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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.

Next steps

Each tracked school opens with Next steps: what to do, by when, and why, built from the DOE’s published audition rules and dates and from what you’ve tracked. For a District 21 talent program, that’s registering for the in-person talent test by its deadline; for an arts program that auditions online, uploading the audition in MySchools before the application closes. Steps also cover the documents you haven’t gathered, the next open house MySchools lists, and putting your programs on the application, and they flag a list that breaks a rule, such as more than two District 21 talent areas.

A step appears six weeks before its date and is grouped as This week, Coming up or Later. Check one off when it’s done, or use its … menu to snooze it for a week or mark it Not for us. Steps follow this year’s dates, so they show for a child applying this year. Every step names its source and when we read it, and the DOE page you act on sits beside the step.

For more than the rules, tap Get next steps. We read the school’s own site (and its network’s, for a charter) and write the steps the rules don’t cover: who to email, with the message drafted for you to send or copy; what to prepare for an audition; what to ask when the school doesn’t publish the answer. It takes a few minutes, and you can leave the page: the new steps arrive marked New, beside the others. Each one names the page it came from, and an email address or phone number in a step is one we found published, never a guess. Each child gets five researches a month; after that, we plan from what we’ve already found.

You can also ask Motley Intelligence (“what should we do next for Mark Twain?”). It reads you the same steps, checks one off or snoozes it when you tell it to, and starts Get next steps for a school once you confirm.

What you track per school

Each school has five tabs:

  • What we know— every date, format and rule we hold for the school and each program you’re applying to, with where it came from and when we read it (including what Get next stepsfound on the school’s own site). Where sources disagree we say so and follow the DOE, and we list what we haven’t found yet.
  • 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.

Your MySchools list

When a child applies to middle school (in 5th grade) or high school (in 8th grade), the Admissions view adds an Application list tab for that child. Draft our listputs together up to 12 programs your child can apply to: the programs you track first, then the schools you saved, then programs near you. Each one shows its admissions method, whether your child can apply and is in its first priority group, and for high school, Motley’s competitiveness tier from MySchools applicant counts (2016–21, the last years published), or “No data” when there are none. Charter schools, private schools, the SHSAT schools and LaGuardia have applications of their own and stay off the list.

The order is yours. Move programs with the arrows, by dragging, or from the keyboard, take any off, and add others from Also considered. MySchools places your child in the highest-ranked program that offers a seat, so rank in true preference order: ranking a program lower never helps your child get into one ranked higher. The checks above Save listflag a list with no program your child has a strong claim to, a list where every program screens or auditions, District 21’s limit of two talent areas, and audition dates coming up. Answering Where does your child go now? sharpens the priority checks.

Save listkeeps the order and tracks every school on it for that child, with exactly those programs picked. Then enter the same list on MySchools: we don’t submit applications.

You can also ask Motley Intelligence (“help me pick high schools for my 8th grader”). It drafts the same list, or reads back the one you saved, and saves it in your order once you confirm.

Calendar and runway

The Admissions view has an Organizer ⇄ Calendartoggle — 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. The feed carries your open next steps with a date too, and drops each one once it’s checked off. Your dashboard also carries a Deadline runway: the next six weeks at a glance.

Exporting your plan

At the bottom of Next steps, PDF downloads one child’s whole tracker as a printable plan: each school’s status, next steps, dates, what we know with its sources, documents and notes. CSV downloads the same as a spreadsheet, and stays available if your Pro plan ends.

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