Unlike New York City’s outgoing first lady, Tracey Collins keeps a low profile — in fact, she was conspicuously absent during her partner Eric Adams’ mayoral campaign and Tuesday victory parties in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

And when the mayor-elect takes over City Hall next year, the unmarried couple may face some ethical challenges. Collins, 58, works for the city’s Department of Education as a school administrator, and Adams would effectively be her boss.

“We will ask for [the Conflict of Interest Board’s] guidance,” Adams’ spokesman, Evan Thies, told The Post.

It’s a job Collins has held since 2008, according to public documents, which also show that she took home $173,710 last year.

“She gets up at dawn to run the largest school system in the United States,” Adams, 61, wrote of his longtime girlfriend in his 2020 vegan lifestyle book, “Healthy at Last: A Plant-based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes.” He noted that Collins typically worked “12 hours a day. She never gets a break.”

According to Thies, Adams has previously said that Collins will not have a role in his administration. It’s unknown if she will move into Gracie Mansion when the mayor-elect is sworn into office in January.

In fact, little is known about the couple’s relationship. According to public records, Collins grew up in New Orleans and lives in a high-rise two-bedroom apartment overlooking the Hudson River in Fort Lee, NJ, where Adams has said that he spends his weekends. Adams has long owned a home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but has lately been dogged with questions about where he spends most of his time.

In addition to working as an educator, Collins is the author of “Sweet Promptings,” a 2007 inspirational book for which Adams, then a state senator representing Brooklyn, wrote the introduction. It’s not clear if they were dating at the time, and even a fellow lawmaker who was close to Adams during his years on the state Senate told The Post they had no recollection of Collins. Back then, Collins worked in his Albany office as chair of his Educational Task Force. (Adams was a state senator representing Brooklyn from 2006 to 2013, when he was elected Brooklyn borough president.)

“Scholars are learners that get smarter, wiser and kinder everyday,” wrote Collins, who is a former teacher and principal at schools in New Orleans and New York City. In her book, she describes spontaneous acts of kindness. Collins wrote how she decided to give away her old car to a single mother “so [the woman] could bring her children to school, their place of faith, and get to work with some degree of sanity herself. The car was not given to her out of pity, but out of an authentic concern for her wellbeing and happiness that would cascade out to her family.”

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book was earmarked for victims of Hurricane Katrina in Collins’ hometown, Adams noted in the introduction.

In 2010, Collins and Adams collaborated on a billboard campaign throughout Brooklyn called “Stop the Sag” to encourage youth to literally pull up their pants.

“Have pride in your appearance: If you raise your pants, you’ll also raise your image” was the rallying cry of the campaign, created in conjunction with Collins’ Brooklyn-based nonprofit Fully Persuaded for Children and Families. The “youth development” charity was incorporated in 2007 and shut down in 2015, according to public records.

The saggy pants look “is one of those issues that impact young people greatly. They walk into classrooms, they walk into schools … and people make an assessment about their appearance,” said Collins about the campaign in a March 2010 press release on Adams’ Senate Web site.

Collins did not hit the 2021 campaign trail with Adams, who, throughout his career as a police officer and a lawmaker, has always been intensely private about his personal life.

“Throughout my entire police career, none of my colleagues knew I had a son,” said Adams during a June press conference at his Bed-Stuy home. Adams is the father of Jordan Coleman, 25, and Justin Coleman, 19. The mayor-elect and their mother, former Daily News reporter Chrisena Coleman, never wed and split up when Jordan was 2 years old, Adams previously told The Post.

Despite the secrecy surrounding his immediate family, Adams invoked his beloved mother Dorothy Adams, a housecleaner and cook, in a campaign ad, and even emotionally carried her portrait to the polling place where he voted Tuesday. Dorothy Adams, who singlehandedly raised her six children in Brooklyn and Queens, died in March at age 83.

“Eric is the kind of person who keeps his girlfriend out of his business,” said a Queens political operative who has known Adams for decades. “He runs his own stuff. When he was in Albany, he always went on the train by himself. She’s not going to be like de Blasio’s wife. She is just not going to be in the picture.”

Collins is not likely to be involved with city government as first lady Chirlane McCray has been over New York Mayor de Blasio’s two terms in office. McCray was formerly head of the city’s embattled ThriveNYC, which spent $1.2 billion on mental health initiatives since it was launched in 2015, raising questions about its spending and effectiveness and lack of information on the overall goals of the program. She is expected to be front and center if de Blasio runs for governor next year.

Despite Collins’ low public profile, Adams described her as his soulmate in his recent book.

“We do everything together, and I wasn’t ready to jump onboard unless she was,” wrote Adams, who convinced Collins to join him on his health quest. “Tracey and I aren’t people who do something half way. So … we threw out every single unhealthy food in our kitchen.”

“I was worried about … Tracey, who had been diagnosed with pre-diabetes,” he wrote. “She … oversees schools in Brooklyn and The Bronx. I have never met anyone more devoted to her job than Tracey. She was so devoted, in fact, that she sacrificed her own health for the sake of New York’s children.”

Adams recalled that the diet, on which they each lost more than 30 pounds, was especially hard on Collins, who “emptied out food storage containers filled with her signature dishes,” he wrote. “They were old favorites that made her think of her childhood, including the jambalaya with chicken that her mother used to make.”

Instead, the couple “rekindled” their love of cooking, heading to the kitchen to make vegan pot pie with cornbread crust and coconut milk and vegan gumbo with beans and okra.

Calls to Collins went unanswered.

Election night victory speeches aren’t for policy, nor governing. But they aren’t meaningless. Through his words and demeanor Tuesday night, Eric Adams showed a radical change in tone at the top.

Taking the stage in downtown Brooklyn, the mayor-elect showed a mixture of joy in his personal accomplishment and awe of his new responsibilities, a combination that is hard to fake.

He wasn’t merely pleased; he was shell-shocked giddy. Adams got on his knees and broke into a broad smile. “I’m the mayor,” he said.

Nobody expects oratorical brilliance on election night, and Adams didn’t break the mold. 

He was gracious to his supporters: “if they only knew the level of energy I get when I walk in your crowd,” he said. He spoke movingly of his mother — “Mommy” — and her example as a Queens housekeeper and cook.

Adams basked in his success — and said that he owed much of it to city and country. “It is the proof that this city can live up to its promise,” he said, that a poor son of a cleaner and a butcher could become mayor.

He offered himself as an inspiration to the “person cleaning bathrooms and the dishwasher in the kitchen,” the person in a homeless shelter or in a holding cell.

“America is the only country, we are the only country on the globe where ‘dream’ is attached to our name,” he said. “There is an American dream.” 

Adams spoke of New York’s diversity. “It doesn’t matter if you are in Borough Park in the Hasidic community, if you’re in Flatbush in the Korean community, if you’re in Sunset Park in the Chinese community,” he said. “Today we . . . put on one jersey, team New York.”

Finally, he hit up Gotham’s better-off citizens. “We’re going to talk to the CEOs” and “ask them to offer paid internships to students from underserved communities.” 

Compare Adams’s demeanor and words with those of his predecessor.

Eight years ago, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio inherited record-high jobs numbers and a record-low crime level. Worth a grin, right? 

Yet in his victory speech, de Blasio barely managed to crack a wan smile. He didn’t offer himself as a personal inspiration; he didn’t have any direct words of hope for people watching from homeless shelters.

Instead, de Blasio clung to the words of his lackluster campaign, abstract concepts seemingly cooked up by a bored grad student for a master’s thesis.

“The people of this city have chosen a progressive path,” he said woodenly, moving mechanically onto his already-stale “Tale of Two Cities” theme. “Progressive changes won’t happen overnight.” 

De Blasio, too, had an “ask” for New York’s most fortunate: “we call on the wealthiest among us to pay just a little more in taxes.” Unlike Adams, he wasn’t thinking of life-transforming jobs but a bigger city budget. 

Blas eight years ago offered bogeymen to slay: disasters that the city would have to overcome. But they were largely imagined. He had little to fret about besides “the growing inequality we see.” He warned that “there will be many obstacles that stand in our way” but couldn’t name any.

Adams doesn’t have to manufacture his urban monsters; he faces nothing but problems. “Midtown turned into a ghost town, and our parking lots became morgues,” Adams reminded New Yorkers Tuesday. “We saw the most vibrant city on earth reduced to silence.”

The incoming mayor’s “three-headed crisis” — “COVID, crime, and economic devastation” — is not a grad student’s bloodless thesis.

In fact, Adams’s only negative note was an allusion to the current officeholder. “You pay your taxes . . . and we have failed to provide those goods and services,” he said. “January 1 . . . that betrayal stops.” 

Eight years ago, de Blasio made it clear that he would be accountable . . . for nothing. He chose the passive voice: “problems . . . will not be solved overnight.” He got that right.

Adams embraces responsibility. “I will be the person in charge of that precinct,” he said of the NYPD. “I will be the mayor in charge of the entire Department of Education.”

Yes, he will, and in 57 days, we’ll see what he does with it. 

Meanwhile, Adams is having fun. After his speech, the mayor-elect, sporting a glittery blue patterned jacket, hit up a private NoHo club, Zero Bond. Why not bring a little midnight glamour back to Gotham while you still have time? It’s more exciting than the Park Slope YMCA in the middle of a sleepy morning. 

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, from whose Web site this is adapted.