if you are at a HRCS...
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Anonymous
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Here is an email I received in 2013:
Dear parent / guardian, I am writing to confirm we received the application(s) you sent to us via our website for the upcoming school year beginning fall 2013 - thank you for your interest in our program. Our application period runs from January 5th - March 15th. If we receive more applications that spaces available we will hold our lottery on March 22nd. Parents/guardians will be notified of the results of the lottery by email / USPS mail thereafter. Sincerely, James. |
Anonymous
What kind of kids would they not want to cherry pick? |
Anonymous
Hmm, that's interesting. Maybe they planned a public lottery for 2012 and nobody came, so they decided not to do one in 2013? That might explain why PPs got the "there was no interest" answer when they called. |
Anonymous
Loaded question. A previous poster described her child and noted that her child is the example of one they would not want to cherry pick. I want to put an end to the CMI suspect lottery discussion. The law in question, which became effective in 2007, does not require charter schools to have public lotteries: DC Code Sec 38-1802.06 (c) Random selection. -- If there are more applications to enroll in a public charter school from students who are residents of the District of Columbia than there are spaces available, students shall be admitted using a random selection process, except that a preference in admission may be given to an applicant who is a sibling of a student already attending or selected for admission to the public charter school in which the applicant is seeking enrollment, or an applicant who is a child of a member of the public charter school's founding board, so long as enrollment of founders' children is limited to no more than 10% of the school's total enrollment or to 20 students, whichever is less. The District's Regulations, which govern how the law is to be implemented, also do not require a public lottery: D.C. Mun. Regs. Subt. 5-E, § 915.3: If a public charter school has more applications to enroll in the school from students who are residents of the District of Columbia than there are available spaces, students shall be admitted using a random selection process. The documentation and results of the random selection process and a list of students on the waiting list as a result of such shall be available for review by the Board. The public charter school may give priority to the siblings of students enrolled in the school. So, based on the law and reg, CMI was not required to have a public lottery, nor did it have to publish the wait list, etc. for public consumption. Consequently if CMI indeed did NOT have a public lottery in 2012 and 2013 and did NOT publish the lists, they broke no law because they were not required to do so. There is therefore no legal basis to assert that the administration did something illegal or suspect. You can say you don't like the policy and would have done things differently (if in fact they did not have the public lottery in 2012 or 2013), but you cannot say they did something illegal. |
Anonymous
| Thanks for taking the time to do this, PP! |
Anonymous
| By the way, note that the current MySchoolDC lottery is by no means public. As far as I know, we can't go and observe the person typing into the computer and running the algorithim and watch the applicants names appear along with where they were placed, which is essentially what happened at CMI's 2014 lottery. Why is no one complaining about this? |
Anonymous
Exactly. Where are all the posters bitching about going to see the computer lottery at my school DC? CMI used a 3rd party to run their lottery (exactly as my school DC). |
Anonymous
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I'm the poster who wondered if the people who always bring this up and say it is against the law wanted to pursue jail time for the administrators.
It was my first post in this thread and I am not a CM parent, but it seems this whole things is overblown anyway. |
Anonymous
Martel is crazy and his stats were wrong from the get go about almost everything. In terms of charters, you have to also think about the almost completely AA charters (KIPPs etc) who are subtracting from the available AA public school population, and then you have to think about people like us, who would have moved out of the city had we not gotten into the charter of our choice which goes through high school, and the not so small number of white parents who are now putting their kids in charters instead of private schools. Only 87% of eligible IB students attend Deal. Where are the rest? In private or in charters. What I am saying is that there are a lot of shifts going on he did not take into account and to start from the premise that a school can be "too white" "too Latino" or "too AA" is ridiculous. How many white kids go to Roots? The thing I think he should have been focused on is the charters that have very few poor kids - but even that may just be a function of the random lottery. Nevertheless, if I were to focus on something suspicious it would be how Latin has almost 40% FARMS in the high school and less than 20% in their middle school. But even there, the high school part can be explained by the fact that many parents traditionally have pulled their kids to go to Walls or privates at Latin after MS. I do find the MS FARMS rate astonishing though - it is lower than Deal, and lower than any school except for the Deal ES feeders and Mann and Key. The only way that can happen (and I would never accuse Latin of doing their lottery unfairly) is through a huge number of high SES applicants and sibling preference for high SES families who already have a child there. Anyway, part of the entire point of charters was that they were not designed to serve the entire community. But it does make me kind of sad when I see less poor AA kids having the opportunity to go to Latin - but then less kids period (in terms of the number of applicants) have the opportunity to go there now than even three years ago. But trust me, Martel is a wacko, he was apparently a crappy teacher at Wilson (one of his students posted), and Matthews should have been fired for being able to hide behind Martel's "statistics" which meant he did not have to check that any of them were accurate. If you read the comments after these articles people refute every single point he tried to make, and Matthews has worked for the Post for over 40 years and lives in California.... garbage in garbage out, except a lot of the comments in response to the articles were extremely educational. |
Anonymous
| Just because Latin middle has low FARMS doesn't mean it's full of rich kids. There is a fine line between qualifying for FARMS and being of Deal income. Based on the profile of most of our friends that attend Latin it is very middle income. I am fine with that. It is probably 20% low income 60% middle and 20% high. I would say that is pretty diverse. I don't think a school has to be majority low income to be considered diverse. |
Anonymous
I applied for this exact same school year. I did not receive this email, and when I called the school to ask about attending the lottery, I was told there was not a public lottery. You did not paste sender info from this message, but giving you the benefit of the doubt that this is an actual copy of an email, my experience was still of being told explicitly that there would be no lottery. I was also on DCUM then, and there was discussion of the lack of a public lottery, and NO ONE mentioned having been given a time/date/location for a public one or of actually attending the CM lottery that year. And there were many people like me who had contacted the school directly and been told what I was. Honestly, the school itself doesn't claim to have had a public lottery that year. So it didn't happen, regardless of this possibly legit email. |
Anonymous
You're both joking right? Or are you really that... interesting... that you don't understand the difference between a school holding its own non-public lottery, and a central agency that is at least as far as we know independent of DCPS or any specific charter, running a common lottery...? Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume you're joking. |
Anonymous
(Corrected below post - I was not told there would be no lottery; I was told there'd be no public lottery.) I applied for this exact same school year. I did not receive this email, and when I called the school to ask about attending the lottery, I was told there was not a public lottery. You did not paste sender info from this message, but giving you the benefit of the doubt that this is an actual copy of an email, my experience was still of being told explicitly that there would be no lottery that I could attend as a member of the public. I was also on DCUM then, and there was discussion of the lack of a public lottery, and NO ONE mentioned having been given a time/date/location for a public one or of actually attending the CM lottery that year. And there were many people like me who had contacted the school directly and been told what I was. Honestly, the school itself doesn't claim to have had a public lottery that year. So it didn't happen, regardless of this possibly legit email. |
Anonymous
Not to be rude, but which is more likely - the fact that you are the only one that didn't receive this email (when others obviously did) or that you just missed the email? Many people contacted the school? Which is more likely, that this is getting exaggerated or like the year before - they had a public lottery and no one showed up? This is the same year that I applied and I didn't go to the lottery (I think I got a postcard with my waitlist number). |
Anonymous
You are missing the 2 main points: 1) You don't get to decide whether to do a public lottery or not based on whether anyone shows up. The lottery (if not a common lottery) has to be public, and if no one shows up, oh well. 2) If you want to know how many people reported contacting the school that year, search the archives for threads. I think multiple people at the time reporting being told there was no public lottery vs. one person listing an email they got trumps, but you are of course free to value whatever you want to value. At the end of the day, CM did at least 2 years with no public lottery, it shot them in the foot with many in terms of credibility re: their admissions process, and that is just the way it is. Now they're in the common lottery, a lot of parents love the school, and they are moving and seem to be doing fine, so soon it probably will be considered ancient history. It was a shady decision, but it seems like they've moved past it and I wish any school educating DC children the best if they are doing their best to serve DC children. |