UPPER EAST SIDE — With the deadline for middle school applications just around the corner, a member of District 2's Community Education Council is launching a hotline to help parents through the process.
Earlier this month, the CEC released middle school criteria of 12 out of 15 schools for screening students' applications.
The information provided parents with a glimpse of how their schools weigh various criteria including grades, attendance and how students rank their school choices.
As the Dec. 2 application deadline looms closer, CEC member Eric Goldberg is using the findings and his own experience to help answer parents' questions about admissions, offering to call parents who sign up for his hotline.
Families in District 2 can choose from 50 slots of 15 minutes each between 5 to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 29 through Thursday, Dec. 1., and Goldberg will call parents to answer their questions, he said.
District 2 covers the east side of Manhattan, south of 97th Street, excluding the Lower East Side, and the West Side, south of 59th Street, and Midtown.
Goldberg, who has been a member of the CEC for five years and has a daughter in the sixth grade, is doing this on his own accord and separately from the CEC because he has become somewhat of an expert on the middle school application process, he said.
"I've thought about doing this in years past, and now with the release of the rubrics there is more information out there and people might have more questions," he said.
"There's support at the school level from counselors, but as we get down to the deadline people end up with questions they didn’t realize they had, and this is a good opportunity to go through it."
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Goldberg said he can help with basic information or questions about the restrictions and admission methods for schools that screen their students and those that don't, he said.
He said he's spent time with principals on how the rubrics are applied, and his guidance would be more about how schools consider student applicants and less about on which schools to choose.
A lot of questions he fields as a CEC2 member are about how zoning preference works at schools and which schools require students rank them first to be considered.
"If I rank Salk first, then there are five other schools I shouldn't put second because they won't consider my application, for example," he said.
"Right now there are underserved families that don't have the support they need as part of this process. This is the initial step."
His hope is to open the hotline every year and grow it into a bigger operation.
To sign up for help, visit here.
