In a normal school year the admissions process for New York City’s high schools would be well underway, with 8th graders submitting their applications typically in early December. The middle school applications process would have also been wrapped up by early December.
This year, the pandemic has meant no new information has been made available yet on what the admissions process for the city’s middle and high schools will look like, creating an unprecedented scenario to increasingly worried parents. A set of information sessions was scheduled and then almost immediately delayed. The December 4th deadline for middle and high school applications has been indefinitely postponed as well, and there’s also been no updates on the specialized high school admissions tests, which were originally scheduled for October 21st.
"COVID-19 has had a profound impact across every aspect of our school system, including the admissions process," the Department of Education's website said.
The frustration is borne out of a sense that the DOE should have seen these issues coming, said one parent of an 8th grader.
“For eight months, they have sat on this and they knew exactly what they had to do [...] so I don't understand,” said Deborah Alexander of Astoria, who is the co-President of Community Education Council 30 in western Queens.
A rally Thursday by parents in favor of screened admissions also called on the city for more information. “For the past eight months, hundreds of thousands of parents and kids have been waiting anxiously for the Department of Education to announce the details on the admissions of high schools and specialized high schools and they are also waiting to sign up for the testing for the Gifted and Talented program,” Phil Wong, president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York, told AMNY.
For weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised more information would be forthcoming. “Our central focus for the last few months was getting school up and running safely and effectively and trying to make things work well in this new environment,” he said at his press briefing Thursday. “But we've got to start to turn more and more focus to next year and therefore the admissions process. So we're going to have a lot more to say on that soon.”
Compounding the sense of frustration is the November 15th deadline for families to enroll in blended learning for the rest of the school year, while increasing rates of COVID-19 this week has brought the city to the brink of de Blasio’s seven-day 3% rolling average threshold for closing the school system.
Regardless, that opt-in deadline for blended learning will stay in place, de Blasio said Friday.
“What none of us could have anticipated is that this signup period is now overlapped with this sudden surge first around the country and now hitting us,” he told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. “We'll complete that on Sunday. We're going to implement that.”
The next phase of blended learning is still scheduled to begin November 30th, he said.
