Friday, June 18, 2010

As spring turns to summer, an 8th grader waits for placement | GothamSchools

As spring turns to summer, an 8th grader waits for placement | GothamSchools

As spring turns to summer, an 8th grader waits for placement

Even more anxious than teachers at schools without students for next year are the parents of students without schools.
We received a letter to Chancellor Joel Klein from Catherine Fleischmann, an Upper West Side mother whose eighth-grader still doesn’t know where she’ll attend high school. Fleischmann’s daughter is one of more than 6,500 eighth-graders who didn’t get into any of the schools they applied to. Unhappy with the second-round school options, Fleischmann filed an appeal earlier this month and will find out the outcome by mid-July.
“I can’t begin to tell you what a nightmare this has been for us,” Fleischmann told me. Here’s her letter to Klein:
Dear Chancellor Klein,
I am writing to seek your help.
My sweet, hardworking, dedicated daughter is an 8th-grade honor student at Delta middle school, an academically accelerated middle school. She has had almost perfect attendance since kindergarten. Unfortunately, she was not matched to one of her first choice high schools, even though there were still openings in those schools. Her second-choice tier of schools consists of