Senior Director of Admissions Systems at NYC Public Schools

Position Summary: The Office of Student Enrollment (OSE) manages admissions, enrollment, and transfers for students in New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) Early Childhood programs, 2K through grade 12, including District 75 schools. Additionally, the office oversees 12+ sites consisting of Family Welcome Centers (FWCs), and Family Resource Centers (FRCs), and a call center, which are family facing offices that conduct enrollment transactions and provide community based support to families. OSE designs and implements enrollment and admissions policies and processes that provide all students with access to high quality public schools. OSE also has teams dedicated to supporting our most vulnerable students, including students with disabilities, students in temporary housing, foster care, and other special populations.

The Enrollment Research, Analytics, and Policy team manages research and analysis for all admissions processes and collaborates across the NYCPS to provide enrollment related data and research support.

The Senior Director of Admissions Systems is responsible for overseeing the development of the application used by families, schools, and central offices to administer 2K through high school admissions, as well as special programs like Summer Rising and DREAM. This system manages the applications of 500,000 students annually and supports users across approximately 10,000 public school programs. The Senior Director of Admissions Systems will serve as the primary business, policy, and analytic owner of the admissions platform, leading a full rebuild and modernization of the MySchools system in the coming year and ensuring continuity, integrity, and equity of admissions operations through system transition and launch. This will include ensuring that all policies and best practices are integrated into the admissions system, that data is accurate in the system, and that new technical requirements are appropriately prioritized, ticketed, and developed based on business impact and customer value. The Senior Director of Admissions Systems is responsible for ensuring that the admissions system is in accordance with applicable policies, procedures, and regulations for each admissions process. Areas of responsibility also include developing and making policy decisions that will be in turn implemented in the admissions system, serving as a content and policy expert for the maintenance and enhancement of the system, raising and addressing process and policy issues, and resolving stakeholder inquiries. Performs related work.

Reports to: Executive Director

Direct Reports: Supervising Associate Director and Enrollment Systems Coordinator

Key Relationships: Office of Student Enrollment (OSE) senior leadership, including the other Senior Directors and Executive Directors; leadership within DIIT and external vendors contracted to support this platform, and other NYCPS stakeholders.

Responsibilities

MySchools System Rebuild & Modernization

• Supervise and direct the planning, prioritization, and management of resources across OSE, DIIT, and external vendors to deliver admissions system rebuild milestones, define functional success metrics, and ensure alignment with policy and equity objectives.
• Lead the full system rebuild and modernization of the MySchools admissions platform, serving as the primary owner of business logic, admissions policy translation, and analytic requirements throughout design, development, testing, and launch.
• Define and maintain authoritative admissions business rules and data standards used in the rebuilt system across all admissions processes.
• Oversee parallel testing, data validation, and launch readiness, including risk identification, mitigation planning, and escalation of go/no go decisions to senior leadership.
• Ensure continuity of admissions operations and data integrity during the transition from legacy systems to the rebuilt platform.
• Establish success metrics and post launch evaluation plans to assess system performance, equity impacts, and family experience outcomes.

General MySchools Management

• With minimal direction, lead the application of scientific and evidence based research methods and advanced quantitative analyses to assess the progress, performance, and equity impacts of admissions policies through descriptive statistics and advanced statistical modeling.
• Navigate complex data sources and datasets to develop a deep understanding of underlying data structures that support the admissions system.
• Prepare technical documentation regarding the business rules and procedures used within the admissions system across all admissions processes.
• Evaluate 2K through high school admissions processes to identify inefficiencies and systems solutions and to attain maximum equity and transparency in the enrollment system.
• Work on ideal solutions to solve parent needs, breaking down goals into deliverables to help achieve solutions and consistently reprioritize as needed to achieve maximum impact given capacity limitations.
• Build a strong understanding of customer needs, working closely with engagement leads within OSE to identify areas for improvement within the admissions system.
• Work with admissions teams and ERAP to define, govern, and approve business requirements for MySchools, spanning front end user experience, backend data structures, and matching logic, and ensure faithful implementation in production systems.
• Make decisions around user experience and technical design to address disparities in policies and processes across admissions processes.
• Lead colleagues in OSE in the planning and testing of all system features for all admissions processes.
• Closely collaborate with external researchers to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the current matching algorithm, with an eye towards continuing to improve the family experience while maintaining a fair and equitable process.
• Communicate and present roadmaps to senior OSE and NYCPS leadership as needed.
• Alongside DIIT, provide technical assistance and troubleshooting the development of long term solutions for system improvement, data related issues, and debugging and optimizing processes and queries.

Qualification Requirements

Minimum

• A doctorate degree from an accredited college or university with specialization in an appropriate field of physical, biological, environmental or social science and one year of full-time experience in a responsible supervisory, administrative or research capacity in the appropriate field of specialization; or
• A master's degree from an accredited college or university with specialization in an appropriate field of physical, biological, environmental or social science and three years of responsible full-time research experience in the appropriate field of specialization; or
• Education and/or experience which is equivalent to "1" or "2" above. However, all candidates must have at least a master's degree in an appropriate field of specialization and at least two years of experience described in "2" above. Two years as a City Research Scientist Level I can be substituted for the experience required in "1" and "2" above.

Plus

• Experience manipulating large datasets using Stata (preferred), SPSS, SAS, R, Python, or other statistical/data management programming languages.
• In addition to meeting the minimum requirements, individuals must have two additional years of relevant work experience.

Preferred

• Experience working with SQL.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office 365 applications.
• Ability to manipulate, organize and analyze large datasets.
• Ability to clearly communicate and document technical work, including coding methodology.
• Ability to translate broad policy guidelines into actionable data requirements and business rules.
• Experience developing thoughtful and creative approaches for addressing a wide range of analytic questions.
• Ability to use independent judgment to design, adapt and modify analyses and programming to the needs of specific projects.
• Ability to think critically, analyze data and notice gaps, and work collaboratively to problem solve
• Ability to work on several projects simultaneously.
• Ability to prioritize tasks, work independently, and follow up to get things done.
• Strong attention to detail and well organized with the ability to meet frequent and changing deadlines.
• Excellent organizational, analytical, interpersonal, and communication skills.
• Experience communicating analyses to non-researchers or non-analysts.
• Strong interpersonal skills in dealing with education and non-education personnel, who are internal and external to the NYCPS.
• Ability to thrive in and enjoy working in a team oriented, high pressure environment.
• Knowledge of New York City’s educational landscape and policies, and of NYCPS’s rules and regulations, including Chancellor’s Regulations.

Salary: $126,000 - $128,995

(Internal candidates who are selected for this position and who currently hold comparable or less senior positions within the DOE will not earn less than their current salary.)

Please include a resume and cover letter with your application.

NOTE: The filling of all positions is subject to budget availability and/or grant funding.

• New York City Residency is NOT Required *

We encourage all applicants from the New York City tri-state area to apply.

AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

DOE Non- Discrimination Policy

The Department of Education of the City of New York is an inclusive equal opportunity employer committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce and providing a work environment that is free from discrimination and harassment upon any legally protected status or protected characteristic, including but not limited to an individual's actual or perceived sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, or pregnancy. For more information, please refer to the DOE Non-Discrimination Policy.

REQUESTING AN ACCOMMODATION - APPLICANTS

Any prospective employee (applicant) who is a qualified individual with a disability may request a reasonable accommodation to assist in the application process. If an applicant for employment believes that they have a qualifying disability and are in need of a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in the application process on an equal basis as applicants who do not have a disability, they should request an accommodation with their interview team or contact ODA by emailing [email protected]. The determination of the accommodation request will be communicated to the applicant in writing.

https://infohub.nyced.org/docs/default-source/doe-employees-only/personnel-memorandum-6-2024-2025---accommodations.pdf

Public Service Loan Forgiveness

As a prospective employee of the City of New York, you may be eligible for federal loan forgiveness programs and state repayment assistance programs. For more information, please visit the U.S. Department of Education's website at https://studentaid.gov/pslf/.