Dive Brief:
- With the start of school just three weeks way, more than 8,000 Boston students are still waiting to find out which school they’ll attend.
- The district superintendent blamed the district’s new software, which generated erroneous assignments earlier this year.
- School employees have had to comb the data by hand to ensure the assignments were accurate.
Dive Insight:
The delay seems to have particularly rankled parents of pre-K students, some of whom have had to put deposits on other childcare options in case the Boston Public Schools placement doesn’t come through. Several parents said they had already paid upwards of $1,000 for private preschool options.
“It would be a shame if this lack of communication makes a decision for him to go to one school versus another,” Theresa Cassidy, the mother of a four-year-old, told the Boston Herald.
Waitlists in pre-K are not uncommon as districts try to keep pace with the demand for public preschool slots. In Poughkeepsie, NY, for example, district leaders announced earlier this month that all preschool and kindergarten slots had been filled. Denver, CO, often has waiting lists for its public preschool and full-day kindergarten slots.
But it’s more unusual to have students lacking a school assignment for other grades. Apparently, the district's new software was not compatible with its school choice algorithm, which assigns students based on individual instructional needs and school availability. Boston’s technological difficulties should serve as a cautionary tale to other districts: Test out your technological systems before "go time" and make sure everything works together.
