New Independent School in downtown Brooklyn in 2020: The Whittle School and Studios

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By Joyce Szuflita
Update 2023: This school never opened.
The Whittle School and Studios is opening in the fall of 2020, upstairs in the Macy’s building on Fulton Mall. Larry Weiss, former Head of School at Saint Ann’s and Brooklyn Friends, is going to be their Brooklyn Campus Executive Chairman.

Info events: Nov. 14 Brklyn and Nov. 21 Manhattan
More information all about admissions. They have early admissions as well as a regular timeline through Ravenna. They will eventually be early childhood through high school but they are only accepting applications Prek through Kindergarten at this point. Contact them for more information.

It is all just beautiful PR so far. We will all be curious to see how they develop.
Washington Post - deep background on Chris Whittle the founder

Brooklyn Eagle

Daily News

WSJ to follow shortly this week.


How to find your zoned school, 2.0

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How to find your zoned school, 2.0

Updated 12/22
By Joyce Szuflita
You are not necessarily zoned to the elementary school that is closest to you. Almost everyone only has one zoned school. There are many zoned schools within a district, but you don’t have the same priority access to all of them. You are not guaranteed a seat in your zoned school at kindergarten. That is too strong a word, although the DoE will make every effort to place you in your zoned school and in most cases it is wildly likely that there will be a seat for you.

The DoE’s website is here. I recommend that you use Google Chrome (seems to be the least glitchy search engine for this).
Most parents will start and end with the “Enrollment” tab, although there is a wealth of information buried in here in many different tabs. I particularly like “About Us”: “Insights and Reporting” and “School Planning”.

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Prek: when you engineer a complicated electronic search, you restrict access in two ways

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The ability for families to search for UPK programs in the fall and early winter, solely by using the convoluted MY SCHOOLS browse is a problem for me. When you design the way people can access information in a complicated and specific path, people who don’t think in the same way and people with different devices will be disadvantaged. I have no doubt that the search will be useful to many eventually, but the lack of a simple static online map as an additional and extremely necessary resource is a joke. It also doesn’t cost you a dime.
READ TO THE END TO GET A THE LIST.

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More about rezoning in D15

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By Joyce Szuflita
First, as many of you know, the rezoning plan for Bococa including PS 15, 29, 32, 38, 58, 261 and 676 has been postponed to distribute information more deeply and engage the community in the planning. As far as we know the current zoned lines will be in place for 20/21 admission season. So all of you with 2015 bday kids applying for kindergarten - it will be business as usual.
Any changes will be made in the fall/winter of 2020 and take effect for kids entering the schools in fall of 2021. Any students currently attending the school at that time in K-5th grade will be unaffected by the rezoning and can remain in the school even if their home zoning status changes.

The District has announced that there will be a new rezoning effort made in Sunset Park

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