Schools Chancellor Says Local Kids May Once Again Get Local Priority
At a May 2 meeting of the Community Education Council (CEC) for District 2 of the New York City public school system, Department of Education (DOE) Chancellor David Banks signaled that he is open to restoring admissions preference to local high schools for students who live within the district.
District 2 includes Lower Manhattan, as well as the East Side south of 97th Street (with the exception of the Lower East Side) and the West Side south of 59th street. This catchment area is home to some of the highest performing middle and high schools in all of the City’s public education system.
For decades, students living within the zone were given priority in applications to these schools. That ended in 2020 during the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who sought to increase diversity and access to opportunity through the public school system.
The CEC is a panel responsible for advising on educational policies and providing input to the DOE on matters of concern to the district. At its May 2 meeting, Chancellor Banks told the CEC, “we are committed to granting District 2 some kind of priority and are looking at various models. I want you to know I’m taking it very seriously.”
He was responding to a resolution enacted by the CEC a few weeks earlier, which called the removal of geographic preference “disastrous for District 2 students,” and noted that it resulted in 18 percent of local students being “offered spots at none of the 12 choices they listed on their high school application and placed at schools they showed no interest in.”
The same resolution stated that the percentage of District 2 students placed against their will at a high school they had no desire to attend was the highest for any district in the five boroughs. Because public high schools in the other four boroughs still grant priority to students residing in those boroughs, the resolution also contends this creates “a perverse situation whereby a student from an outer borough can apply for admission to a Manhattan high school knowing that a spot at a local school closer to their home is virtually guaranteed. This places Manhattan students at a severe disadvantage during the high school admissions process.”
The resolution concluded by urging that “District 2 priority be reinstated for current middle school students for the next [high school] admissions cycle in order to ensure that all District 2 eighth graders receive placement to a neighborhood high school.”
Maud Maron, a member of the District 2 CEC responded to Mr. Banks’s announcement by saying, “this is great news. He indicated that he had heard from many District 2 parents, that he understood the issue and the concerns, and that he is going to work with the CEC on this.”
“We see an enormous attrition rate among local public school families leaving as their kids enter high school,” she continued. “The problem is that your kid can work really hard and be the best student in their eighth grade, but if they live in District 2 they are more likely to be denied a seat at their first-choice high school, or any of their choices, because of the lack of priority for local kids. The result is an unjust system, with kids getting cheated out of a fair process.”