Why Grubman Was So Keen To Get His Twins Into the Y Rich and Famous New Yorkers See Preschool as a Passport to Success
By EMILY NELSON and LAURIE P. COHEN Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
NEW YORK -- On Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, it's an annual race more brutally competitive than the New York Marathon: application for a spot at the 92nd Street Y's nursery school.
The school has 65 openings each year, for children ages 21Ž2 to 5. Applications are available only at the end of a school tour. There are just 300 tour appointments. The school books the appointments on the day after Labor Day, starting at 9 a.m. The slots are invariably gone within hours. To get through on the phone, parents line up friends and relatives to engage in a frenzy of speed-dialing and redialing.
It's a crazy fact of life in a city full of rich, ambitious and anxious parents: Getting into one of Manhattan's top preschools is a challenge of Himalayan proportions. This week the world got a glimpse of just how loopy the sweepstakes are, thanks to some unusual disclosures in -- of all places -- the government probe into conflicts of interest in Wall Street research.
They came in a newly uncovered e-mail from Jack Grubman , Salomon Smith Barney's former star telecom analyst. In the message, Mr. Grubman said he upgraded his rating on AT&T Corp.'s stock in part because Sanford I. Weill, chief executive of Salomon parent Citigroup Inc., agreed to use his influence to help Mr. Grubman's twins secure admission into the 92nd Street Y. Mr. Grubman later said his rating had nothing to do with the twins' application. But government investigators are examining a $1 million donation by Citigroup's philanthropic arm to see whether it was used in an effort to get favorable attention for the Grubman family's admissions applications.
All sides disavow any connection between the donation and the subsequent admission of the Grubman twins. Mr. Weill confirmed intervening to help the twins but said his intentions were "grossly distorted" in the e-mail.
More details came to light Thursday in a newly disclosed Nov. 5, 1999, memo from Mr. Grubman to Mr. Weill, about his research into AT&T. "On another matter," the analyst wrote, he was going through "the ridiculous but necessary process of preschool applications in Manhattan."
Explaining that his top choice was the 92nd Street Y, he wrote: "Given that it's statistically easier to get into the Harvard Freshman Class than it is to get into preschool at the 92nd Street Y (by the way this is a correct statement), it comes down to 'who you know.' " He helpfully attached a list of the Y's board and asked, "I would greatly appreciate it if you could ask them to use any influence they feel comfortable in using to help us."
Letters to powerful financiers are just one of the tactics New York parents use to get their toddlers into preschool. Some hire consultants, with names such as IvyWise Kids, for as much as $4,000 to advise on the application process. It isn't uncommon to switch denominations or suddenly start going to church because some religious houses have pre-preschools or playgroups that are seen as good entrees and networking places for preschools, whose tuitions are comparable to some colleges. For four- and five-year-olds, the Y charges $14,400 for a full-day program. Threes pay $11,800. Tuition for still-younger children depends on the hours and the days they attend.
When Erin Flanagan Lazard was applying to nursery schools last year, she thought, "I don't know if my child is a Brearley child or a Sacred Heart child or a Spence child" -- rattling off the names of elite private schools that are, in turn, feeders to top colleges. "I don't know her that well yet -- she's 20 months."
Chloe now attends The Episcopal School, which occupies a place at the very pinnacle of coveted nursery schools, along with the 92nd Street Y and a tiny number of others. Ms. Lazard, a fashion designer whose husband, Marc, is a descendant of the founder of investment bank Lazard Freres, says that to prepare for Episcopal, she sent Chloe to Sunshine, a pre-preschool, but Chloe didn't much like the experience and attended just three times. With Sunshine's tuition of $1,500, Ms. Lazard jokes she paid $500 for 40 minutes.
At IvyWise Kids, director Nina Bauer coaches parents for interviews and encourages them to apply to 10 schools, which, at the going rate of $50 an application, comes to $500. The way parents behave is a big part of the admissions process. Some of New York's pre-preschools give parents call-sheets -- lists of the schools so they can speed-dial after Labor Day.
Elizabeth Harrison at the high-powered New York PR firm Harrison & Shriftman dialed along with her husband and her assistant the day after Labor Day and still never got through at one school. In the end, her daughter, Charlotte Schwebel, was waitlisted but ultimately got into the Metropolitan Montessori School on the Upper West Side. "She interviews great," Ms. Harrison says of Charlotte, now 31Ž2. But she had contacts make recommendations on Charlotte's behalf because "you have to work everything. ... I feel bad for the person who has moved here and doesn't know anyone and has to navigate the system."
At the center of the latest storm, the 92nd Street Y school looks like lots of other preschools. Framed children's finger-paintings line the hallways. The nine color-coded classrooms are filled with 175 children with runny noses and sticky fingers.
In fact, it's not like other schools. The outdoor playground has a retractable roof for rainy days. The annual March fund-raiser and auction has earned the school more than $250,000 in donations in recent years. Past contributions included European ski vacations, jewelry and stays at vacation homes in the Hamptons. At noon dismissal, there is a line of chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Cars and sport-utility vehicles waiting outside.
It may indeed be harder to get into Harvard than into the Y's preschool. The Y enrolls 65 of its 300 applicants, or 21.7%. Harvard accepted 2,066 of 19,609 applicants to the class of 2006, or 10.5% -- but anyone can apply and you don't need to call Harvard on the day after Labor Day to secure an application.
Founded in 1874 as the Young Men's Hebrew Association, the 92nd Street Y hosts lectures and concerts, has a newly renovated gym, and adult evening classes, in addition to the preschool. At the school are some of the city's richest scions -- whose names are Bronfman (as in Seagram), Lauder (as in cosmetics) and Farkas (as in the former Alexander's department stores). The kids of actors Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan, Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, and Sting and Trudy Stiler have attended in recent years. Mr. Grubman's twins, a boy and a girl, currently at the school, aren't the first Citicorp kids to go there, either. Bank One Corp. CEO James Dimon, the protégé of Mr. Weill whom he dismissed in 1998, sent his children to the school, too.
In perhaps the ultimate sign of the school's selectivity, in 1999, Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon failed to make the final cut -- after her mother, Madonna, met with the school's interview board, which also observed the then three-year-old -- both alone and in playgroups.
"Normal people aren't the majority," says the mother of one of them. Catherine Hausman, co-author of the "Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools," says, "They do let in average people and these people then often wonder, 'What am I doing here?' " Ms. Hausman says one reason the 92nd Street Y is known as one of the best "feeder schools" to the city's best private elementary and secondary schools is that the preschool director, Nancy Schulman, has been there for more than a decade and is "well connected" to admissions directors of these schools.
One esteemed alumnus, Robert Katz, special counsel and advisory director to Goldman Sachs & Co. -- and the firm's former general counsel -- says that during the course of his professional life, "No one has asked me where I went to nursery school." Mr. Katz attended the 92nd Street Y in 1952, 14 years after its founding. "I went there because I lived in the neighborhood," says Mr. Katz.
As for the school being the first baby step on the road to Cambridge, Mass., a Harvard University spokesman says he hasn't heard of the 92nd Street Y school. He added: "That's not to say it isn't a great place. It could very well be."
-- Charles Gasparino, Christopher Lawton, Suzanne Vranica and Bridget O'Brian contributed to this article.