the Department of Education," said James Devor, a Brooklyn parent.
Guerrier was a surprising choice for the newly created $150,000-a-year chief family engagement officer slot, having repeatedly butted heads with Chancellor Joel Klein as a member of his Panel for Education Policy.
Her charge was to harness support from public school parents by bringing them under the umbrella of the new Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy, which has a budget of $15.5 million a year.
She quickly became a highly visible official, hosting a series of "Ask Martine" public meetings in every borough and creating an e-mail address of the same name so parents could easily remember it.
But the increased attention brought scrutiny.
Parent guidebooks weren't available for the first few weeks of school. Guerrier was responsible for proposing changes to school leadership teams that critics say stripped power from parents and gave it to principals. And on her watch, a citywide parents group pulled their support from the department's lobby day in Albany, and her office's Web site is still not up and running.
Guerrier told the Daily News that she was prepared for friction. "I didn't walk in believing that it would be a cakewalk, and I certainly didn't believe that it would be a giant lovefest either," she said. "There was a lot of work to be done."
She acknowledges bumps in the road but believes her office has made tangible changes, particularly in providing translation services and holding training sessions for parent leaders.
Vacancies are down from a year ago on the city's 34 Community Education Councils, all of which now have quorums, she said. And, according to the mayor's management report, more than 660,000 parent-teacher conferences were held last October, compared with about 485,000 a year earlier.
"There are days where we are wildly successful helping people with their individual issues, and I look forward to those days," she said. "And there are days when we didn't get people the answers they wanted."
Klein clearly believes that the office has been a success, telling a City Council hearing last week that he wished he had created Guerrier's position sooner. And some parents easily tick off instances where Guerrier intervened on their behalf.
"There is a definite difference because now there's a point person for the parent," said Dmytro Fedkowskyj, a parent from Middle Village and vice president of Community Education Council 24.
