Web Site Aims To Help Parents With Preschool

Getting a child into preschool is such a cutthroat process that some parents pay as much as $6,000 a year on advisers and start touring schools even before their child is born.

In an effort to take matters into their own hands, a group of mothers has started a Zagat-like Web site that rates school programs on everything from storybook reading to kindergarten placement rates.

The San Francisco-based company, Savvy Source, launched a New York site this week and plans to expand to about 12 more cities. More than 1,000 parents have already posted their comments.

The site, which costs $35 a year to join, is the brainchild of Stacey Boyd, a 36-year-old San Francisco mother who was struck by the lack of information on preschools when she started looking for schooling for her daughter, Grace.

"What's remarkable to me is that you can get Consumer Reports on everything from cars to toaster ovens, but it's hard to get information on schools," Ms. Boyd, a former school principal who also started an education company, said. "It's a first walk through the woods in this process of choosing a school for your child, and my hope is that it will make for smarter consumers."

She tapped a group of mothers who papered the city and popular parenting Web sites with surveys. The site first launched in San Francisco and other cities in California last month.

So far, the city site focuses on several hundred schools on the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, and TriBeCa, as well as Brooklyn.

Parents rate such aspects of the schools as curriculum, teaching approach, social skills, and work habits, and offer detailed information about tuition and the application process.

On a scale of one to five, parents rate statements such as: "This school has increased my child's ability to sit still for longer periods of time."

A mother of 14-month-old twins, Sally Wilkinson, arrived in New York from London last year when the bank her husband work for transferred him. Friends urged her to immediately seek out preschools for her sons.

"To be honest, I was absolutely astounded that you had to start looking for preschools when your children are only 1," Ms. Wilkinson, an economist who lives in TriBeCa, said. "I have a research background and I was struggling to get information on schools, and this puts it really clearly on one site." Ms. Wilkinson said she learned of Savvy Source from a friend who is working for the company.

A few kinks still need to be worked out and some school ratings are based on just one or two parent surveys.

Until now, there was no comprehensive Web site about city preschools, and books are outdated even before they hit the bookshelves. Parents most often rely on word of mouth and neighborhood Internet List serves when deciding where to apply.

Education advisers who charge upwards of $6,000 a year to help place 3-year-olds in preschool are increasingly in demand as slots become harder to come by, due in part to more middle-and upper-middle-class parents staying in the city.

An early childhood education policy expert, Todd Boressoff, said educators have been talking for some time about creating a similar site.

"There are parents scrambling all over the city with little or no choice about where they send their child and with little knowledge about what programs are good," he said.

He suggested that Savvy Source should expand to include all parts of the city and not just focus on the wealthy pockets.

Ms. Boyd said that she plans to add other neighborhoods and boroughs to the site.

In addition to the ratings, which include dozens of questions, parents also have a place to post their comments.

One parent with a child at Beansprouts, a preschool on Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, wrote: "Beansprouts has both, free play and teacher led, music and movement. They have scheduled music and movement classes. In addition, there is often music playing and kids dancing during free play time."

In another section, parents offer tips about how to get into schools. A parent at the prestigious 92nd Street Y nursery school, which is reportedly more difficult to get into than Harvard University, suggested, "Contact influential people."