JERSEY CITY — More than two years after state officials announced they would return full local control to Jersey City's public-school district, local teachers are asking one question.

Why is Cathy Coyle still here?

Coyle, 71, is a retired associate superintendent who returned to the district in 2012 to act as a state monitor, at $600 a day. State and district officials say Coyle is helping transition the district from state to local control, for which there remains no timetable for completion.

Teachers want her gone, according to Ron Greco, president of the Jersey City Education Association.

"She's in classrooms fighting with teachers, she's scaring students, she's ripped down bulletin boards," Greco told The Jersey Journal, comments that district spokeswoman Maryann Dickar called "absurd" and "misinformed."

The controversy over Coyle — teachers at a recent school board meeting chanted her name mockingly, leading to an eventual smile from Coyle — comes as the district's unionized teachers are battling the district over a new contract. Negotiations, which center around the teachers' demand that the district pay more for their health care costs, are not going well. Teachers have organized protests outside schools in recent mornings.

The teachers union has long seen Coyle as an enemy. It blames her for the five-day teachers strike in 1998, saying her method of evaluating teachers was not fair. Coyle has told The Jersey Journal she considered the method a way to hold teachers accountable for their performance.

She left the district in 2000 to become a superintendent in Englewood Cliffs, but returned to Jersey City four months later. She retired in 2001 and earns a $73,764 pension in addition to her roughly $120,000 annual salary as a state monitor.

Greco said he has talked to the new governor, Phil Murphy, in recent weeks to gripe about Coyle.

"I've made it very clear to Phil Murphy, you need to get Catherine V. Coyle out of here," Greco said. "She is the problem."

A request for comment from a Murphy spokesman was not returned.

In a statement, Dickar said, "Ms. Coyle's only role has been to ensure that the district implements its improvement and transition plans as approved by the commissioner, and to provide support where needed, so that we can have a speedy return to full local control," adding that Greco declined invitations to join Coyle during classroom visits.

State education officials first announced in 2015 that it planned to return full local control to the 27,000-student district, which the state took over in 1989. In July 2017 the state Board of Education voted to grant the district control over its instruction and programming, the final administration category state officials supervise.

But the district remains technically under partial state control pending a transition plan being worked on by state and district officials, including Coyle.

At the school board's most recent meeting, Coyle told The Jersey Journal the transition was delayed a bit with the change of administrations in Trenton. She could not provide a timetable for its completion, and neither could state Department of Education spokesman Michael Yaple. Yaple declined to respond to Greco's comments about Coyle.

Sudhan Thomas, the Jersey City school board president, noted that the district is required to have a designee of the state education department while the transition to local control is ongoing.

"The choice of the commissioner's designee who is a native of Jersey City with years of experience in Jersey City, additionally in other districts allows Ms. Coyle to carry out her responsibility with a unique, personal, local Jersey City school district perspective unlike in other districts where we see designees who are transplants without local background perspective," Thomas said in a statement.

At the school board's Jan. 25 meeting, a parent complained to the board about Coyle's salary. Coyle asked this reporter to clarify the source of her state monitor salary.

"I do not get paid by the district. I get paid by the state," she said.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.