By Tom Momberg
The city’s universal pre-K, or pre-Kindergarten, officially starts Wednesday, Sept. 9, and the mayor’s office said Wednesday it has officially met its goal of enrolling at least 70,000 families in full-day programs.
More than 1,900 pre-K program locations are up and running, with some last-minute additions still coming in, the mayor’s office said.
Only about 4,500 half-day pre-K seats were put online, despite a push from stay-at-home parents and religious groups advocating for the half-day option. The mayor’s office said it would not have enrollment numbers for those seats until after school begins.
The Orthodox Union said it was happy Mayor Bill de Blasio made a solid number of half-day seats available, because they are compatible with Jewish day school programs and yeshivas and have served those children for 15 years.
But the non-partisan public policy arm of the Orthodox Union, OU Advocacy-Teach New York State, issued a statement expressing concern over the time it took to roll out the half-day seats.
“It took nearly eight months from when the mayor announced he would release a Request for Proposals in December 2014 to the release of these seats just three weeks before the beginning of the school year,” OU Advocacy-Teach NYS said in a statement. “Many more students would have been able to participate in the half-day program had this process been as open and timely as the full-day UPK application process. We hope to work with the mayor to rectify these issues in the future.”
But as a result of the push by the mayor’s office to give a full day of learning to every kid and family who wants it, the city Department of Education has put roughly 80,000 full-day pre-K seats online throughout the five boroughs, including 23,000 in Queens — up from 14,000 the year before.
“We built a solid cushion since this is the first year of universal enrollment, and because we want to make sure parents have lots of options to choose from,” a spokesman from the mayor’s office said.
That means there are still seats available, including some in Queens, the mayor’s office said. Parents can continue to register online up until the first day of school at nyc.gov/
Reach reporter Tom Momberg by e-mail at tmomb
