In the early 1990s, faced with the need to find quality elementary schools for our children, a small group of parents living on the Upper West Side began a collaboration to create a school. Many of their neighbors were deciding to bus their children to schools in other districts or to send them to parochial or private schools in order to find the quality of education they needed. Committed both to the public school system in New York and to the idea that young children are best served by quality neighborhood schools, the founding families worked with District 3 staff to build a new school. They wanted a school to which neighborhood families would choose to send their children. That is the school that was created and the one that our children attend today. Many of those founding families continue to play a role at MSC, as does our principal, Susan Rappaport, who founded the school and has been here from the start.

The Manhattan School for Children is a contiguous program from Kindergarten through Grade 8, maintaining throughout all grades a nurturing, child-centered spirit while meeting the developmental and academic needs of the student as he or she advances. We are what is considered a public choice school — admissions are done by lottery and open only to families living in District 3.

MSC began as part of District 3, REGION 10, and is largely supported by tax levy, with the same per capita costs as any other District 3 school. As a public school, our class sizes and basic operations are the same as other schools in the district. The principal and the school staff are all Board of Education employees who are fully licensed in accordance with New York State and City regulations. As part of the public school system, MSC is required to follow all educational mandates and assessments designed by the State and City Departments of Education. MSC serves a population of special learners through a special Tweed initiative and there are generally — though not always — two Immersion classes, also referred to as inclusion classes or CTT (collaborative team teaching), per grade. We are also committed to children who participate in the No Child Left Behind program and approximately 20 children per year enter our school through that program.