Data-driven lottery predictions!

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03/08/2026 10:00

Subject: Data-driven lottery predictions!

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Anonymous wrote:4th grade, absolutely zero preference. Miner is IB

Maury (ha ha ha ha ha)
Brent (ha ha ha ha ha, aware of the swing space)
L-T
Watkins
JO Wilson
Payne
Chisholm (English only)
Thomson
John Francis
TR 4th
TR Young

Don’t put Brent near the top of your list for 4th. You’ll have 4th in the swing space and then just the awkward “Upper School” 5th for one year in the new building. (They don’t retain a lot of students in 5th because of feeding to Jefferson so they sprinkle them in small pods into the 4th grade rooms…) Any of the four others right below are far better decisions for moving at 4th. Search the board for more info on the Upper School model, but you can re-order your list until mid March.

I mean, the deadline has closed and this is the PP's list. However, since I think the odds of them getting into any of their top 3 choices in the initial lottery are slim to non-existent, they can always re-order after results come out to adjust for things.

I am not OP of this thread, but think you stand a good shot at JO Wilson at least. They have some wiggle room in 4th due to attrition during the swing space and while I expect their lower grades to fill faster due to the new building, I think 4th and 5th will have more options. You will almost definitely get spots at one or both TR campuses, I would hold out for Watkins, Payne, or JOW. I don't think you'll get anything at Maury/Brent/L-T even after school starts, those schools do not see much attrition in 4th (everyone is sitting pat that year, attrition does happen in 5th obviously) and I don't think Maury or L-T are going to offer any lottery spots for 4th this year. Brent I'm less sure about because of the swing space, but given their historic approach to 4th/5th, I doubt it.

LT is not offering 4th grade lottery spots. 3rd grade is busting at the seams and hoping for attrition!

Watkins has cleared it’s WL in 4th or not even filled recently, so you’re almost guaranteed to get in there.

No reason to stress, as there will be attrition between 4th and 5th regardless. Maury and Brent should also max out their 3rd grade classes for the same reason. It could help ensure fewer kids coming in via lottery for 5th and may help with larger cohorts to respective middle schools. If Brent maxed out their 3rd grade, they might not have their idiotic set up for 4th/5th.

There is an art to managing cohort sizes and it's not smart to keep class sizes low when you know you're going to lose a certain number of students in the cohort over the next couple years no matter what. It's better to have a couple bumper years with full classrooms than to constantly be playing the consolidation game or taking in a dozen new students at 5th when it's too late to really integrate them into the culture of the school.

LT is nowhere near the Brent position. There are 3 3rd grade classes and only 6 new kids entered 3rd via the lottery (and the current 5th grade was 2-3 students/class smaller than the current 3rd). The question for LT has been 2 vs 3 5th grade classes historically, but honestly I think it’s unlikely to ever go back to 2. The classes coming up in current 2nd-4th are all very large; there are actually 4 2nd grade classes, but they’re offering no 3rd grade spots and hoping for attrition there too.

DCPS kept forcing LT to offer lottery slots as though its IB numbers & retention numbers were constant and, as a result, LT gained close to 100 kids in 3 years. They seem to have finally realized that the need to pull on the breaks, so LT is going from offering 40+ lottery spots in 1st and up to about 10 this year.

How large are those 3 5th grade classes tho? If they've considered consolidating to 2, my guess is the classes are small. Which means there will be room for more students in them in coming years. If the school is committed to having 3 classes per grade through 5th, it makes sense to lean towards larger classes in 3rd.

There's ebb and flow to this. I am not surprised LT is currently at max capacity, given JOW and Brent are both in swing spaces, TR4 has gone downhill, and CHML continues to bleed students in upper grades. But the pressure will ease when JOW and Brent are in new spaces. A few years from now LT may be in a very different situation due to JOW retaining more IB students, for instance. One or two bumper crops of kids are not a crisis.

Here is L-T's initial draft budget for FY 2027. A forecast of +24 students total, and a decrease of -40 in the at-risk population (wow). SPED total is +18. The grade level breakdown is actually for a big increase in 3rd (+14), +8 in 4th, and +2 in 5th.

https://dcpsbudget.com/datasets/ludlow-taylor-es-initial-budget-fy2027/

Just want to note that based on this info, the PP is incorrect that the current 3rd grade at LT is "busting at the seams." The issue is actually that the current 2nd grade is huge. That's why next year's 3rd grade (current year 2nd graders) are expected to increase by 14 -- because this year's 2nd grade class is significant larger than this year's 3rd grade class, which is actually smaller than both the class above it and the one below it. Here's the breakdown for this year (and the projection for next year in parentheses, with the net change):

2nd Grade -- 74 (68, -6)
3rd Grade -- 68 (82, +14)
4th Grade -- 71 (79, +8)
5th Grade -- 53 (55, +2)

So to say the current 3rd grade is bursting at the seems makes no sense -- it's slightly smaller than the current 2nd and 4th grade classes. NEXT year's 3rd grade class will be huge -- that's the class they must be hoping/praying for attrition because if the are projected to have 82 students, they are going to have to consider adding a teacher to the grade.

No. I am not wrong. These are based on DCPS projections, which are wrong. 2nd had 76 kids in 4 classes; 3rd has 75 in 3. You tell me which busting at the seams. Projections from DCPS are meaningless because they take into account past growth based on forced lottery seats. 82 for 3rd is wrong, because the school will be offering zero lottery seats, so no chance they go from 76 to 82 based on IB students. They are not adding a 3rd grade class — the schools has a departmentalized 3rd grade so that would change the entire model. This really shows how misleading DCPS projections can be, because they don’t correct them based on the actual numbers. Next year they’ll claim the 3rd has the 82 students it predicted, but it never will have; the projection without correction system is dumb.

Wait, if those numbers are just made up even for 2026, what is the point of having posted them here at all?

I didn’t post them. Another poster pulled them off of the publicly available projections, likely assuming the were accurate. However, when DCPS does projections for a year, they mark them against the projections from the prior year not the actual census. You can find the real data somewhere too though — whenever the audited counts are done for the year.

It's on the OSSE enrollment audit website but the current year spreadsheet isn't up yet. Annoying that it takes so long.

https://edscape.dc.gov/node/1730326 shows the enrollment trends of specific schools.

A bit hard without this year's data but I continue to question the idea that L-T's current 3rd grade is bursting at the seams or somehow done dirty by Central Office. Last year that class (then in 2nd grade) had 67 students. The had 10 lottery seats available, which is a bit high. But if they are now at 75 students, it means they had net attrition of at least 2, likely higher (you have to factor in people who move into the zone and get a by-right spot in the grade). So while 75 is pretty much the most you'd want in a grade with three teachers (I consider 25 in a 3rd grade classroom at capacity, not over capacity, and so does DCPS) and it makes sense to not offer any lottery spots for that cohort this year, It seems unproblematic to me.

Especially when you consider that the class *will* experience attraction of between 20-25% between 4th and 5th, based on all historic trends. That will bring the class down to 55-60 students by 5th, a perfectly healthy number for 3 classrooms AND a positive thing for Stuart-Hobson who is likely to get a large number of those students for 6th. Certainly better than last year when L-T only had 45 5th graders.

IB families always freak out about adding lottery seats and everyone seems to hate a classroom over 22 students, but at a non-title 1 school seeking to build strength in the feeder pattern and very susceptible to charter- and private-based attrition in late grades, this all makes perfect sense to me and I don't get why people would complain (just kidding, I know why people are complaining, I just think their complaints are myopic).