Before You Say Yes

Ask about the Tuesday, not the tour

A school can be lovely on tour day. What you are choosing is an ordinary Tuesday in November, when your child needs something specific and you need to know who will help. The letter of admission is not yet the whole decision. It says the school wants your child, and it leaves open what support will look like, what the year will cost and when you have to answer.

Published support pages describe how a school is organized, which is not quite what your child would receive. Packer's learning support page, for example, describes a team of learning specialists and curriculum coordinators who work with teachers, psychologists, counselors and nurses. That is a good sign of structure and not yet an arrangement.

So ask for the arrangement in plain terms. Who would work with your child, how often, in the classroom or outside it, alone or in a group? What does tuition cover, and what is billed separately? What happens if needs change mid-year? Then ask who at the school will confirm those answers, and in what form, because a friendly tour conversation and a written arrangement are different things.

If the school asks for evaluations or reports, ask which route it wants for sensitive records and who will see them, then use that route instead of a general admissions inbox or a forwarded email. Practices differ from school to school, so ask rather than assume.

The public track runs beside it

For a child with a disability, New York City runs two processes side by side: kindergarten admissions, and the Kindergarten IEP Process (KIP), which determines special education services. Families are encouraged to take part in both, and the KIP representative assigned to you is the first person to ask (NYC Public Schools).

If your child will attend a private school in New York City at your expense, tell your KIP representative you are seeking special education there. If your child is eligible, the city develops an Individualized Education Services Plan (IESP) rather than an IEP, and you provide the school's name and address. An IESP does not set up an arrangement inside a private school by itself, so ask the school how it would work alongside one.

Two calendars, one decision

For regular-cycle applications completed by Friday, January 8, 2027, member schools of ISAAGNY, the independent-school admissions association, can send kindergarten decisions no earlier than 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, February 4, 2027. Replies are due no later than noon on Thursday, February 11, 2027 (ISAAGNY). Your own letter gives your actual window, which may be shorter than that span.

The public calendar sits alongside it. Kindergarten applications open December 9, 2026 and close January 22, 2027, and offers are released March 30, 2027 (NYC Public Schools). For regular-cycle families, that means the public application closes before private decisions arrive, and public offers come after the private reply deadline. You will answer the private school first.

Early notification for connected families, rolling admission at schools that mainly serve children with learning differences (ISAAGNY agreement), and schools outside the association can all follow different calendars. Our timeline guide sorts out who qualifies. Check your own letter before leaning on any date here.

Annual cost, and when the money moves

Aid is its own application, and each school decides its own award. Our financial aid guide has the household detail. For this decision, what matters is the arithmetic. Tuition plus necessary extras, minus grants, is the annual net cost. The payment schedule is a separate question, because a year can be affordable and the first payments can still arrive sooner than you would like.

Clarity, which collects aid applications for the schools that use it, does not produce a family contribution figure. Each school applies its own formula, so the same household can see different results at different schools (Clarity). One school's award is not a forecast for the next. If the other parent is not part of your child's life, cannot be located, or there are safety or custody concerns, Clarity says to contact its support team about the right path (Clarity).

Timing matters too. Packer, as one example, sets January 8, 2027 as the aid deadline for prospective families, and its 2027-28 application opens in early October. Awards arrive with the enrollment contract, and a family that enrolls without applying is expected not to seek aid in its first three years unless circumstances change significantly (Packer). Other schools will differ, so ask whether skipping aid now closes the door later.

Here is the comparison to fill in for each school you are weighing.

A school that wins the tour can still lose the table, and February is a better time to find that out than September.

Reading the letter and the contract

The letter says yes, and the contract says what yes involves. Read the letter for the reply deadline, hour included, and put it in your calendar first. Then read the contract for the lines in the table: how the deposit is treated, when refund terms change, the payment dates and what the aid award covers.

Finally, find where the support arrangement lives. If it was described in conversation, look for it in the contract or an attachment. If it is not there, ask the person you identified earlier to confirm it by email. A school may be unable to commit to specifics before an evaluation or placement is complete, and that is worth knowing before the deadline, not after.

Waitlist, no offer, and what to send now

A waitlist does not tell you where you stand. Member schools may extend offers to waitlisted families after notification, but the published rules do not give families a rank or odds, so do not assume a good place or a poor one. Ask the school how its waitlist works: what, if anything, it wants to hear from you, how offers are made and how long you would have to answer.

Keep a real alternative moving. New York City guarantees a public kindergarten seat to resident children in the calendar year they turn five. Look up your zoned school by address on the city's Find a School page or call 311, and if you do not have one, a Family Welcome Center can help (NYC Public Schools). If you accept a seat while waitlisted elsewhere, your contract's deposit terms decide what a later waitlist offer would cost, so know them before you reply. If learning differences are central to your search, our learning differences schools guide is the place to start.

The move for this week: email admissions at each school you are seriously weighing. Ask who will confirm the support arrangement and in what form, and ask for the 2027-28 tuition, required extras and deposit terms so you can fill in the table. Then put each reply deadline, hour included, in your calendar.