Kindergarten: My beach read is MYSCHOOLS!
/By Joyce Szuflita
I actually love playing around with the City’s websites to find curious things about different elementary schools. If you are coming up on the kindergarten application when the weather gets colder, why not start browsing now!
#1 How to make browsing easier.
I recommend that you start with the MYSCHOOLS directory. You don’t need to go into your account to do this, but you can if you like. There are schools with the same PS number in different boroughs. The fool proof way to search is to use the “District/Borough/Number”. For example if you are looking for PS 11 in Brooklyn. The District is 13. The Borough is K (for Kings County, which is Brooklyn). The Number needs 3 digits, so PS 20 would be 020. Their DBN is 13K020.
For example: PS 9 would be 13K009.
PS 261 would be 15K261.
PS 34 would be 14K034. Easy peazy! You will never mistake your local school for a school in the Bronx!
You can put your address in or not. If you put your address in, you will see that the map only shows you schools that are a mile from your house. If you click the right arrow at the bottom of the list, it will show you schools in the next concentric circle 2 miles from your house.
If you don’t put your address in, then you need to start putting in filters. Search for schools in your district, or pick other districts and look for G&T or Dual Language, or unzoned schools.
If it has too many parameters open and starts to get wonky, make sure to resent the filters or just start over. Play with it!
#2. When you click on a school. You will see basic info like contact information, size, start time, and some simple admissions information. When you look under the “performance” category, you will see a link “See the school Quality Snapshot”, that will have slightly more nuanced information. When you click on that link, it takes you to the Quality Snapshot page. This is the Readers Digest version of the Quality Report which gives the full survey results and stats. I like to keep a couple tabs open when I am reading about schools. I toggle between their page on MYSCHOOLS and their Quality Review to get a little more nuance. The Quality Snapshot gives racial and gender breakdowns, how long the Principal has been at the school, a tiny bit of info on the teachers, along with some little bit of information from the school surveys. One interesting piece is “Frequently Attended Middle Schools”. They list the % of students going to the top 5 most frequently attended middle schools from that elementary. This DOES NOT represent some kind of “feeder” aspect. You don’t need to go to a specific district elementary school to get some kind of magic leverage to a favored middle school. It doesn’t represent school quality either. BUT it is interesting to know which middle schools are interesting to the families attending that elementary. The DoE only lists 5 schools. Do the math. Often only half the students may be accounted for. There will be students going to many additional schools.
#3 Open the school’s website. Click on the website link and open a third tab. Read the Principal’s message. Look at the staff page. Try to find out what partnerships or special programs that they have. Bookmark their Tour/Open House page. This will be the place to find the most up to date tour information when the fall comes.
