Hi, I’m Julia. I teach in the system your kid is about to enter.

By day, I teach in an NYC public school. By evening (and plenty of weekends) I help families figure out one of the most confusing admissions processes in the country: getting a kid into a NYC public high school.

I have spent more than fifteen years teaching NYC students in public and private school settings. I hold two master’s degrees, one in special education and one in literacy, and I am a certified special education teacher.

I built Next Stop: High School because I kept watching smart, devoted parents drown in the same maze: screened programs, specialized exams, Ed Opt lotteries, audition schools, priority zones, and a portal full of terms nobody defines. The families who could afford private consultants got guides. Everyone else got forum threads and rumors.

That never sat right with me. The information families need is public, but it’s scattered across portals and written as though you already speak the language. Translating it, and knowing which questions actually matter, is what I do every day as a teacher. This year, not the way it worked a decade ago.

What I bring to your kitchen table (via Zoom)

With a master’s in special education and certification to match, if your family is navigating an IEP or a 504, you won’t spend the first twenty minutes teaching your consultant what those words mean. We can go straight to the real work: what supports each school lists, what questions to ask about them, and what signs help you understand how those supports work in practice.

The numbers are the easy part. Anyone can look up program descriptions, admissions criteria, and prior-year demand data, and I’ll build you a list the way anyone would. The difference is what happens next. I can help you look past the statistics, compare programs through an educator’s lens, and work out which questions to put to each school about workload, structure, and day-to-day support.

I also think about the parts that never make it into a spreadsheet. Your kid isn’t just picking a school, they’re picking a neighborhood, a commute, a train line, and where they eat lunch for four years. Some of the best arguments for a school have nothing to do with its stats.

And I’m a person, not a service desk. Sessions sound like a knowledgeable friend talking you through it, because that’s what this is supposed to be.

To protect my students’ privacy and maintain clear professional boundaries, I do not publicly identify my current school.