the clone wars
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By Joyce Szuflita
What's in a name? Granted NYC School Help is lame. If I had thought another minute, I probably could have come up with something better, but when you search "joyce" or "help! schools" I figured it would be likely to come up in the search. Lately there has been a rash of similarly named schools that have occasionally been scrambling my brain.
There is Greene Hill School in Ft. Greene, a private Prek though 8th grade program. The Green School: An Academy for Environmental Careers is a public high school. The new Green School is a nursery school opening in Brooklyn Heights in fall of 2016. (Just in! a newish middle school in District 16: Brooklyn Green Middle School)
There is the beloved The School House run by Audrey Doyle in Ft. Greene, and the Brooklyn Schoolhouse in Clinton Hill AND the Park Slope Schoolhouse in the South Slope. All very different places.
Do you want the Little Nest (Learning Center) in Clinton Hill? or the Little Nest (Preschool) in Park Slope South? Different schools.
I have long been a fan of Little Brooklyn Playschool in Carroll Gardens, but the DoE has just rebranded a couple of their new UPK Centers (AGAIN!) as Little Brooklyn Prek - also awesome, very different (there is the one on 3rd Ave. and the one in PS 118- and the way the DoE is going, there will be others).
The Lab School is a long standing, sought after, progressive public program with an elementary, middle and high school in District 2. Brooklyn Lab School is a public high school - similar but very different in Brooklyn. Brooklyn Lab Charter School a new 6-8 charter program in Brooklyn Heights.
I am constantly trying to help families differentiate between Hunter High School (a 7-12th grade public school) on the East Side of Manhattan and Manhattan/Hunter Science High School (a 9-12 grade public school) on the West Side of Manhattan.
I haven't even begun to talk about the fact that there are public schools with the same number in several boroughs. Just because you search for your local PS in Brooklyn, doesn't mean that you haven't found the website for that number in the Bronx. Do you mean PS 3 in the West Village or PS 3 in Bed Stuy?! In the DoE code numbers “K” is Brooklyn (Kings County) NOT “B”. That is the Bronx.
When you look for a school online, make sure that you have found the one that you want.
