New DoE School Choice Rules Increase Parental Anxiety (Village Voice news blog)
No, I didn’t write the headline, but it pretty well sums up the situation. The New York City Department of Education has new rules to simplify picking schools for pre-K and kindergarteners, and the implications are clear as mud:
The city’s long-awaited changes to the school variance procedure — for non-parents, that’s code for “who gets to pick which school their kids go to, and who has to go to whatever’s the closest” — are out, and parents are already starting to buzz about what it means for the increasingly fraught world of public school admissions. While the new system was first announced last week, two subsequent community info sessions in Manhattan and Brooklyn (the other three boroughs take their turn the next two weeks), as well as conversations with the Department of Education, have begun to fill in the details:
• Principals will no longer have discretion to decide which kids to let in from outside their designated school zone. Instead, all parents will fill out a single form to apply to different programs, listing their five top choices… [read more]
February 10th, 2008 at 11:02 am
It sounds like someone from out of district who lists a school first would get in before someone in-district who lists it second. That could make people crazy–especially if it means ending up with a third- or fourth-choice school.
Seattle parents are always debating whether to list a school as a first choice even if you don’t think you have a good chance to get in; if you don’t get in, then you won’t get in to your second-choice school either because you failed to list it FIRST. Composing that sentence made my brain hurt.
February 10th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
So does Seattle also have a system where everyone who lists first gets in ahead of anyone who lists second or later? Because what I’m wondering about NYC (I’ve asked the DoE, and haven’t heard back yet) is what happens if a student doesn’t get into any schools - which actually seems pretty likely to happen a fair bit, given that the further you go down your list, the more schools will already be full by the time they get to you.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:10 am
As far as I know, everyone who lists first does not get in ahead of anyone who lists second. I think that if a person who lists Smith School second does not get their first choice, and they live closer to Smith than someone who listed it first, that person might get admitted into Smith ahead of the person who listed it first. The enrollment info says, “Your child will be assigned to this second choice school if he/she has a higher priority (based on tiebreakers) than other children requesting the school.”
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/eso/faqs_elementary.html