Parents — and, in some cases, their baby sitters, nannies, secretaries, and family members — will begin working the phones this morning in an effort to snag highly coveted 2007–08 preschool applications.

Beginning early this morning, the phone lines at the 92nd Street Y, All Souls, and Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side, as well as a host of other power preschools throughout the city, are expected to be jammed, as New Yorkers with toddlers clamor for their limited applications. With an education at a top city preschool widely perceived as a gateway to the Ivy League, those applications are more prized than ever.

“People are trying desperately to get through to preschools before they run out of applications, before they say, ‘Sorry, we’ve already given out 300,'” the founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors, Amanda Uhry, said.

“Some parents I work with have 10 people calling for them,” she added. “These parents will stop at nothing.”

This all-hands-on-deck approach is inappropriate, the admissions director for the Parents League, Cynthia Bing, said. “The nanny shouldn’t be calling. But does that happen? Sure.” Her organization helps guide city families through the private school admissions process.

The academic year begins at many schools today, thereby kicking off the quest for preschool admission for the following fall. Preschools generally require parents of would-be students to call with their application requests. Some schools grant these requests on a first-come, first-served basis, while others hold a lottery at the end of this week or later to determine which prospective students receive applications.

All Souls holds a lottery. The school’s answering machine message recently informed callers that names and addresses of 2007–08 applicants would be taken between September 5 and September 8, after which “a random selection by age group will then be made, and applications will be sent out accordingly.”

Only phone requests will be processed, the message stated, and “no write-ins, drop-ins, or messages left on this machine will be answered in the process.”

The Jewish Community Center in Manhattan on the Upper West Side requires parents to schedule an on-site tour, during which applications are distributed; and Children’s Aid Society nursery school has parents —or their surrogates — lining up as early as midnight Monday, Ms. Uhry said.

“There aren’t enough schools — that’s the real problem in New York City,” the director of the Church of the Epiphany Day School, Whendy Carter, said.

Epiphany, which offers its application online, began three years ago with 13 students and now has more than 60 preschool students ages 2 to 5, Ms. Carter said.

Although school admissions counselors say downtown preschools are being flooded with applications amid a boom of young families moving to condominiums in TriBeCa and Battery Park City, some Lower Manhattan residents insist that the preschool admissions process is less harried than it is uptown.

“I think it’s more of a phenomenon on the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side — at least I hope so,” a TriBeCa resident, Michael Caruso, said.

On behalf of his 17-month-old daughter, Asia, Mr. Caruso, 45, said he would be making calls to a handful of downtown preschools today. “One of the good things about living downtown is that we have a good public school,” he said, referring to P.S. 234 on Chambers Street. “I think that takes some of the pressure off.”

Another TriBeCa resident, Fain Sutter, 37, said calling for the applications last year was a relative breeze — compared to filling them out.”I was expecting much worse,” he said. “I was expecting that I’d have to get all my siblings, all my relatives to make calls, but for the most part, I got through on the third or fourth try.”

Mr. Sutter’s 2-year-old daughter, who will start preschool at the Montessori School of Manhattan in TriBeCa next week, was accepted to one of the nine schools to which she applied.

A mother who plans to enroll her 2-year-old daughter in an Upper East Side nursery school said she would enlist her parents, her in-laws, her office assistant, and several friends to help call for applications this week. “I’m trying not to get stressed out,” the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Susan, said. “I’ll take it in stride — unless we start making phone calls, and all the lines are busy.”