Willful negligence

We’re down to the wire in this dystopian process known as the NYC public high school admissions process.

It’s hard to explain exactly how complex and overwhelming this process is, from uncertainty as to whether we would be returning to the pre-covid schedule or the more delayed covid schedule (it’s the earlier pre-covid schedule - but this was only announced two weeks before applications opened!) to the undecipherable hexadecimal “lottery” number that each student is assigned that is a) very hard to find and b) once you find it, impossible to understand what it means based solely off information shared by the DOE. Thank goodness for Amelie Marian taking the time to explain it, although that’s not exactly an easy read, right?

And that is barely the tip of the iceberg of what is confusing about this process. In fact, I don’t think you could make the process more confusing or stressful if you tried.

Wait, you don’t just go to your nearest zoned school?

No, you do not. Any NYC student can pick from almost 900 schools or programs across the five boroughs. Some schools do give priority or restriction by borough, and some areas do still have zoned schools, but most do not. And while there is good reason for that in a historically redlined city that is segregated geographically, the admissions process that we have instead is itself laden with inequities and the system remains one of the most segregated in the country.

It’s not an easy problem to solve, but the thing is… we don’t want to solve it.

According to Inside Schools, NYC public high schools are 93% BIPOC students and 75% students from low income families.

Here is the racial breakdown at a popular Brooklyn school compared to the racial breakdown of NYC public high schools as a whole.

And here’s what happened last week - applications (you can choose up to 12 schools or programs that you rank in your order of preference) were due on Friday December 1st.

In the days leading up to the deadline, which, by a stroke of genius, was also the deadline for middle school applications, MySchools, the DOE website where you can search for information on schools and build your application, started crashing from the increased traffic.

The night before the deadline, the system was down completely for many people for hours at a time. If you could log in, you were faced with the “spinning pencil of death.”

Finally, in the middle of the night before the deadline, the DOE Press Secretary, tweeting from his own account, said that there would be a new deadline announced in the morning.

Now, I happen to be in a Facebook group with thousands of parents who are going through this process or who HAVE gone through this process, Applying to High School in NYC and so I knew to a) submit our application and b) that the deadline would likely be extended as happens every year, so it was no big deal to me, and I’ve appreciated a few extra days to sit with our list and decide if we want to make any last minute edits.

But for those less resourced and in communities less connected, it seems callous and cruel to add another of stress to an already ridiculous process.

Remember: we are talking 93% BIPOC, 75% low-income families, not to mention 6-7% English language learners and about 20% students with disabilities.

What this means is - the DOE knows their system can’t handle the traffic but it is not a priority to upgrade the system so it can, so the only option to spread out the traffic is to have a fake deadline that gets extended at the last minute.

It’s willful negligence.

In a city of talent, innovation and ultra-wealth, “the greatest city in the world,” we can’t figure this out?

Or we don’t want to figure it out?

Banner photo by Jonas Elia on Unsplash

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