They’re back in school. Hallelujah.

Depending on the age of your child, that means three, five, or seven child-free hours a day, five days a week.

The onus is back on the schools to provide the stimulation, education, organization, entertainment, special outings, and food.

I don’t know how they do it. But they have no choice but to do it well: There is no tougher bunch of customers than demanding New York parents, especially those that fork over a fortune to private schools.

“I’m so happy the summer is over,” one such mother told me solemnly last week. “Time for school again. This is a big year for my son, and for $25,000, it better be a good one.”

If would be tough enough if the parents at a particular school could agree upon exactly what was greatness. But unfortunately for the schools, there’s no such luck.

“At my daughter’s school they place so much emphasis on plays and speaking in public. It’s ridiculous,” a mother whose children attend a private school on the Upper East Side told me over the summer.

A week later a father at the same school told me how impressed he was with the school’s focus on performing. “I’m so happy these kids learn to perform on command at an early age. My son is really comfortable getting up and speaking or singing in front of people.It will serve him well later on. If only the school could get a half-decent sports program, then it would be perfect.”

Perfection. In so many areas of our lives, New Yorkers know there is no such thing. Everyone who has hunted for an apartment knows that at any price point you have to prioritize: What matters to you more, location or space?

We’ve spent too much time on the analyst’s couch to think our spouses or children are perfect. And we know that if we’re going to keep our nannies for an extended period of time we have to overlook certain faults. “You’ll be trading in one set of problems for another,” I heard an acquaintance counsel a friend when she was considering replacing her baby sitter of three years.

But no one seems to cut the schools any slack.

“The education at our children’s school has become mediocre,” a father of two said last week. “They really aren’t learning that much.”

“There’s too much work and too much pressure,” another father whose children attend the same school said. “My kids are always doing homework and there’s no time for them just to be kids.”

One mother of three said she’s tired of hearing parents complain. “Either pull your kid out of the school or shut up already,” she said. Committing to work to change the school is also an option, but according to this mother, too often parents want changes just to serve their own children. “Change should be made to better the entire school community,” she added.

“I actually switched my son to a different school last year,” a mother of four said. “I got sick of hearing myself complain and knew that I wasn’t willing to try to change the school, not that I think the school would have been open to doing anything about my complaints. I got into the hot school that everyone else was trying to get into. We pulled our strings and had the phone calls made and then I got there and couldn’t believe what a mistake I’d made.”

“We try hard to be in constant communication with the parents,” a private school administrator said. “We want to hear their concerns. And during the admission process we try hard to choose children who we feel will thrive in our school’s environment. And we try to explain to parents as best we can in a short period what kind of child will do well here. But the process isn’t perfect. The reality is that some teachers are better than others and not every year is going to be a great year for every kid. But a lot of times parents complain about things that really aren’t about the school.”

He’s right. Complaints often aren’t always about what goes on inside the classrooms.

“We yanked our kids out of what we had thought was the finest, most rigorous school in Riverdale. We just realized that the school’s community didn’t have the same values we wanted to impart to our children,” a mother of three boys told me.

And sometimes the issues are with the school’s administration. “There was cheating going on in my son’s school,” a mother of three said. “And nothing seemed to be being done about it. I asked the headmaster what the school’s policy was on cheating, and he had no idea. That’s frightening.”

Almost as frightening as voluntarily undergoing a New York City admissions process.

sarasberman@aol.com