Alum Appointed New York City’s Top School Physician

A recent New York Times feature article introduced readers to Terry Marx, MD, ’81, who was appointed to a newly created position as chief physician for the New York City Public Schools. With 1,100 elementary, junior and senior high schools throughout the city’s five boroughs, this system is among the nation’s largest. Dr. Marx has accepted the formidable challenges of developing and implementing policies to address student health care issues. From depression to asthma, health problems frequently undermine student performance.

Dr. Marx’s roots are urban. A Detroit native, she attended Cass Technical High School, and except for a pastoral undergraduate interlude at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, she has always lived and worked in large cities. Following graduation from the Wayne State School of Medicine and a pediatrics residency at Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., she and her physician-husband settled in New York City. Remaining active in pediatrics while caring for two young daughters, Dr. Marx has worked half-time since the early 1990s. She treated children and taught residents at two New York hospitals and was a supervising physician at several west side Manhattan schools where she developed a more than superficial familiarity with the complex and sometimes cumbersome workings of the city’s health and education systems.

Dr. Marx describes the clinical experience working among predominantly poor urban populations, rather than aspirations to an administrative career, as fueling her “intellectual interest in public health policy.” Motivated to study the dynamics of shaping policy and measuring outcomes, she enrolled in Columbia University’s masters program in public health and completed her degree.

The opportunity to put her knowledge and experience to work came fortuitously. New York City’s schools chancellor Harold Levy, seeking a fresh approach to the system’s efforts to meet student health needs, recruited Dr. Marx for the school system’s chief physician position. Having developed a friendship with Dr. Marx and her family, his neighbors in a Manhattan apartment building, Dr. Levy persuaded her to focus her experience, real-world judgment, and non-bureaucratic approach on the formidable tasks of overhauling the city’s school health programs. With some reluctance, she agreed.

After three months on the job, Dr. Marx observes that she remains “on the learning curve,” grappling with fragmented and uneven school health programs remaining after relentless budgetary cuts inflicted during past fiscal crises. Working to establish priorities, direct limited resources and measure the delivery of services, Terry Marx is neither discouraged nor surprised that the “job expands to fill as much time as I give it.”