“Universal” actually means “Unavailable”

Today is March 1st, a notable day around here because the New York Public Schools pre-K program list (here as a .pdf) was posted online at 7 a.m. this morning.

Okay, so this post may be of interest only to me and fellow Gothamists, but here it is: Theodore and I have been complaining about the lack of options for public pre-K. Theodore is putting a deposit on a private school in case it doesn’t work out. We are not: it’s a waste of money, right? But maybe Theodore isn’t such a dummy after all. The news this morning is that a dim situation will only get worse this year for us. In particular, the school right down the block that we had our eye on — the one that was merely ridiculously oversubscribed last year — simply isn’t offering pre-K at all this year.

By my calculations, all of District 3, which covers both West Harlem and the extremely fertile yuppie wonderland known as the Upper West Side, has 406 public school pre-K spots this year, down from 432 last year. The number of applicants for those spots last year: 2,125.

There are schools in District 3 that have slightly fewer kids applying than there are available spots. They are all in West Harlem, where, last time I checked, people are also having kids. We’ve got no compunction about traveling north for school, but I do have to wonder why families there aren’t filling up those schools. Who doesn’t like free education? Is there something so wrong with those programs? Or is Head Start fulfilling the demands as it is?

This month, we will be spending a lot of time in Harlem figuring it all out. I will try not to bore everyone with the details.