Special Delivery: City Parents Receive Gifted, Talented News

Families that had expected to receive news in the mail about the gifted and talented programs that accepted their children instead received a surprise: The results were delivered over the weekend by a fleet of hired couriers driving black vans.

The deliveries were made to all five boroughs starting Friday and ending late last night, with the un-postmarked letters being dropped into the hands of doormen or in mailboxes.

A Department of Education spokesman, Andrew Jacob, said the city hired the couriers in order to get the letters out as quickly as possible, after a glitch in the prekindergarten selection process led the department to double-check the kindergarten decisions before sending them out.

Parents must decide whether to accept the gifted and talented offers by this Friday.

Hiring couriers was about five times cheaper than using overnight mail, costing $5 for each of the 3,300 letters, school officials said.

Parents whose children scored in the 90th percentile on a gifted-and-talented exam had marked their top choices for programs, listing them from no. 1 on down a list. The letters told them to which programs their child had been admitted.

Although there are many gifted-and-talented programs scattered at schools around the city, some — such as two citywide programs, NEST and Anderson, and local district programs with good reputations — are more coveted than others.

Yesterday, the founder of the consulting firm School Search NYC, Robin Aronow, said that while some families are thrilled, others are disappointed. "There were people sort of in shock that their child scored in the high 90s, and they had to go all the way to their third or fourth choice," Ms. Aronow said.

She said some of the disappointed parents may decide to send their children to private school instead, while others might apply to other public schools that admit through lotteries or go to their zoned school.

News of the unusual delivery system spread quickly through e-mail listservs and Web sites, where parents wrote to each other trying to predict the precise time they could expect news to come.

"Dying here," a mother wrote on the online message board UrbanBaby. "Hubby is furious that I made us sit home all day on Father's Day weekend."

"We have camped out in our lobby half the day and doorman knows to buzz us the second it arrives," another person wrote five minutes later.

The letters are also going out through regular mail.