Aren’t They Just Income Tax Deductions Anyway? (No, I Mean The Kids Themselves)

Another year, another crop of Type A parents struggles with getting ahead in this competitive city:

Among some New York parent circles, it’s considered normal to spend $6,000 on a consultant to help toddlers get into private school.

The spending is spreading to public schools on the Upper West Side, where parents jostling for the seats in a few “it” schools are increasingly willing to drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get an advantage.

Maggie Ganias said she used to scoff at frantic pregnant New York City women applying to competitive private nursery schools before reaching their sixth month. She decided she would be sending her child to public school so she wouldn’t have to go through all that. When her son, Alexander, turned 4, she realized her mistake.

“I had always laughed at that cliché of parents in New York. But here I was just a public school mom and all these choices were in front of me,” she said. “It’s overwhelming.”

Faced with a staggering array of decisions and deadlines as her son prepared for his first day of kindergarten a year away, she did what a growing number of parents are doing each year: She turned to Robin Aronow.

Ms. Aronow is an elementary school admissions consultant who has created a niche by charging parents to help them apply for choice public schools. She is based on the Upper West Side, where public elementary school admissions are arguably the most competitive and complicated in the city. Autumn is Ms. Aronow’s peak season: Applications become available, and school tours and testing begin.

. . .

“I couldn’t have done this without her,” a mother of a 4-year-old, Brett Hill, who lives on the Upper West Side, said. “Friends call me crying, saying, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ They go to Robin’s seminar and they come back better and calmer.”

. . .

Ms. Aronow charges $50 a season to join the e-mail listserv, nearly $200 an hour for phone calls, or $2,000 for an annual all-inclusive package. She says she charges less than some of her competitors, who focus more on private schools. This year, she is also doing a pro-bono presentation at a nonprofit center for immigrants.

“Whatever it was, it was worth it,” Ms. Hill said of the costs of Ms. Aronow’s services. “It alleviated so much stress.”

See also: Manhattan Preschool Admissions More Competitive Than Harvard.