Documentary Chronicles City Kindergarten Admissions
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

When she read the admissions letter, tears filled Kristin Hart’s eyes. “He’s on the waiting list,” she said.
“Who is? Who’s on the wait list? Who?” her 4-year-old son, Caleb, asked.
Ms. Hart, a single mother who is a librarian and freelance writer, dropped her head onto a table in her Harlem apartment and sobbed. “He” was Caleb. He’d been put on the waiting list for the 2007 kindergarten class at a prestigious boys’ school on the Upper East Side, his mother’s first choice.
The scene is among several portraits captured in a new documentary, “Getting In … Kindergarten,” that will air tonight on the cable network TLC. The program puts a new twist on the familiar Manhattan melodrama. At Dalton on the Upper East Side, the film’s producer, Pamela French, said, 700 families vie for 90 spots; at Hunter College Elementary School, 1,300 families try for 48 openings. All the families profiled face difficulties, but rather than mocking kindergarten mania or bemoaning its hyper-competitiveness, “Getting In” raises the possibility that all the trouble is ultimately worthwhile.
One father, Kimani Rogers, wants his daughter Amina to go to his alma mater, Hunter, a publicly funded school for gifted children. But Hunter requires children to score in the top percentile on an IQ test, and Amina barely misses the cutoff.
Two fashion designers who live on Park Avenue, Barry and Stephanie Bricken, are told that their son is not impressing admissions directors at the most prestigious schools, prompting Ms. Bricken to voice an insecurity: Am I a good enough mother?
Ms. Hart, the single mother, stretches dollars as well as her social comfort to fight for Caleb.
“I can’t believe my daughter turned out this way,” Ms. Hart’s own mother says in one scene, watching her daughter hunt her closet for a proper outfit in which to hand deliver a “first-choice” letter telling the Upper East Side school it is her no. 1.
Yet no children — and no parents — are left bereft.
A former head of the West Side Montessori School who is featured in the film, Marlene Barron, said that outcome is fairly typical. Those who are rejected from their initial first choice, she said, often decide ultimately that they didn’t want to be there after all. “Only a few people in the end aren’t where they want to be,” she said. “It works out.”
Many parents, she said, take the competition in stride. Mr. Bricken said that was his approach. “It’s like getting into a country club, buying an apartment — it’s all the same,” he said.
Ms. Hart said that though the competition was emotionally taxing, in the end her son found the right place, a public school for gifted children. And she said that considering so many options, and deciding which would be best for Caleb, was educational. “It helped me understand my own son,” she said. “It’s a luxury.”
Ms. French compared the decision to apply rather than attend a local public school to going to a five-star restaurant even though cooking at home is cheaper and easier. “You’re paying for a luxury,” she said.
Last week, Ms. Hart said, Caleb was so excited about starting his new school that he could not sleep.
“He woke me up, completely buck naked, with his backpack on, at 5 a.m.,” she said. “He’s going to be fine.”