If Elisabeth "Babby" Krents didn't have a healthy ego before—doubtful since she's been running admissions for the posh UES Dalton School for 15 years now—she's gotta have one now! In the last four months the 61-year-old has been the subject of praise-filled profiles first in the Wall Street Journal and now in the New York Times. But we can live with that—because really, how else would we know that Babby defended her Ph.D dissertation at Columbia on the same day she delivered her second daughter? No wonder she scares people. more ›

Despite the impression you may have gotten from Bravo's late "reality" show NYC Prep (has it really been two years?) the world of high end private education in New York is not all rich and white. In fact, a number of New York private schools are working quite hard to try and assure that their student bodies are increasingly diverse...and rich. Take the posh Dalton School, for instance, which happily crows to the Journal today that nearly half of its incoming kindergarten class will be students of color. Which, naturally, has given anxious parents one more thing to worry about when playing the admissions game. Is little Holden ethnic enough? more ›

In the courtroom, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is all about the First Amendment, but freedom of speech flies out the window when a high school newspaper wants to write about him. On October 28th, Kennedy gave a talk at the fancy Upper East Side Dalton School, and naturally the school's paper, The Daltonian, sent a reporter to cover the event. But Kennedy's handlers insisted on approving the article before it was published, and the article didn't make it into that week's edition, forcing The Daltonian to print an embarrassing editor's note: "We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints." (Luckily for them, they weren't scooped by their competitors at Loyola's paper, The Blazer!) more ›

Forget about swine flu, the kids at Dalton are suffering from shortness. The fancy pants Upper East Side school is filled with boys battling the problem. The cause: being a child. The cure: parents armed with growth hormones. The NY Post reports on a few of the kids — one, Jeffrey, went on the Humatrope hormone at age 10. In just five years he shot up from 4'1" to 5'7" ... and still has hopes of growing more. One expert told the paper the designer drug is like "Miracle-Gro for kids." more ›

There are some new details coming to light following yesterday's incident at the Dalton School, where a 17-year-old allegedly jumped to his death. While the Post is withholding the student's name, the Daily News reports that Theodore (Teddy) Graubard went to the empty 11th floor dance studio and "when asked by a teacher why he was there...said he wanted to look around." Minutes later he jumped, something the school's 4th graders witnessed as they were enjoying recess out on the sidewalk (the paper notes that he "nearly landed" on some of them). A security guard said he "heard a loud bang. It sounded like a gunshot. The fourth-graders were out here [and] everybody started running away from the body." more ›

Earlier this morning reports came in of a "fatal jumper down" at East 89th Street and Park Avenue. Disturbingly, news soon followed that it was a child who jumped or fell from the roof of a school (the Post is reporting it was from an 11th floor window). Now WCBS sheds some more light on the incident, noting the deceased is a 17-year-old male who was found DOA outside of UES's Dalton School (a co-ed private school with about 1,300 students attending). No specifics as to how the fall happened have been reported, but ABC notes that the school has "closed all the shades to keep students inside the building from seeing the scene outside." more ›