you asked for it!

I have been giving my popular High School talks for over 15 years. I did it in church halls and playspaces with my easel and bad “jokes” and the giant directory. Then Covid changed all that. The millennial children stepped up and got me online. You asked for a recording so you could watch more than once, on your own time. Once again, the millennials to the rescue!

The talk is now attractive, easy to use, and available whenever you want it. For $30, you have it for 48 hours, and I have been told that while it is helpful to watch the colorful graphics, it is just as easy to listen to, and there are natural breaks so you can take a breather if you need one.

The benefit of watching it now? You need these few months to prepare. Also there is a bunch of other documents that come with the talk. What to ask for on a tour, the timeline, a whole lot of resource links, and more. Check out the trailer on YouTube.

• Watch it at 3am with a pint of Ben & Jerry's.

• Watch it twice at 2x speed.

• Ask your spouse if they know what "Ed Opt" means, and when they don't know forward to 58:08.

• Is your kid anxious? It may be easier if I talk them down.

• Be the serene, quietly confident one in your group.

applying to 3k or Prek with a "bad" lottery number

The DoE is now putting the random number in your MYSCHOOLS profile when you begin the process to apply for 3k or Prek. It is a hexadecimal 32 digit list of letters and numbers that kinda looks like your computer’s serial code. The only characters that really matter are the first two. The sequence goes from 0-9 and a-f. The “best” number is 00. The “worst” is ff. If you care to know, it is all explained here, including a chart that has estimated what % of people have a higher number than you.

SUPER IMPORTANT: Don’t freak out about your number. It is only used as a tie breaker when there are candidates of equal priority. Each time you apply for schools; for Prek, K, 6th grade and 9th grade, you get a different number. Each time you are on a wait-list, you get a different number.
DON’T JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS! IT IS NOT THE ORDER IN WHICH YOUR APPLICATION IS CONSIDERED. It is a tie breaker whenever there are candidates of equal priority. For example: all zoned families have the same priority for their zoned school, but they are ordered according to their random number within that group.

There are many factors that matter in this match, like, if you are continuing at a school that has 3K or Prk, if you have a sibling in the school, if you are in District for a Prek Center, or if you are in-zone for a DoE school. If you are placed in a program depends on a whole bunch of factors including your priorities if any, the number of seats available, and the popularity of the school, as well as your luck with the random number.
The best advice is to rank a robust and diverse list of programs. Make sure that there are lots of seats available to you that are not mostly prioritized for other people. Try to leverage any priorities that you can. Rank schools in true preference order.

High Schools make "over offers"

If you are looking at the “numbers” on MY SCHOOLS and the totals don’t add up, it is because the City knows generally how many people decide to take other offers. More students are placed at a school than official seats available. When the inevitable happens and kids choose to go to Specialized HS or charter or private there are not big empty gaps. This is why the wait lists may not more a lot (or at all) at many popular schools.

Here is a sample from the Directory:

Millennium has 117 general ed seats and 33 SWD seats. Total 150 seats in the Freshmen class. They made offers to 190 students last year. Even though that is more than seats available, no one will be turned away. It is very likely that a bunch of those students will decide to go elsewhere. If Millennium is very popular this year, then its classrooms will be more full than normal, and people won’t move off the waitlist.

These numbers are particularly helpful when looking at 6-12th grade programs, because they will tell you how many people, who were not returning 8th graders, were offered seats.

Good luck

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.