One reason some superintendents are abandoning admissions is declining student enrollment rates. Since 2019, her sixth grade through her eighth grade enrollment across the city has dropped by about 20,000. This decline means that some once highly competitive middle schools can no longer fill all the seats.
District 1, which includes parts of the Lower East Side and East Village, said Carrie Chan. A recent meeting of the district’s Community Education Council.
The majority of the district’s nine middle schools used selective enrollment prior to the pandemic. Now, Chan said, “we are struggling with admissions and obviously trying to attract as many students as possible,” but restoring these policies would be a barrier to those efforts. increase.
School leaders have come to a similar conclusion as overall middle school enrollment has fallen by about 200 over the past three years across the Third Ward borough, which comprises the Upper West Side and Harlem sections. . In the fall of 2020, his six of the district’s 11 middle schools that used screens once filled all the seats. Last year he had only three.
“The historical problem is the lack of what many families consider quality seating,” District 3 Superintendent Kamar Samuels said at a Community Education Council meeting last week. “It has been largely removed due to the current environment.”
In the district, integration was already a priority. In 2018, every middle school there was required to reserve a quarter of her seats for low-income and underperforming students. Nearly all of the region’s middle schools have achieved that goal, but some struggle to enroll more diverse children.
Elsewhere, the shift to random draws during the pandemic has also led to a slightly more even mix of student groups in each school. For example, the percentage of students learning English as a new language in the city’s 50 most selective programs increased from 3% to 7% last year.