Selective schools deny high achievers April 2, 2001 BY ROSALIND ROSSI EDUCATION REPORTER For 14-year-old Meghan Hodgkinson, Northside College Prep is so close, and yet so far. >From her bedroom window two blocks away, Meghan can see the state-of-the-art Chicago public high school where she applied to be a freshman this fall, along with 4,657 other students. But despite her 3.85 grade-point average, Meghan was among the 4,421 eighth-graders who were not accepted at Northside. Northside was the toughest public high school in the city to get into academically this coming school year, data from the Chicago Board of Education show. The lowest score accepted at Northside was a 142 out of a possible 160 on the Stanford Nine Achievement Test. That translates into the 97th percentile, or the top 3 percent nationally, board officials estimated. Only 5 percent of Northside applicants were accepted, or a total 237 students. Northside, at Bryn Mawr and Kedzie, opened nearly two years ago as part of a network of rigorous new regional college preps intended to stem the flight of high-achieving students from the city's public high schools. But this year, for the first time, all six college prep schools, along with Whitney Young Magnet and Lane Technical High, used the Stanford Nine as their basis for admissions, giving the nation's third-largest school system its first-ever glimpse at comparable admission data across its selective high schools. Students at all eight schools were picked in rank order of their test scores. No preference was given to race, address or gender, but each school's racial mix is expected to meet desegregation muster, said Blondean Davis, chief of school operations. "It's purely a score and that's that. Otherwise, this thing is too complex," Davis said. Northside's new freshman class will reflect the largest white population (40 percent) and the largest Asian population (32 percent) among the city's eight selective high schools, but its ninth-graders still will be mostly minority students. Whitney Young, once the system's crown jewel, still garnered the most applicants--6,708. But the latest results confirm that Young now has fierce competition. Northside, Jones Academic College Prep and Payton College Prep all had higher test score cutoffs. Applicants to King College Prep, which will convert from a neighborhood to a college prep high school next school year, faced the easiest test score cutoff. King accepted all the way down to the national norm, or the 50th percentile, although Davis said "we expect them to do much better next year." Jones' applicants had the slimmest chances of admission--only 3 percent--because Jones shrunk its number accepted to adjust for construction planned this coming school year, Davis said. At Payton, the city's newest state-of-the-art school, only four of every 100 students were accepted, data showed. However, Payton also accepted fewer students than Northside because one classroom, featuring reduced class size, was set aside for its autistic special education students, Davis said. Meghan's father, Don Hodgkinson, said his daughter was accepted at Lincoln Park's International Baccalaureate program, which admits students scoring above the 95th percentile, as well as Whitney Young, but had hoped to attend Northside. The family figured Meghan's seventh-grade Iowa scores, which put her vocabulary at an 11th-grade level, and her 3.85 GPA out of a possible 4.0 would translate into impressive admission scores. Plus, Meghan hoped to join Northside's soccer, volleyball and softball teams and enjoy a two-block walk home from school. She will attend the selective Young Scholar's program at Von Steuben, four blocks away, instead. But sometimes, said Meghan, "it's a little bit aggravating" when she walks out her front door and looks down the street at the front door of Northside. The entrance test "didn't seem hard to me," said Meghan, an eighth-grader at Peterson School. However, Davis said students' impression of how they did on the test can be deceiving. Ten parents of rejected Northside applicants were so convinced their children tested better that those tests were rescored. "We had representatives from the Stanford Nine here do that on request, and they all came out the same way," Davis said. Even clout didn't help. The children of one prominent North Side alderman didn't make it into Northside this year. They will attend Wilmette's Loyola Academy, a highly regarded Jesuit school, instead. While other college preps accepted 10 percent more students than seats available, Northside kept only a 5 percent cushion because "we got burned last year" when the cushion was bigger, Davis said. As of Friday, Davis said, only five students accepted at Northside decided to attend high school elsewhere. All but King expect to send out no other acceptance letters beyond those mailed March 2, she said. Parent Patricia Norcik said she is "keeping her fingers crossed" that her seventh-grade daughter will follow her son into Northside 1 1/2 years from now. She's even considering hiring a summer math tutor to boost her daughter's math skills and increase her chances of admission. Norcik said she's "frightened to death" her daughter won't make it into Northside. Fear hit hard when one neighbor was recently accepted at the prestigious and private St. Ignatius College Prep, but rejected by Northside. "That's really amazing to me," Norcik said. "What does it take to get in that school?" -- This is the CPS Science Teacher List. To unsubscribe, send a message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For more information: <http://home.sprintmail.com/~mikelach/subscribe.html>. 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