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.

how to make a high school list

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how to make a high school list

By Joyce Szuflita
Families are starting to think about the public high school search right about now. Spring of 7th grade is also the perfect time to start making a list of around 24 programs to investigate. You will whittle down to 12 by the deadline in 8th grade. You need to keep your mind open at this time of year. If a school is within and hour commute and has something that intrigues you, it is worth at least a passing glance early in the game. If you are too particular right now, your list will be a pathetic group of well known, tiny, wildly popular schools that will be impossible to gain entry to.

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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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Black Students and the SHSAT

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Black Students and the SHSAT

By Joyce Szuflita
This letter was sent to me by my good buddy Allison Shillingford. Allison is an African American mom who lives in Brooklyn. She runs a not for profit called, Navigate the Maze:
Navigate the Maze to Achievement, Inc. (NTMA) is a non-profit, educational enrichment program that prepares black students in Brooklyn for the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) and supports the students socially and academically while in high school.

In 2019, out of the 5,488 black students who took the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) to attend New York City specialized high schools, only 190 of the students received offers. In one of the worst years for black enrollment in specialized high schools, an emerging non-profit in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, demonstrates that black students are capable of passing the SHSAT.  Navigate the Maze to Achievement (NTMA) had 20 students take the SHSAT, and seven received offers. About 3.96% of Black students citywide passed the SHSAT, while 35% of NTMA students passed.  To put this into perspective, 1 in every 27 black students who received an offer to a specialized high school is an NTMA student.

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