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wall street woes

Coming soon, parents say: A wave of private school refugees

Upper East Side parents say they’re changing their plans and picking public schools because of the toll the financial crisis has taken on their bank accounts.

They aired the complaints at a meeting last night about overcrowding in public schools on the Upper East Side. (More on this later today.) Parents said department officials underestimate how many children will enter the neighborhood’s schools this fall, in part because many Upper East Siders can no longer afford the pricey private schools attended by as many as 60 percent of families in one part of the neighborhood.

One mother, Caroline Hall, said at the meeting that she’s pulling her son out of his private school when he starts kindergarten in the fall. I filmed her comments:

Hall, who works on Wall Street as a lawyer, told me that many people she knows saw their bonuses drop by 50 to 80 percent last year. “Most people rely on their bonus to play for things like private school,” she said. While Hall and I talked, we were approached by a father whose children attend an overcrowded school in the neighborhood. Hall recognized him from their company — but he said he is no longer employed.

  • http://www.coreknowledge.org/blog Robert Pondiscio

    One wonders what pressure — if any — the private schools feel under to be more generous in aid to working families (they do exist) in their midst.

  • http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com InnovativeEdu

    I think the influx of private school parents into the public schools will be a blessing in disguise as they bring to public schools, private school expectations. You can get a Dalton Education at a public school if the right elements are in place and if ALL parents are fighting to demand it. I wrote about this issue recently in my post, “You Can Get a Dalton Education at a NYC Public School” (http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2008/12/you-can-get-dalton-education-at-nyc.html).

  • bucky dent

    Private school endowments got hurt like all the other pools of capital, so it will be HARDER for them to dole out more money as
    aid to students. And while some folks will put their kids in the public schools, at least as an interim step, most are likely to move to the burbs rather than stay in high cost/weak school Manhattan.

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  • Matthew

    InnovativeEdu

    My experience is District 2 public schools have no shortage of parents with expectations as high as those of the Dalton parents, or teachers trying to meet them. So I’m not sure that’s a particularly large value add they would bring (not to pick on Dalton kids – it’s only an example you know – and my Mom and Aunt are alumnae)

    I heard a different concern at that meeting., As these neighboring schools have adjusted their building configurations to accommodate more kids while keeping class sizes to a level that parents and teachers find reasonable, they have given up common spaces like auditoriums, computer rooms, libraries, art rooms and science labs.

    It will be interesting to see how this compares with the experiences of the UES private school crowd, and whether that changes the administration’s view on the importanace of these kinds of facilities to childrens’ educational success.

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