GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

City school officials say they’re still crunching the numbers to figure out how many soon-to-be kindergarteners are on wait lists this year, but a familiar pattern of long lists is remerging in parts of the city.

Despite rezonings and the opening of new schools on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, elementary schools are posting wait-lists dozens of children deep. Early reports are in for a few schools, such as P.S. 290 on the Upper East Side, which had a wait-list of 91 students last year and is telling parents they have 68 families on the list this year.

Jason Rowland, a father who lives in the P.S. 290 zone on the Upper East Side told me today that his daughter is number 34 on the wait-list. Rowland wrote:

We received a letter yesterday informing us our daughter has been wait-listed for PS290 for the upcoming kindergarten class. Not a big surprise I know considering the schools rep for wait-listing — but considering the Dept. of Ed. and City Council just went through complete re-zoning of the district and opened a new school — the news was especially outrageous.

Community Education Council for District 2 Vice-President Shino Tanikawa said that a rezoning on its own often doesn’t do much to decrease wait-lists, but the arrival of a new elementary school P.S. 267, could have. (more…)

It’s becoming a New York City spring ritual: thousands of parents sign up their children for kindergarten only to find that the school they’re zoned for is all out of room. This year, the early enrollment period ended with about 2,000 soon-to-be kindergartners on waiting lists, city officials said today.

Those students and their families represent less than five percent of all the city’s entering kindergartners, but they’re not easy to ignore. Last year, parents of wait listed kindergartners staged a protest in front of City Hall, drawing press coverage and a new name for their predicament: the kindergarten crisis. This year, despite the introduction of new schools in some neighborhoods and rezonings, 104 public elementary schools have wait lists, and many of them are more than fifty names deep.

DOE spokesman David Cantor said this year, the department was tracking the problem earlier than in the past in hopes of easing parents’ anxiety. (more…)

Anxious parents posting on UrbanBaby are asking for your thoughts on Trinity, Brearley, Chapin, Riverdale, and Manhattan’s PS 87. Private school admissions season must be upon us!

The best depiction of what this means for families that I’ve seen is a year-old documentary called “Getting In…Kindergarten,” available for the first time on YouTube. The film tracks three Manhattan families all the way through the process of applying to private and elite public kindergartens, from picking schools to receiving yes and (lots of) no letters. Director Pamela French is herself a New York City public school parent.

I wrote about the film in the Sun last year when it premiered on TLC. (Philissa also wrote about it at Insideschools.) Now, it brings up a new question: How will the competitiveness depicted in the film weather the recession? So far, private schools say they’re doing just fine. More thoughts from UrbanBaby here.