So now I’m the poster-parent for the poster-child, who isn’t on the DOE’s middle school list. At Parents as Reading Partners, PS 321’s monthly open school hour for parents, everyone wanted to know: So did things work out? Did you get your letter?

Some people looked very sorry for me with their sad, long faces. Others looked guilty when they congratulated others. Like, oops, sorry you have nothing to be congratulated about.

One friend said jokingly,  "I hear you’re homeschooling." Another friend said, "How are you holding up?" And I feigned being weak in the knees.

"They messed with the wrong woman," someone else said. Still others wanted to know what I was going to do.

I’m going to do what I always do: find the words to tell the tale.

I ran into the guidance counselor in the administration office and asked if she’d gotten to the bottom of the matter.

"Not yet," she said.

She told me to check back in at the end of the day. Yeah, like, hey that was what I was planning on doing. She said that there were 20 people who had major problems connected with the admissions process: that’s 10% of the class. 

Some kids were assigned to a school in Red Hook that no one in the fifth grade even applied to. There was some anger about that. I suspect there’s a big story there. 

None of the so-called special needs kids were assigned. The acronym for that is CTT or Collaborative Team Teaching. It’s an inclusion class that has a mix of special needs and general education kids — so that’s unresolved as yet.

No one has heard from Mark Twain, the gifted and talented middle school in Coney Island. NEST, a school on the Lower East Side popular with PS 321 parents had its own snafu. They sent out rejection letters to some kids that they meant to accept. They tried to intercede in advance. One friend got a phone call on Friday telling her to disregard the rejection letter she never received.

This happened to another family I know, too. That family did receive the rejection. Oops.

And then there are people like us. We’ve been disappeared from the list entirely. N’existe pas (pardon my French).

Problems all around. Like that person said, "They messed with the wrong woman!"