From Park Slope Parents, one woman’s take on the Pre-K mess. Most importantly, everyone affected should COMPLAIN to 311, WRITE LETTERS to Joel Klein and Mike Bloomberg.

I had a long talk with a parent coordinator this morning who told me
more detail about the screening process than the Times article
revealed. The article stated that parents either filled out the
application incorrectly or the algorithms weren’t working. I can’t
speak to the latter, but as for filling out
applications “incorrectly”, this is what she told me: the data
clerks in Pennsylvania were interpreting these forms without a clue
as to what NYC looks like.

If you mispelled a street name, you were
rejected. If you left something off because you weren’t sure how to
answer it, you were rejected. This was mishandling on a personal
level, because the program was shipped to a place outside the city,
with real live people making judgement calls. The way it was handled
last year (or before) was school by school, district by district,
where the people making the assignments knew the parents and families
and kids personally, and knew the street names (for example). On top
of this, because of this huge backlog of problems, OSEPO (the office
of student enrollment) is overwhelmed, leading to secondary backlogs
the gifted program, etc. And because the process was centralized,
there are very few – business school graduates – handling what used
to be handled by many skilled and knowledgable people all throughout
the city. She even said someone on the phone at Tweed was crying.

I am affected by this myself. Some kids who should have been
accepted earlier in the year in her school were rejected, so they
were reaccepted as Magnet students as a solution to keep them in the
school, which is crazy because they are in their own district and
don’t need the magnet status, thus bumping people like me, who needs
a magnet admission to get into that school!

She advised me to call 311 to complain, or drop an email to Joel
Klein: so should everybody reading this post!