The School District of Philadelphia has chosen someone from within its own ranks to replace Michael P. Marcase, who resigned as superintendent in July after a stormy, seven-year tenure.
Last week, the city’s board of education selected Constance E. Clayton, who has been the district’s associate superintendent for early-childhood education since 1978.
She will be the first woman and first black to head the 201,000-student school system, the fifth largest in the country.
Ms. Clayton, who was born in Philadelphia and holds a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania, was chosen over two other finalists, Richard Hanusey, another Philadelphia associate superintendent, and Wilmer S. Cody, superintendent of schools in Birmingham, Ala.
She joined the Philadelphia school system as a teacher in 1955. Before shifting to early-childhood studies in 1972, she worked in social-studies curriculum development and African and Afro-American studies.
City and school officials in Boston have been named in a $3-million civil-rights lawsuit filed on behalf of a former student who was paralyzed three years ago when he was struck by a sniper’s bullet during a high-school football game.
The suit charges that school and law-enforcement officials “knew or should have known that holding an interracial event in Charlestown [a predominantly white neighborhood] would pose a grave peril to the safety of black persons,” according to Edward J. Barshak, the attorney representing the former student, Darryl Williams, and his family.
On Sept. 28, 1979, when he was 15 years old, Mr. Williams was shot in the neck at the Charlestown High School field during a football game between that school and Jamaica Plain High School, where he was a student. Mr. Barshak said the suit contends that city and school officials should have anticipated trouble and provided the proper protection.
The suit names Mayor Kevin H. White, Robert Wood, the former school superintendent, current and former members of the Boston School Committee, and the headmasters and athletic directors at the two schools at the time of the incident.
