When her daughter took the city’s specialized high schools admissions test in October, Merle Hendricks wasn’t sure she would get into every one of the public schools she applied to. But she was shocked when the results arrived in the mail several weeks ago, and her daughter, Deanna Murphy, 14, had not been admitted to any of them.
Deanna, after all, was one of the top two students in her eighth-grade class at St. Joseph’s Parish Day School in Queens Village, her mother said. Her score on the qualifying test, 398, was not exceptional -- scores range from 200 to 800, and the cutoff for admission to specialized high schools hovers around 480 -- but her grades should have been good enough to get her into other desired high schools, Ms. Hendricks thought.
But, as it turned out, Deanna was not alone. Five eighth-grade girls from St. Joseph’s who took the admissions test were not placed in any city school. A few of them had to scramble and are hoping they are given a spot in the second round of high school matches.
Citywide, 7,391 eighth graders — about one in 10 — were not matched to schools in Round 1 this year for a variety of reasons, the Education Department reported when those school assignments went out. With high school choice increasingly more complicated -- and the stakes ever higher -- some of those 13- and 14-year-olds who are left out have risen to the public's attention. But it's rare when a cluster of students at one school is locked out.
In the case of St. Joseph's, which has fewer than 80 students, there are only nine eighth-graders to start with, meaning more than half did not get into a city high school.
But Ms. Hendricks did not realize that right away. She found out only after a chance encounter with the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott.
Looking to learn about Deanna’s options, Ms. Hendricks went to the Round 2 high school admissions fair at the Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Campus on March 3, where she ran into Mr. Walcott. She said she pressed him for answers.
“I didn’t let him go,” Ms. Hendricks said. “I needed him to explain the situation to me.”
Mr. Walcott made a call on the spot, Ms. Hendricks said. Three days later, an official called to tell her: The Education Department had never received grades from St. Joseph’s Parish Day School for the five girls who took the admissions test, including Deanna.
Ms. Hendricks immediately called Monique Maylor, the school’s principal, who said she had no inkling of the problem. “We really didn’t know how anything had happened,” Ms. Maylor said. She called an emergency meeting with parents the next night.
In an interview, Ms. Maylor said the girls’ teacher had encountered a problem logging their grades into the Education Department's Web site. The teacher had e-mailed the department about the problem, but it remained unresolved when the deadline passed.
This came as a surprise to Emmanuelle Toussaint, 13, who had assumed she had not been admitted to a public high school because her test score -- 410 -- was too low.
“I was upset,” said Emmanuelle (whose mother is an employee on the business side of The New York Times). “I thought I let myself down, and I thought I could have tried harder.”
The Education Department declined to comment on the girls’ situation, but Frank Thomas, a spokesman, said that St. Joseph’s should have had plenty of time to enter the grades. Schools can log them into a Web site anytime from early December to mid-February.
Ms. Hendricks was taken aback. “I just can’t imagine being that careless as an institution,” she said.
Ms. Hendricks and Emmanuelle's mother, Yves Toussaint, said their daughters had spent weekends and summers studying and taking enrichment classes to prepare for public school.
When looking at middle schools, Ms. Hendricks added, she had chosen St. Joseph’s Parish Day School specifically to put Deanna “in a better position to get into a great high school.”
In recent weeks, Ms. Maylor said, she has driven to a dozen or so of the high schools that four of the girls have since applied to, to try to better their chances of being accepted in the second round of high school admission. Those offers will go out in May.
But the girls’ parents aren’t taking any chances. Several have already put down deposits at Catholic high schools in case their daughters do not get into any public schools in Round Two.
Ms. Hendricks said she had put down a nonrefundable $900 deposit at Mary Louis Academy, a nearby Catholic school, even though paying the school’s tuition fees would be a challenge.
“That’s killing me,” said Ms. Hendricks, 37, a registered nurse who has put on hold her plans to buy a house. “I was hoping to have at least four years to save and send her to a good college.”
At least one of the five students, Keana Tomlinson, 13, said she was not too upset. “I don’t think she really cared much about it,” said her mother, Donna. “Her heart was set on Mary Louis.”