The city will give students living in Manhattan priority for admission to six of the borough’s top public high schools, Schools Chancellor David Banks announced Thursday.

“So many Manhattan kids went to schools that were a long train ride away. That doesn’t make sense to me,” Banks said. “So we want all of our parents to be able to send their kids to good high schools that are close to home.”

What You Need To Know

  • Six high schools in Manhattan will once again give priority to students living in the borough
  • But now that priority will be given to all Manhattan residents, not just those in District 2

  • The schools also screen students academically

Seventy-five percent of seats at the schools will be set aside for Manhattan residents. The schools, which also consider students’ grades in their admissions, are:

  • Eleanor Roosevelt High School

  • New York City Lab School

  • Baruch College Campus High School

  • Millennium High School

  • The Clinton School

  • New York City Museum School

“This will give local Manhattan parents more access to local schools or not change the percentage of low-income Black or Hispanic kids at the schools significantly. It also preserves some opportunities for students from other girls to attend the schools,” Banks said.

For years, those schools offered priority admission to residents of Manhattan’s District 2, which covers lower and midtown Manhattan and the Upper East Side. But that priority was scrapped in 2020 by the de Blasio administration, amid criticism it shut out high-performing students — including many Black and Hispanic students — simply because they lived in a different district.

Banks says the new policy is a middle ground.

“We didn’t think it was fair to just do a straight up-and-down District 2 priority that we thought would have been unfair, and that absolutely would have changed the calculus, particularly of the number of Black and brown kids who had the opportunity to go to some of those high-performing schools,” he said.

Even as he set aside seats for Manhattanites in those schools, Banks also criticized what he called a scarcity mindset behind the focus on the city’s specialized high schools, which use a single admission exam and continued to admit few Black and Hispanic students this year.

“I for one, am just quite tired of this whole argument around how many kids get into some of these specialized schools. The schools, those are great schools, but we have lots of other great schools,” Banks said.