Parents bent on getting their kids into the kindergarten of their choice might still be camped out overnight outside the Board of Ed, but they won’t have to return anxiously day after day.
That’s thanks to the introduction of waiting lists for registration in New Haven neighborhood school kindergartens. While the open spots in kindergartens will still go to the first applicants to show up on Monday morning at Board of Ed headquarters, spots on waiting lists will be assigned by lottery.
That’s a change from the previous system, in which there was no waiting list at all. Anxious parents used to stop by the office multiple times a day hoping a spot had opened up at the kindergarten of their choice.
It was a procedure that has at times bred chaos and confusion, along with charges of favoritism and gaming the system. See stories here and here.
No more, said school officials on Friday morning, when they announced the changes at Board of Education headquarters on Meadow Street.
Bob Canelli, magnet schools supervisor, and Debbie Sumpter-Breland, student recruitment coordinator, said the new system is designed to be more transparent, fairer, and less stressful for parents and staff alike. East Rock Alderman Justin Elicker hailed the changes. One of his constituents’ top concerns is landing a coveted kindergarten spot at the Hooker School.
Here’s how the new system will work, according to Canelli and Sumpter-Breland:
The affected schools are Bishop Woods, Clinton, Hill Central, Lincoln-Bassett, Nathan Hale, Roberto Clemente, Troup, Truman, Wexler Grant, and Worthington Hooker. Those are all “neighborhood schools” that serve distinct geographical areas of the city.
Each of those schools’ kindergartens has a certain number of slots open to kids who live in the neighborhood. Altogether, there are 52 spots at each school, but some of those are claimed ahead of time by kids who have enrolled in several pre-kindergarten programs. That’s a procedure designed to encourage parents to put their kids in preparatory programs ahead of kindergarten.
The school district will now make the number of open kindergarten slots at a school publicly available on the BOE website. Currently, slots are still open at all of the schools except for one: Hooker. That school already has two people on the waiting list; 54 kids went through the approved pre‑K programs.
On Monday, parents can show up at BOE headquarters to register their kids — first come, first serve — for open slots in the neighborhood kindergartens for the neighborhood they live in. Once those slots fill up, parents can fill out a new form that will register them for a lottery for a spot on the waiting list for their neighborhood school. They can fill out those forms any time between May 2 and May 30; it won’t affect where they end up on the waiting list.
The lottery will be done on June 17 by a third-party company, the same one that does the magnet schools lottery. Once waiting list numbers are assigned by that lottery, students can claim a spot if there is a cancellation at the school of their choice.
Students not placed in their neighborhood school will be automatically placed in the Celentano school kindergarten and, when that fills up, at the Strong School, which is nothing but kindergarten classrooms.
The new waiting list system will “streamline everything” and “alleviate some anxiety,” Canelli said. The district may eventually implement a lottery system for all kindergarten slots, not just for waiting list spots, he said. That depends in part on installing new software to manage the district’s database of student information.
“This is a great step in the right direction,” said Elicker. He called it “incredible progress” that will lead to greater transparency, predictability, fairness, and efficiency.