Moving to NYC during "non-entry" year

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Second, when choosing a public school, if you can be very flexible about location, be sure to ask a lot of questions about resources. There are some schools where the PA's raise a lot of money to provide assistant teachers (some schools have one full day in each classroom), extra art, language, music, etc. These schools operate more like a private school. Having the full time assistant teacher makes a big difference as they can break down to smaller groups, and the assistant teacher can help with a lot of menial tasks so the teacher can focus more on teaching.

Sorry, just to clarify on this point: we have a pretty well funded PTA and a lot of other classes in the school did have assistant teachers, they just didn't quite have the budget to put one in every class and we drew the short straw. (perhaps because this teacher had a good track record with test scores etc and they thought she could handle it)

Frankly I'd have preferred they eliminate dance classes - also paid for by the PTA - and used that money to give every class an assistant teacher, but it's not up to me

Totally agree - Assistant teachers are more important than dance. Dance is great but it is more of a nice to have than a need to have. Sounds like you are almost done at the school (unless you also have a younger child) but perhaps you should join the PA and influence the decision!

I'm not sure of the breakdown of which schools have different levels of assistant teachers. Anything is good but some have more than others. This is something I would do homework on if I were choosing a school. There are also different levels of assistant teachers but in my experience most are in grad school for education or something similar, so usually truly can add value - worst case they at least can help the teachers with basic tasks which is better than nothing.

[Anonymous]

Anyone having experience with Basis Manhattan? I’ve heard that they have openings for almost every grade

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thank you so much! This is incredibly helpful! I’m also curious, are there any all-boys schools that fall into that category?

No problem!

I'm not as well-informed on those - my daughter was interested in single-sex (though she ended up at a co-ed) but my son was not - but I think Allen-Stevenson, St. Bernard's, and Buckley are the three lower-tier ones in the UES at least, though none of them have high schools.

Also, for commute reasons we didn't look much at Brooklyn so there could be some options I'm missing there, I may have missed a few other coed ones also - we applied to all the ones I mentioned, but rechecking my spreadsheet, some other co-eds in that category we looked at but decided not to apply to are UNIS, Dwight, Basis, BWL, Steiner, City & Country, VCS, and Leman. (we liked a couple of the ones on my first list better than those and assumed - correctly - we'd get into at least one of them)

What did you think of VCS?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What did you think of VCS?

We didn't get to the point of visiting - I was a little casual in saying "liked better" there; we had to cull down the list, we weren't applying to any K-8's for our older kid and so we ended up eliminating any downtown K-8's because we thought (correctly, as it turns out) that she'd most likely end up somewhere uptown and we didn't want to commit to years of annoying commutes for one or both of them.