Lottery for Rising 5th Graders
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Anonymous
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It's been on my radar for a while to enter the lottery this year. Then I went to MSDC and couldn't find a few of the schools I wanted to list. I realized more schools than I thought begin in 6th grade. So other than the obvious candidates like Latin and Basis, what are people lotterying for for a rising 5th grader?
Do people lottery for feeder schools? Like if you want your kid to go to Deal you lottery into a feeder school for Deal and stay one year? That seems a little nuts, but then again, the lottery can be a long game.... |
Anonymous
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People do lottery for feeders, yes.
You might consider Inspired Teaching for 5th, it's a good year to get in because they backfill kids who leave. Mostly they leave for Latin it seems. |
Anonymous
| You could lottery for Jackson Reed feeders. If your kid has a language interest, for DCI feeder. |
Anonymous
| Mostly just Latin and Basis. Sometimes Inspired Teaching. You wont get Deal for 6th so yes people try for Deal feeders early. |
Anonymous
| It also depends how bad your by right middle school is. Plenty of folks position themselves for Stuart Hobson (via a feeder) as a backup backup, for instance. |
Anonymous
DCI is 6th grade lottery |
Anonymous
Ooops! Sorry I see you said DCI FEEDER. |
Anonymous
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We also lotteried for Logan Montessori at Capitol Hill (LMCH), but it's not very popular for middle school on this board. (We ended up at a school we ranked higher.) It goes through eighth grade. There is also a newish Montessori middle/high school you can look into, but I'm even less sure about how viable of an option that is for an average student.
You could also consider lotterying to a Hardy feeder, if you are comfortable with Hardy and then MacArthur. (I don't think it's easy to lottery into Hardy for sixth, but you could check those numbers.) |
Anonymous
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If your feeder is a non-starter (as ours is) you gotta lottery HARD for 5th. You can easily get shut out in 6th, but in 5th you’ve got options.
Basis, Latin, inspired teaching, deal feeders. Capital hill Montessori. Potentially some center city locations (brightwood, Shaw, and petworth all have a cohort of kids doing on grade level work). SWW@FS For safeties - Thompson (feeds to SWW@FS), JO Wilson (feeds to Stuart-Hobson) |
Anonymous
| Yes, if you're not comfortable with your in-boundary school, many do lottery for both better feeders and charters in 5th. Now's the time to go to a lot of open houses if you can but also keep an eye to the difficulty of getting into many of these feeders and charters (Latin and Basis are by no means a sure shot). Cap City is another one some apply to depending on where you live. One thing to think about is how much you care about the high school path and keeping your kids with middle school friends - Inspired Teaching, for instance, only goes through 8th. |
Anonymous
Watkins (SH feeder) for 5th has also been a safety in recent years and I'd much rather that than JOW swing space. L-T is the best option, but whether that's hard or easy for 5th depends on whether they open a 3rd classroom (which has varied from year to year recently). |
Anonymous
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Yes, lottery for feeders. Hardy feeders, Stuart Hobson feeders if that's appealing to you, John Francis feeders.
Deal feeders are the least likely to take people. SH and Francis feeders are super likely, bc those schools send LOTS of kids to Latin and BASIS and spots open up. Loved this last year, got a spot at BASIS and one at a Francis feeder. Good luck! |
Anonymous
Be careful with this. Even getting into a DCI feeder still could mean relatively low chances of getting into DCI. Look at, for example, the number of DCI spots available for DCB relative to the number of DCB 5th graders. |
Anonymous
Good point, but I'm curious if people have actually, at this point, gotten locked out of DCI if they went to a feeder. I know that many parents choose other schools even coming from feeders, so I would think that there might be enough spots. |
Anonymous
Because it's due to the feeder schools' expansions, there will be a year when there are a lot many potential DCI enrollees as there were the year before. But what year that is varies depending on which feeder school you're at. So far I think some Stokes kids were waitlisted but then got offers. But it really depends on the number of kids in your child's grade, not on what happened the year before. |