How does the lottery work if you want to try for a new school for next SY?

[Anonymous]

Hi All,
wondering how the lottery works if we wanted to try for a new school for next SY.
We are generally happy at our current school but still want to try for a school (its a reach-- highly unlikely we would get our child into, but why not try in the one in a million chance we pull a good number)
Do we register at our current school, and just put the one school we want to try for as the only one we rank in the system?
Kinda new to this lottery stuff (last year was our first year) so curious how this works!
Thanks all!

[Anonymous]

You don't enroll for next year until after the lottery runs, so you don't have to do anything with your current school to preserve that spot. You are guaranteed a spot at that school next year (unless you moved and are there on a boundary preference, but since you don't mention this, let's not get into it).

Do a lottery application and list any school you are interested in. You can just list one school if you want. Though I should note that you can also turn down any lottery offer you get and just re-enroll at your current school, with no repercussions, so you can always list other schools just in case you might change your mind. We did this one year when we were considering moving and wanted to hedge our bets with a possible lottery offer in the new neighborhood.

If you get into the new school, you'll need to submit enrollment paperwork for them later in the spring, and you will also need to let your current school know you are re-enrolling.

If you don't get in via the lottery, you'll get a waitlist number. In that case, you will re-enroll in your current school as normal, but you may get a spot off the waitlist over the summer, in which case you would then enroll in the new school and formally withdraw from the current school.

The lottery process is easier once you've been through it once -- just log into myschool.org and you'll see it will be very easy to open and submit a new application.

Do it today thought because deadline is just a few days away and you don't want to miss it.