Good luck

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By Joyce Szuflita
According to the DoE high school placements will be coming out through MY SCHOOLS on Thursday March 9. If your child took the SHSAT, the results of the test, and LaGuardia auditions as well as your main application results will be listed there. You will receive an email when your results are available. They often stagger the results because MY SCHOOLS would crash if everyone went on at the same time.

Here is the thing. Life is uncertain. You can prepare and calculate and hope. It is hard not to fall in love with one place or another, but you can’t engineer your placement. Your mission is to prepare your child (and yourself, cause you have worked hard for this!) There is no doubt that you will be disappointed for any number of reasons, possibly just because there has been so much effort and angst.

This is what I hope students will consider when they get their placement:

This school is all potential.
It will be what I make of it.
I don’t know those kids, but my new best friend for life is somewhere in that crowd.
My first love is probably in there too.
There will be a teacher that I will never forget in that building.
There will be some uncontrollable laughter.
There will be something that seemed nearly impossible that I will conquer.
I will likely be sorry to leave at the end of it all.

You can focus on what you desire, but you don’t always get it, and you might even be sorry if you did, because you would have missed the wonderful thing that appeared when you least expected it. Go out and find it.

What does that crazy change in Applicant : Seat ratio numbers mean?

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By Joyce Szuflita
First to find each school’s Applicant:Seat ratios which can give an idea about how popular a school is.
Go to the MY SCHOOLS directory.
Put the name of the school in the search bar.
When the school page comes up, go all the way to the bottom and you will see one or more programs that you can apply to. Open the link on the program name.

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2021 Kindergarten: Applying in a vacuum, Vol. 2

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By Joyce Szuflita
We have a few dates now. Surprisingly, the DoE is sticking to their regular K timeline. The deadline for your MY SCHOOLS application is Jan. 19. Here are some other insights that you are probably wondering about. Oh yes, and this application in mid January IS NOT the Prek application. That always happens way later, likely in mid to late March! That is why you don’t see any information about it.

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a review of the DoE new high school admissions videos

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By Joyce Szuflita
You can find the DoE’s new videos here
You can find the video page through this link, but the link doesn’t show up yet on the website. It is nice that they have divided these videos into bite sized chunks. Nothing earth shattering here, but they are clear and simple and it walks you through the process at a saunter. I will highlight some interesting things below.

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