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New York City is extending the high school application deadline to Dec. 9, after officials discovered a glitch in a new tool that tells students their admissions chances, an Education Department spokesperson said Wednesday.
The glitch only affected two schools, but families said that could have had ripple effects on their rankings.
The extension came hours before applications were set to close for the city’s eighth graders, who rank 12 or more top choices from an array of over 400 schools.
In an added layer of complexity, the deadline will be extended even further, to Jan. 10, for roughly 1,500 students who officials said may have acted on incorrect information about their odds of getting into two popular Manhattan high schools.
Officials said they would still release admissions results for all families on March 6 as originally planned.
Education officials debuted the new prediction tool — developed by researchers affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — this year to give families a more realistic sense of their odds of getting into a given school and help them assemble more balanced applications. It gives students a “high,” “medium,” or “low” chance based on the school’s selection criteria and competitiveness, along with the student’s lottery number.
But the program spat out incorrect odds for families looking at two popular Manhattan high schools, Millennium and NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies, based on incorrect information about the number of open seats, according to officials and Debbie Kross, the president of the Citywide Council on High Schools, a parent-led school board representing high school families across the five boroughs.
Both of those schools were part of a group of six competitive Manhattan high schools where officials decided this year to give students who live in the borough priority for 75% of seats.
Officials corrected the error Tuesday night, but emailed roughly 1,600 families who had either applied to one of the two affected schools or selected either as a “favorite” in the MySchools online portal letting them know about the mistake and offering a deadline extension until Jan. 10, according to Kross and an email obtained by Chalkbeat.
Education Department spokesperson Jenna Lyle called the glitch an “initial implementation issue,” noting “families are finding the tool helpful.”
“This issue, which only impacts a small percentage of students, has been resolved, and we apologize for this inconvenience,” she added.
The Education Department decided to extend the deadline for everyone to “ensure all families have enough time to complete their application and have the most accurate information,” officials said.
It wasn’t immediately clear how long the prediction tool had been using incorrect odds for the two high schools and why officials only caught the mistake this week. Enrollment officials told Kross they were performing an audit to ensure the tool wasn’t giving out bad information for any other schools, she said.
The introduction of the new tool was one of several changes to this year’s admissions process. Students could also rank an unlimited number of high schools this year for the first time, up from 12.
It is not, however, the first time that technical glitches have gummed up the city’s school application processes at the last minute.
Earlier this year, technical glitches with the city’s middle school application process delayed the start of the application period and forced officials to push back the deadline.
Officials also extended the high school deadline in 2022 because of technical issues. But Education Department officials in recent years have committed to streamlining the process and delivering admissions results earlier in the year so families have time to plan.
Kross, who helped push the Education Department to develop the prediction tool, thinks it’s reasonable to grant more time just to families who’d received incorrect information through it, in case it swayed how they ranked schools in their application.
“The way [the Education Department] identified the issue, communicated about it, and offered to remediate it is very fair,” said Kross.
But other parents felt it’s unfair to further extend the deadline for only some families.
“That is incredibly unfair … to selectively give some people more than a month to continue their application process,” said Kim Gabriel, a Brooklyn parent of an eighth grader who did not get the extension until Jan. 10.
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.
