Children Are Rejected By Schools Near Home.

When Jeanne Shapiro received two letters on Saturday from Public School 290 on the Upper East Side, where she always assumed she would send her twin daughters, her husband cracked a joke about the way thin envelopes from college admissions offices tended to bear bad news. Mrs. Shapiro just laughed; P.S. 290 was a block and a half from the family's apartment, she figured, and every New Yorker knows that an address in a good school zone is tantamount to a guaranteed kindergarten seat. But the letters said the 5-year-olds had been placed on a waiting list for the school, on East 82nd Street. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]