Acceptance letters for the city’s highly competitive public Gifted and Talented kindergarten programs are going out months later than usual this year, adding another layer of stress for parents going through the arduous process of enrolling their children.

The stress will be financial for parents who have paid deposits to hold places in private schools as a backup in case their children aren’t accepted into a gifted program.

Letters for district-based programs will be sent out citywide on May 14, the Department of Education announced last week, almost two months later than in years past in some districts, private school administrators and parents say. Private schools follow the same calendar every year, which requires parents to make a decision and put down a deposit — sometimes thousands of dollars — on a seat for their child by early March.

A downtown Manhattan mother, Julie Messeca, whose 5-year-old son was accepted into private school and who is still waiting to hear whether he will also be accepted into a public gifted program, is among the parents saying she feels trapped in “a very difficult situation.”
“You’re caught in a Catch-22,” she said. “It’s not just about losing the deposit — and it’s a big chunk of money — it becomes about your relationship about the private school. If they have the deposit, they’re going to plan for you to be there.”

The delay comes after the Department of Education overhauled the admissions process for its gifted kindergarten programs this year in an effort to make it more equitable. Previously, applications were sorted in local districts. The new centralized system, which includes a new citywide test offered in nine languages, is taking the department longer to process, although department officials also noted that letters had gone out as late as May and June in past years in some areas of the city. Citywide gifted programs send out letters earlier than district-based programs.

“Of the more than 12,000 students who applied for Gifted and Talented programs throughout the city, we have heard from only a handful of families who are encountering a problem with the timeline,” a department spokeswoman, Melody Meyer, said. “This is the first year for a new admissions process and we are closely listening to feedback in an effort to make the process responsive to parents’ needs.”

The chairman of the trustees for the Independent Schools Admissions Association of Greater New York, George Davison, who is also the head of the Grace Church School, praised the quality of public gifted programs but called the admissions calendar a “movable feast.”
Making things worse for parents this year is Manhattan’s recent boom in children born to wealthy parents, he said, which has increased competition for private school seats.

“You have a growing cohort of children, and schools have a fixed number of seats,” Mr. Davison said.

Despite the high demand for seats, the late letters could put some private schools in a jam if parents wait until late spring to decide where their children will go to school in the fall.

Many small private nursery schools are holding places for 4-year-olds to come back for another year in case they aren’t accepted into a gifted program, the director of West Side Montessori, Marlene Barron, said. For the nursery schools, which often have only one or two classes, the holes in enrollment could be particularly troublesome as they make teacher-hiring decisions for the coming year.

“There will be huge sucking sound, a vortex, as a significant number of kids get sucked out of the private schools,” she said.

After months of touring schools and prepping their 4- and 5-year-olds for tests, even parents not considering private schools say the long wait for acceptance letters is making the process more stressful. Alexandra Morrison, who lives on the Upper West Side, said getting her twins into public kindergarten this year has been more difficult than giving birth to them.

“The enormous pressure that this process has put on parents is unmatched by anything else. I’ve had root canals, I gave birth to twins, I got into college,” she said. “All these major things in life have been less traumatic than this ordeal.”

The director of Columbus Park West Nursery, Emily Shapiro, says the stress of the process this year drove two families with children enrolled at her school to the suburbs, and she warns that more middle-class parents could follow.

“We’re getting squished on both ends — it’s harder to get into private school, and the gifted and talented is so late,” she said. “I think the city’s losing families just because the whole thing has been so chaotic.”