Top Schools: The $12,000-a-Year Preschool

Back in March, the New York Post reported that it is now harder for the son or daughter of an Upper East Side family to gain admission to a top Manhattan preschool than it is for a high-school senior to get into Harvard. There are more than 500,000 babies and toddlers being wheeled around in Bugaboos and carried in Snuglis in New York right now, and room for only a few thousand of them in the expensive hallways of Spence and Chapin and Brearley. This kind of pressure led to the case of Citigroup banker and South Philly native Jack Grubman, who in 2002 arranged a $1 million donation to get his twin two-year-olds into the vaunted 92nd Street Y kids’ program. (It worked.)

All hail the happiness of not living in New York, where everything is a drama. But then, you might not yet have tried to find a preschool for your child on the Main Line, and might not know that there is really only one program that is right for her: $12,000-a-year Gladwyne Montessori, which the children of wealthy cable heirs have attended, where the infants of Art Museum committee members gurgle happily during Mommy and Me classes, where the scion of one of the city’s biggest sports stars comes to learn addition via colored beads and Velcro numerals. As potential GM parents trade reports on who has managed to triumph over the wait-list, they can contemplate lists of where the school’s tiny alumni most frequently matriculate (Baldwin, Shipley, Haverford, Friends’ Select, Episcopal) and eventually go to college (Harvard, Yale, Penn and Duke). It’s best to start early, because if you’re in at age two, you’re in till sixth grade (barring disaster), and admission only gets more competitive each year.

Of course, there are other excellent preschools nearby, such as the Wetherill School and Har Zion, both of which are also very desirable. (See the box on page TK.) The barriers to entry are varied: The elite St. Peter’s School in Society Hill requires a psychological evaluation of all its miniature applicants (luckily, not of their parents). But right now, inquiries about admission to Gladwyne Montessori are coming in for 2007-’08, from parents with babies in utero, from Main Liners who are even thinking about getting pregnant.

The school has grown more popular every year since its 1962 founding in a carriage house in Rosemont, and one imagines the topiaries and the baskets from FoodSource and the handwritten notes winging their way to its unassuming headmistress, Usha Balamore, who laughs when asked about some of the more lavish admission bribes sent her way. “We do get that,” she says.

Welcome to the new Upper East Side: the Main Line. If you think for one minute that anxiety about getting your kid into Gladwyne Montessori — or general insanity about whether one’s three-year-old is ready for math tutoring yet and the wisdom of teaching eight-month-olds sign language — is any less right now in Philly than it is in New York City, you haven’t been spending enough time at dinner parties or lunching with the girls at Plate.

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