Why Should Getting a Child Into
Preschool Be Such a Nightmare?
By Mary Frost
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
TWEED COURTHOUSE — Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, Councilman Bill de Blasio and frustrated parents held a press conference Wednesday on the steps of Tweed Courthouse to demand action from the Department of Education (DOE) about the city’s new method of assigning students into scarce pre-kindergarten slots. The new system has rejected thousands of children and inexplicably placed others into schools far from home.
After years of pre-K admissions being handled individually by schools, the DOE centralized the process this year in an effort to simplify the process. But simplification has not been the result.
Last week, parents received letters informing them which pre-K program that their child would be admitted to this September. To their horror, 3,000 parents, including those in large swaths of Brownstone Brooklyn, were informed that none of the schools they had listed on their applications were available.
Hundreds of children were rejected from programs where their older siblings are enrolled, although the DOE’s new process is supposed to give them priority. Others were told that their child was accepted at a particular school, but when they went to that school to register, they were turned away.
Marcy Wang, who lives with her family on Tiffany Place, is zoned for P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill. “When we submitted our application, we selected [P.S.] 29 as our first choice and then listed 58 and 261 as back-ups,” she told the Brooklyn Eagle in an e-mail Wednesday. The family received a “blanket, boilerplate rejection letter” for all three schools on Saturday, May 24.
Ms. Wang says that the letter included a vague reference to a “second opportunity” on June 23. “Both my husband and I scrambled to try and understand what happens after June 23 … We called 29 and the District 15 office multiple times; posted questions to the BoCoCa and Park Slope Parents sites; and sent e-mails to council members and Betsy Gotbaum, all in a quest to understand what was going on.”
What really bothers both her and her husband is that the process “at no point felt open and transparent,” she said. “We have no indication as to how fair the process was, and neither our school nor our district had information regarding what transpired and how to move forward. We’ve been in a frustratingly intractable limbo since May 24.”
Rally on the Steps of Tweed
“These changes to the pre-K admissions system have had some chaotic consequences for parents,” Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum said at Wednesday’s press conference. “We are hearing from many concerned parents that this system just didn’t work the way they were told it would. At the very least, these parents need more time to file an appeal and adequate information about the process.”
De Blasio called for the mess to be untangled before June 23. “A solution for sibling issues must come faster and cannot wait until the second round of placements this month. As a public school parent, it is understandable that parents who rightly believed that they would receive preference in placing all of their children in the same school are anxious. I will work around the clock until this problem is fully resolved.”
According to educational advocates InsideSchools.org, DOE spokesperson Andy Jacob said that some of the mistakes were due to errors on the applications, especially in cases where the address filed for the pre-K application did not precisely match that of a sibling enrolled at the school. A company in Pennsylvania processed applications.
According to Jacob, InsideSchools says that of 20,000 pre-K applications submitted, 17,000 children were offered seats, though not all to their first-choice schools. Three thousand received no placement at all. (Calls to Mr. Jacob were not returned by press time.)
The DOE’s web site does not provide a fax or phone number, Public Advocate Gotbaum said, or a physical address where parents can file an appeal. According to the DOE web site, “Families who wish to submit an appeal must do so in writing to ES_Enrollment@schools.nyc.gov no later than June 13, 2008.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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Just a reminder, though -- It’s not considered polite to paste the entire story on your blog. Most blogs post a summary or the first paragraph,( 40 words) then post a link to the rest of the story. That helps increase click-throughs for everyone, and minimizes copyright issues. So please keep posting, but not the entire article. arturc at att.net
