More time to apply for school

Families scrambling to finish their middle and high school applications for city schools by next week are getting a fourday extension, Education Department officials said.

The deadline for the applications was pushed back from Monday to Friday at 11:59 p.m. after parents reported glitches with the online application portal.

“In order to give families and schools more time to review their options and complete their middle and high school applications, the DOE announced that we are extending the application deadline to Friday, Dec. 6,” said department spokeswoman Miranda Barbot.

City students rank up to 12 middle or high schools in order of preference. High schoolers can generally apply anywhere in the city, while middle schoolers are mostly confined to their districts.

Schools use a variety of admissions criteria, ranging from geographic proximity to previous grades and state test scores. Some require portfolios and interviews. Applications to the city’s specialized high schools involve a separate process. Students learn what school they’ve matched with in March.

This year, for the first time, city officials scrapped the second round of the admissions process, opting instead to automatically place students on wait lists for any school they didn’t get into that they ranked higher than the school they did get matched with.

Students will be able to track their positions on the wait lists in real time.

A growing number of schools are now explicitly considering diversity in their admissions criteria. District 3 in Manhattan and 15 in Brooklyn now give preference to needy students as part of their districtwide middle school integration plans.

Several coveted schools including Baruch College Campus High School in Flatiron and Leon Goldstein High School in Brooklyn will give preference either based on socioeconomic status or zip code in a bid to diversify their student bodies.