Last year there were several changes made to the high school process.
1. Six schools now give priority for 75% of their seats to students who live/attend public school in Manhattan. The schools:
Baruch
Lab
Eleanor Roosevelt
Museum School
Clinton
Millennium
Note: the first 4 were District 2 priority before Covid, the last 2 had no priorities before now.
Another note: even though these schools now give an advantage to Manhattan students, keep in mind they are all small and if you don’t have a strong random number, changes aren’t strong you’ll get an offer.
2. Predictor tool
The DOE introduced a new function in MySchools that will tell you if you’ve got a low, middle, or high chance of getting into any high school based on your each school’s criteria. The results aren’t absolute but they do share some solid insight as to possibilities and can help with ranking decisions.
Note: the predictor tool doesn’t work for screened schools that ask for additional materials or auction based programs.
3. Limitless ranking
You can now rank as many schools as you’d like on your application - the cut off used to be 12. The logic/upside to this? I haven’t figured it out yet. Families are now ranking schools they have no chance of getting into so they’ll at least be on those waiting lists.
4. Waitlists
Every waitlist generates a new random number for each student, which is not shared with students (that was put into place the season before last). What was new last season is they got rid of DIA (diversity in admissions) priority on waitlists.
There have been changes every season for the past 5 or so years and could be there might be some in the fall. Changes generally aren’t announced until after school is back in season but as soon as I know, you’ll know.