$30 An Hour Is My Rate

Cute story but it won’t really be something until they start advertising on Craig’s List for help:

Parents — and, in some cases, their baby sitters, nannies, secretaries, and family members — will begin working the phones this morning in an effort to snag highly coveted 2007–08 preschool applications.

Beginning early this morning, the phone lines at the 92nd Street Y, All Souls, and Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side, as well as a host of other power preschools throughout the city, are expected to be jammed, as New Yorkers with toddlers clamor for their limited applications. With an education at a top city preschool widely perceived as a gateway to the Ivy League, those applications are more prized than ever.

“People are trying desperately to get through to preschools before they run out of applications, before they say, ‘Sorry, we’ve already given out 300,'” the founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors, Amanda Uhry, said.

“Some parents I work with have 10 people calling for them,” she added. “These parents will stop at nothing.”

. . .

A mother who plans to enroll her 2-year-old daughter in an Upper East Side nursery school said she would enlist her parents, her in-laws, her office assistant, and several friends to help call for applications this week. “I’m trying not to get stressed out,” the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Susan, said. “I’ll take it in stride — unless we start making phone calls, and all the lines are busy.”