To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

Going to high school can be scary, but it is even scarier when you're the only one in your eighth-grade class who still does not know where you're going next year. More than 6,600 eighth-graders did not get matched with a school this spring, so they have to apply all over again, but many of the schools they want to go to are no longer an option.

More than 2,000 students and their parents attended a fair in the Upper West Side this week to learn more about the high schools that still have places.

"There are more than 300 schools listed in this current round of high school admissions, but unfortunately all of them are schools that didn't fill of their seats in the first round. So for many students, they don't seem like good choices," said Pamela Wheaton of InsideSchools.org.

Most of the attending parents did not seem happy.

"This is ridiculous. I don't even know why I am here. My daughter is not going to go to a school that has an extra seat available. She's going to go to the school of her choice," said parent Tabitha Velazquez-Ramos.

"It seems impossible to get into a school that's a good school when there are so many great students and there's not a lot of great schools," said parent Gretchen Zufall.

Eighth-graders had to rank their top 12 choices and then the high schools ranked the students they wanted to accept. More than half of the students got their first choice this year.

"The high school admissions process is complicated, both from the Department of Education side and from the family side. Because the DOE has to look at some 80,000 incoming ninth graders who need to find a high school and because they offer school choice, it’s not a question of just sign up for your neighborhood school," said Wheaton. "It’s complicated for a 13-year-old, who might not know whether they want to go into law or medicine or nursing, and a lot of the schools are specialized."

The second round is not any easier.

"It's really a guessing game, because looking through a book and just looking on a piece of paper is not going to tell me exactly what’s going on with that school and what it's about," said parent Melinda Wilcox.

The complicated admission process certainly does not work out perfectly for everyone, but DOE officials said it is the best way to give eighth-graders some choice in where they will spend the next four years of their lives.