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Admissions tracking & deadlines

NYC admissions is a season of overlapping deadlines, portals, and paperwork, run separately for every child and every school. The admissions tracker is where you keep it straight. It’s part of Motley Pro. If you just want to understand how the system works, that reference is free at Admission methods.

Getting a school into the tracker

Open Admissions from the rail on your dashboard. The schools you can track are the schools you’ve saved, so save a school first and it becomes available. Tracking is per child — two siblings applying to the same school get their own independent entries — so check which child is selected at the top before you start.

What you track per school

Each school opens with four tabs:

  • Important dates — the application deadline plus any dates you add yourself (tours, open houses, auditions, results).
  • Documents — the paperwork this school asks for.
  • Links— the school’s own site, its application portal, and its DOE profile, plus anything you add.
  • Notes — free text, saved as you type.

One documents list per child

Your family has one birth certificate, so Motley keeps one documents list per child. This is the part that surprises people, in a good way:

  • Check it once, it’s checked everywhere.Tick off “Birth certificate” at one school and it shows as done at every school you track for that child.
  • A school you add later arrives pre-checked. Start tracking a new school in December and the paperwork you already have is already ticked.
  • Removing a document is per school.If a school doesn’t ask for something, remove it there — it stays on your child’s list and at every other school that does ask.
  • Documents you add yourself show up everywhere.Add “custody agreement” once and it appears on every tracked school for that child.

One side effect worth knowing: the “documents outstanding” number on your dashboard counts distinct documents, not copies. If that number recently got smaller, nothing was lost — it had been counting one birth certificate once per school.

Schools that ask for more

Some admissions methods want more than a ranked list — an audition, an SHSAT ticket, a screened-admissions record, a private-school application packet. When a school you’re tracking uses one of those, its header carries a method badge you can click straight through to the Documents tab, where the requirements are spelled out and any paperwork specific to that method can be added to your checklist in one click. That extra paperwork is also seeded automatically when you start tracking, instead of every school getting the same generic list.

Deadlines we already know

For charter schools we read application deadlines from the schools’ own sites. When we have one, the Dates tab shows it beside your own date — with where it came from, how confident we are, and when we read it — and offers to adopt it in one click. We never overwrite a date you set yourself.

Admissions rules and dates change from cycle to cycle. Treat what we show as a head start, and confirm the specifics with the school.

Calendar and runway

The Admissions view has an Organizer ⇄ Calendar toggle — the calendar lays every tracked date across the months ahead. From there you can subscribe to a feed that drops your deadlines into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook, so they sit alongside the rest of your life. Your dashboard also carries a Deadline runway: the next six weeks at a glance.

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