school daze

Park Slope Has Run Out of Classrooms for Kindergartners

Nobody panic, but it looks like come September, there will be more kindergartners in Park Slope than classroom seats to accommodate them. Haha, just kidding. Everyone is already panicked! After the city put 47 kids on the waiting list at P.S. 107 on Eighth Avenue without any information about alternatives, parents rushed to try other area schools like P.S. 10 on Prospect Avenue and Seventh Avenue and P.S. 39 on Sixth Avenue. But principals say their classrooms have already been filled with in-zone students. The staff at P.S. 107 is doing its part to help distraught parents already convinced this has ruined little Finn’s or Francesca’s chances of getting into Harvard. P.S. 107 administrators have visited 35 homes on a list of 142 to find out-of-district kids (the Brooklyn version of wrong side of the tracks).

It’s not as though these kindergartners won’t get an education. The city is obligated to find them a seat, just not necessarily in the kid’s home district or zone. Preferences are given to students with a sibling already in-zone, so definitely keep churning them out if you want to improve your odds. But as with most things Park Slope, it’s hard to sympathize. If you want to live in a homogeneous community of locally grown, organic-fed baby geniuses there’s a chance the blob next door will grow up to take your kid’s spot. Hopefully leaving the neighborhood will toughen them up for when this sort of travesty happens later in life.

Kinder crisis! No room for new kids at Slope schools
[Brooklyn Paper]

Park Slope Has Run Out of Classrooms for Kindergartners