High School Admissions Perils Part I

It's that time of year again in our beloved City.

High School Admissions Time!

This is the first entry in the public school admissions series. Middle School Madness begins at the end of the year.

Just learned that my treasured resource, insideschools.org, will not have enough funding to be able to produce an Open House/Tours web page this year!

No offense to one of my favorite websites, but that was one of the two most important pages on their site (the individual school reviews is the other). It has been very helpful over the years to be able to refer to one source and get an accurate overview of when all the events were happening.

Don't even bother looking at the Department of Education's website; there you'll only get the most general, superficial information. You're going to have do more work yourself: calling every school for Open House dates. You will have to call more than once, for not every school has confirmed dates yet. The staff at the popular schools will really enjoy fielding the extra phone calls. Insideschools' Open House page was a great timesaver on all sides.

Ask Judy of insideschools says that their calendar will have to suffice. By this time in previous years, open house dates from all over the City would be posted on the now-inactive page; as of this writing, insideschool's calendar is pitiful.

Now we have to depend on the parent coordinators, guidance counselors and other staff to submit events to insideschool's calendar themselves! These people are too busy!

Another advantage to the Open House page: you could see listings for other schools that would have never crossed your mind to investigate before. There are the same five knee-jerk Manhattan and Brooklyn choices that go on every decent student's application. But how do you learn of the existence of the NYC iSchool, Brooklyn Latin or Bedford Academy? Some guidance counselors are better/more accessible than others, so how do you come across these lesser-knowns on your own: word-of-mouth or seeing it on the defunct insideschools' tours list.

I fear that insideschools will become less important. Their valuable school reviews will become obsolete without updates and we won't need to refer to the site at all after that. I hope that never happens.

Even when I wasn't going through an admissions process, I'd read through their school reviews just out of curiosity.

The solutions to keep insideschools current and informative?

1. Submit comments about your school to the summary/reviews page.
2. Insideschools is a non-profit. Donate $25 + and receive a subscription to Time Out Kids magazine. That's a great deal in itself.

I've already given.

So as we go into this harrowing time of year: tours, tests, applications, new school year and all the holidays interspersed, we will be writing about the Perils of High School Admission.