What happens when middle and high school offers come out?
/By Joyce Szuflita
First, patience is a virtue.
High School offers come out on Thursday, March 6.
Middle School offers come out on Wednesday, April 9.
View the DoE’s tutorial about getting your offer and info about the waitlists.
Generally offers are released after school through your MYSCHOOLS account, but roll out is often very haphazard. My recommendation for you and your child is to wait to look for, or talk about offers, until you are together at home, where you all can take the news in private surrounded by love. If it were me, I would stay off the boards, and refrain from clicking refresh a thousand times. You will just be torturing yourself. Text your friends that you haven’t heard yet, and you will call when everyone is on the same page.
When you get your HS offer “letter”, if you took the SHSAT, your score will be listed (whether you got in or not) along with your placement if you qualified. If you did a portfolio/audition for LaGuardia, you should get your score along with an offer or not. You will also get the offer from your regular list school. In the past, you would also get any assessment or audition scores from those schools, waitlisted or not.
Middle School offer “letters” are simpler. You will have one offer. You can see your waitlisted schools on that tab. If you eventually get a waitlist offer, you will have a limited time to accept or decline the offer. You can only have one accepted offer at a time, and if you take the new offer - you won’t be able to change your mind.
How it goes down:
In the past, a few offers have shown up very early and then been removed. If you see an offer page - take a screenshot right then, just in case it disappears for a short or long while. It will come back eventually, but you will feel like you are going insane in the meantime.
Offers can roll out over time. Your friends may see their offer, but yours may not show up yet. Breathe. It sucks, but nothing is wrong. They just can’t roll it all out at one time.
Charter and Private School students may possibly have to wait even longer. If it take longer than a day to get your offer - contact HSEnrollment@schools.nyc.gov
The MYSCHOOLS website will crash or be glitchy. It is 70,000+ people refreshing over and over for hours.
Click on the waitlist tab for that information, and/or to add your name to an additional waitlist if you like. You will see your ranking on that waitlist. Just being on a waitlist doesn’t mean that you have an offer. If you get a waitlist offer sooner or later, you can accept it or decline, but you can’t have two accepted offers at a time. How long you have to accept that offer should be noted on the offer. The window for acceptance will likely be very short. Once you accept a new offer, the previous accepted offer is voided. Take a screenshot of that confirmation.
If you get offers at an SHSAT school or LaGuardia program, AND a school from your regular list, the DoE will give you some time (last year about 3 weeks) to decide between them. When you accept one offer, the others will be off the table. Take a screenshot of that confirmation. Some Specialized HS are starting to list “Accepted Student Events” - those are open houses for kids who received an offer so they can make up their minds between the Specialized HS and their regular list choice. The regular list schools don’t usually have Open Houses at this time. These events are NOT for curious 7th graders. If you are a curious 7th grader, go here for more information.
