Are waitlists "real"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you know how long schools continue to pull off the wait list? For example, if a space opens up in November, will they pull off the wait list for that, leave it empty, or fill it if someone calls and asks if there is space?

at my daughter's charter, they set a cut off date of, i believe, mid-Oct

Thanks for the response. After mid-Oct, will they fill the spots with students moving in from outside the district, or just leave it empty? I think it may vary from school to school, so I am curious about others' experiences.

What about for public (not charter schools)?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think charters have some autonomy with their lottery waitlists. Some of them use the lottery to create the entire waitlist and some create the waitlist based on the order you applied.

IOW, let's say two schools each have 35 applicants for 20 spots. School A puts all the names into the lottery and draws them all out in random order. The first 20 are automatically accepted. #1 on the waitlist is whoever is drawn 21st. #2 on the waitlist is whoever is drawn 22nd, and so on until all 35 names are ranked.

School B puts all the names in and draws out 20 and they are automatically accepted. Then #1 on the waitlist is whoever applied earliest of the remaining 15. #2 is whoever applied earliest of the remaining 14, and so on.

This is correct - YY uses the order you applied to create the waitlist.

BUT regardless of if the lottery or some other method is used to create the waitlist - is the waitlist followed?

i thought using the date of application was strictly prohibited by the charter board....

For the lottery, yes. But not for the waitlist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you know how long schools continue to pull off the wait list? For example, if a space opens up in November, will they pull off the wait list for that, leave it empty, or fill it if someone calls and asks if there is space?

at my daughter's charter, they set a cut off date of, i believe, mid-Oct

Schools have not incentive to accept the child after the head count because they will not get additional funding...I learned this the hard way..tried to move my child after the head count and I was told that they were full...what the pricipal didn't know is that I knew quite a few teachers and the each class was not actually full. I later learned from a teacher that they were not accepting anymore students because they were not getting money for additional children after the head count.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you know how long schools continue to pull off the wait list? For example, if a space opens up in November, will they pull off the wait list for that, leave it empty, or fill it if someone calls and asks if there is space?

at my daughter's charter, they set a cut off date of, i believe, mid-Oct

Schools have not incentive to accept the child after the head count because they will not get additional funding...I learned this the hard way..tried to move my child after the head count and I was told that they were full...what the pricipal didn't know is that I knew quite a few teachers and the each class was not actually full. I later learned from a teacher that they were not accepting anymore students because they were not getting money for additional children after the head count.

Is that true for all schools, or just charters?

[Anonymous]

True for all public schools - DCPS or charter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:True for all public schools - DCPS or charter.

Of course, if a child moves in bounds after the count, the local DCPS has to take them, regardless of not getting additional funds.

[Anonymous]

Two observations: on admissions to charters after October, it generally does not happen. The official enrollment count is done in October, this year I believe it was Halloween week at my child's charter (Yu Ying). That count sets the student population for the year. No follow up count is done to see if the students are still at the school in Dec, April, June. . . . so a charter has no incentive to admit new students after the count date, and a lot of incentive to get the classes full by the count date.

by the way, DCPS generally has an enrollment mini surge with children leaving charters, returning to neighborhood schools during the school year. DCPS justifiably complains about this, because they must take inboundary kids, and at that point in the year, the money does not follow the kid. Any kid making a mid-year transfer is probably not having a good year, and it is difficult to integrate anyone into a class mid-yr, much less someone tranferrirng due to a difficult previous experience. Caveat, I have known families that transfer charter back to in boundary due to logistics of needing all kids in family in same school, so not always a "problem" necessarily.

For Washington YY, I disagree with an earlier poster who stated that the date you submit an application is used to prioritize. My detailed (almost daily) observation of the lottery results from the spring of 2009 for entrance in the 2009-10 school year is that the applicants were ranked by lottery number at the lottery in early April. Spreadsheets were posted with admitted children First Name, Last Initial, and with wait list children. Whenever there was movement on the wait list, another spreadsheet was posted updating the wait list numbers. There was never a reference or sort by date that admission application was made, at least for 2009-10 at YY. The process may have been different in 2008-09 when the initial lottery had fewer students than available slots. For that school year, which I did not observe, I could easily imagine that the wait list was sorted by application date FOR THOSE WHO APPLIED AFTER THE LOTTERY DEADLINE. This was also true for 2009-10, occasionally new names would appear on the bottom on the posted spreadsheet.

Some observations about 2009-10 entrance to YY. The preK wait list started with about 80 kids. (after admitting 50, so 130 applicants). The school got down to ~ number 50 with offers. The K list started with ~60 kids, got down to about number 20 or 30. All applicants to 2nd grade were accepted (an anomoly for 2009-10 because the 1st grade class in 2008-09, the highest grade level in the school's first year, was underenrolled).

One lesson I've taken away from this (meaning the whole OOB/ Charter "game") is that if you are willing and your child is flexible enough to move schools in September / early October, you can possibly have a lot of choices. With young children, probably don't tell them much until it actually happens, because as you leave for a school on Aug 30, you may be contacted by another preferable to attend on Sept 1st. . . . . ripple effects occur. A child left YY K in mid-September to attend a Spanish bilingual charter, opening up a slot to someone on the K wait list at YY.

Good luck to all, it's horrible, and I've lost a lot of sleep over this process. Landing at YY has been good for our family, and this year I"m not even submitting lottery applications elsewhere (phew!)

[Anonymous]

I have a personal experience that runs counter to the idea in the post above that charters don't let in students after October. I am on the waitlist for 3rd grade at Two Rivers and I have watched a friend and then my own child be offered spots in the 3rd grade just this month. I have also watched my own neighborhood school bring in several Out of Boundary students since October. Not sure if this is widely outside the norm at other schools or not...

[Anonymous]

At our DCPS, the wait list is real and they pull off of it all-year round. My child got in off the pre-K waitlist (and we were way, way, way down) in July and someone entered his class in January.