Kindergarten Registration….what’s next
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I got an interesting email after the post this week on Applying to a School You Aren’t Zoned For. It was a popular post with great information provided by school consultant Joyce Szuflita who has been answering questions here for readers on schooling. Her post got some people asking more questions. One question that came in for Joyce was from Jae, mom to a 4 year old. Joyce kindly got an answer for us right away. Her answer is in green below.
Hi Karen,
…..In today’s post, you mentioned that the kindergarten "registration reorganization" for next year. What is this, and how do I find out more? Does it mean that I will not necessarily get into the elementary school that I am zoned for if my child is entering kindergarten? Will it be lottery, like for pre-k?? This would be big news, and important to know more about…..Any info. would be helpful, thank you! Jae
Joyce : Parents of future kindergartners please don’t despair yet. Yes, the DOE is planning on centralizing the process for kindergarten registration next year, and yes, the pre-K registration this year was a disaster, but being an eternal optimist who only wants the best for you, I hope that the DOE will either change the process or clean it up before they subject tens of thousands of kindergartners to inept registration procedures. Frankly, if they don’t, I think they know that the Tweed Courthouse will be reduced to rubble by angry parents. The problem was that the old variance procedure wasn’t entirely uniform or necessarily fair and to give the DOE the benefit of the doubt I think that they are trying to bring some consistency to the process. (I know that all of you are rolling your eyes right now. By holding them accountable as I am sure that you all did by contacting your City Council Members, Betsy Gotbaum, and Marty Markowitz’s office, we should affect some change)
Here is why you shouldn’t despair, even if they go ahead with plans to have a lottery with priorities similar to the pre-K system (assuming that they work out the problems with the Pennsylvania firm that assigned the registrations). There is enough room in zoned schools in Brooklyn (so far) for all zoned children and maybe a few more. So there shouldn’t be an issue for siblings and zoned children to ALL have seats in their zoned school, which will then remain their school through 5th grade. Some popular schools may have a couple seats for out of zone children and those would be assigned in a possibly more equitable way. (notice I said "possibly")
You may have heard that there are some elementary schools in lower Manhattan that don’t have enough seats for all of the children in the zone. Some children were assigned to other schools within their District. So far this hasn’t happened in Brooklyn. There have been rumors that there may be trouble in paradise for the PS 321 zone, because the very large condos on 4th Ave. that have gone up in the past couple of years are in the zone. The school is already crowded at capacity. I would not be at all surprised if there were some rezoning issues there in the future, but nothing seems to be happening yet.
If you want to keep current with all information about this process I highly recommend that you get an e-mail subscription to www.insideschools.org <http://www.insideschools.org> "Alert" notices. (I am not affiliated with them in any way, I just think that they are great) And while you are at it, drop this fabulous not-for-profit a check to keep them doing the great work that they do for all us NYC Public School parents.
Joyce Szuflita
www.nycschoolhelp.com
www.mysidewalkchalk.blogspot.com
