The building of the first state-funded Hindu school in England will be marked with a ceremony this weekend.

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Kate Yourke does not have the heart to tell her daughter Coral she was rejected from the prekindergarten program at Public School 132 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where her sister goes, even though siblings were supposed to get priority.

One of Bay Brown’s 4-year-old twins was rejected from the prekindergarten at P.S. 282 in Park Slope. But three days later, Ms. Brown received another letter saying her other twin had been accepted.

And on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Deborah Gottesfeld soothed her son’s nerves for weeks as he waited to find out which middle school would take him.

“We’ve been checking the mail nonstop,” she said, adding: “It’s like you can’t even enjoy the last four weeks of elementary school. All of these things chip away at your willingness to be in the system.” On Thursday, she received a letter from the middle school her son applied to apologizing for the delay and informing her that he had been accepted. But that letter was supposed to have come from the city itself.

This year, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has streamlined and centralized the dizzying array of admission procedures for the city’s prekindergartens and middle schools. He said his goal was to equalize the process, saying that the vast number of individual applications and deadlines made it impossible to know if parents were being treated fairly.

But with the changes have come snags. Children who were supposed to receive the greatest preference for a prekindergarten spot because a sibling attended the school were rejected. At some schools, children who lived within the school’s zoned area were rejected in favor of those who lived outside it, the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

Education Department officials said the problems arose either because parents made mistakes in filling out a new standardized form, or because the algorithm to assign siblings to the same school did not take twins and triplets into account. After receiving dozens of complaints, officials combed through 9,000 applications and concluded that the problems were limited to roughly 200 cases, which they said would be corrected. But some city lawmakers and parents say they believe the problems are more widespread.

Middle school admissions notifications have been delayed, leaving parents frustrated and unable to plan for next year, especially if their children do not get their first choice.

“Part of the challenge is that we took on about 28 individual district processes and created a standardized timeline,” said Elizabeth Sciabarra, the director of the Office of Student Enrollment, Planning and Operations, referring to how middle school admissions were changed. Her office, which handles high school admissions, added prekindergarten admissions and notification of middle school admissions this year. “I know that there are parents who are upset that they haven’t gotten a letter yet. Rest assured they will by the end of the week, and we have committed to parents we will work to get this done earlier next year.”

In years past, neighborhood districts set their own calendars for middle school admissions; this year, the city placed all middle schools on the same timeline, although admissions criteria and decisions remained the responsibility of individual schools.

In some districts, the uniform timetable means students are finding out where they will go several weeks later than they would have under the old system. And, in part because various admissions forms were delayed, notification letters were sent several days later than the city had planned.

The department has considered consolidating the entire middle school admissions process, as it did for high schools five years ago, but Ms. Sciabarra said no final decision had been made.

Although city officials said the problems were limited to the delay in notification, there were hints of other issues. Several students at P.S. 321 in Park Slope were assigned to middle schools that they did not apply to, school officials said. And one student was simply left off the list of children assigned to the school.

for full story - parent frustration

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