Thursday, 4:30 PM
Former deputy tapped to lead city health department
By Stephen Smith, GLOBE STAFF
Mayor Thomas M. Menino wasted little time finding a new chief for the city’s health department, and he looked no further than the city’s school system.
Menino plans to ask the board of the Boston Public Health Commission Tuesday to approve his selection of Barbara Ferrer as executive director of the agency, which has about 1,200 employees and is the nation’s oldest public health department, founded by Paul Revere. Ferrer is completing her second year as headmaster at Parkway Academy of Technology and Health in West Roxbury.
The mayor chose Ferrer two weeks after the agency’s veteran boss, John Auerbach, was selected by the Patrick administration to be the state’s public health commissioner.
For Ferrer, 51, the appointment marks a homecoming to the department’s headquarters at 1010 Massachusetts Ave. For more than five years, she was deputy director, forging a tight working relationship with public health specialists and, perhaps even more crucially, with Menino.
In an interview Monday, the mayor could scarcely contain his ebullience about the appointment.
"She’s the best, isn’t she?" said Menino, criticized in the past for taking too long to fill top positions. "When she told me the other night she would take the job, I was flying high."
During her earlier tenure at the health department, Ferrer earned a national reputation for her work on topics as diverse as health disparities, AIDS, and infant mortality.
"Barbara is a highly regarded, extremely knowledgeable, and accomplished public health official," said Geoffrey Wilkinson, executive director of the Massachusetts Public Health Association, a confederation of local and state health officials. "I know she has a good relationship with the mayor, which is important for such a powerful and sensitive job."
