stuff to keep in mind for middle school search 2019

/
cringy queens.jpg

By Joyce Szuflita
Tours and open houses are booking now. Go to schools’ individual websites for info. There is a mania for naming schools things that often has nothing to do with what is going on in the school. Don’t judge too quickly by the name. Also, all of these schools have to cover the same curriculum and they only have three years to do it. They will often only talk about the stuff that makes them different. MOST of what they do in those 3 years will be THE SAME. It is different deal at high school where the schools can wrap up the basics required for a NYS diploma in a couple of years and you spend significant time doing AP’s, IB’s, College Now classes, electives or pre-career classes. Middle schools are more the same than they are different!

Mark Twain’s open houses don’t require an RSVP and are being held on Oct. 15 and 22 at 5-7:30.

You will be applying to schools through an online application - MY SCHOOLS
You can rank up to 12 programs. Rank in TRUE PREFERENCE ORDER. You are not guaranteed a placement from your 12. If the City can’t place you in a school you prefer, they will put you somewhere within your district where there is room. If you rank a solid list of schools that you have a good chance of getting into, you will likely get a placement from your list. If you rank a whole bunch of Hail Mary passes, you are taking a chance that you could come up with nothing that you want and you will go where the DoE places you. Expectations management! The “trick” to this is not in the ranking - it is gathering a solid list of schools that are worthy and that you could get into.

The Directories are changing. The City is no longer printing District Directories (saving trees is good), they are making a single borough-wide directory that is essentially a map and a list (not so good) and trying to develop a online search with wider information. They are distributing the Directories at school, I hope that they will put it online as a PDF shortly. Word to the wise, search the on-line listings on a laptop and in Google Chrome. Go here and then scan down to the bottom of the page and follow the prompts. You can’t apply to any school in the city as you can at elementary school. You will be limited to choosing from among your district schools, a prescribed list of boro-wide and city-wide schools. If you live in one district and attend school in another, you will get the district schools from both.

You will get one placement from a DoE school. You can apply to charter schools (they are publicly funded but privately run). You can get additional placements at charters, aside from your DoE placement, but there are not many seats at 6th grade. Unlike in previous years, you will automatically be placed on a wait-list for any DoE program that you ranked higher than the school you were placed in. These wait-lists are supposed to be numbered and it has been said that you will be able to watch your placement on them in real time…we’ll see. What will really happen? Parents will spend countless hours clicking refresh on wait-lists that never move. Why won’t they move? because the vast majority of people get only one placement. You stay where you are placed. “But,” you say, “what about all those people that the press is telling me are going to private schools?” If you get a placement at one of the coveted public options, are you going to leave fo a 20-40k option? The wait-lists at those popular schools will not move. If you get a placement at a less popular option, you might. Those will be the wait-lists that move. Expectations management.