City debuts its new common application for charter schools
Every spring, the city’s charter schools hold admissions lotteries and every year, parents applying to multiple charters must fill out a different application for each school. But this year, parents will have a new option: a common application.
The application, which can be sent or turned in to any of the city’s 99 charter schools, is one page long and is available in eight different languages.
It’s not a complete replacement for schools’ individual applications. This year, schools have to accept both the common application and their individualized forms, a change that Department of Education officials hope will make the process simpler and increase the number of applicants. Officials are considering making the common application mandatory in coming years.
DOE officials have been developing the application for months, and in January officials from the State University of New York and Board of Regents charter authorizers agreed to have their charter schools join city-authorized schools in using the application.
A side effect of the common application is that it could quiet criticism that the difficulty of filling out dozens of different applications is narrowing the field of applicants to those with motivated, supportive parents.
“The intention is to make the process accessible to those who might but get deterred by the six page applications or something like that,” said DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld. “It’s not as if this is meant to pull people away from district schools. It’s to make the process for those already interested a much more accessible and easily understand process.”
