Reply to How does DC lottery really work...any inside info?

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[quote=Anonymous]It's not a secret and no, it does not take into account gender or ward. Here's how it works.

Everyone who enters the lottery for a particular grade is randomly assigned a number so that every student in the lottery for that grade, across the entire city, is ranked in sequential order. This is your master number.

Then the program goes through the lottery lists and the students who listed a particular school on their lottery list are ranked for that school and grade according to their master number. So, just to give an example, the students who listed School Within School for PK3 would be listed in order (S is for student): S1, S5, S8, S13, S14, S19.... etc. until you've gone through the entire list. The only thing that determines your rank for this is your master number.

Then, the program looks to see if there are students in the list who have a preference. Continuing with our SWS example, the only preference you could have is a sibling preference (the student already has a sibling enrolled in the school). Those students will be bumped to the head of the line but again in their rank order according to master number. So in the above example, assume S14, S48, S62, S97, and S128 all had siblings at SWS. Those students would move to the top of the list, in rank order, and the students without preference would then follow.

At a school with multiple preferences (boundary and sibling, for example), the students with two preferences would go to the front of the line, then students with one preference (I can't remember if sibling preference outranks boundary preference or vice versa), then everyone else.

Next the school's available seats for that school and grade are applied to these lists. So if SWS has 40 spots for PK3, they will make offers to the first 40 students on their list. Some students might be dropped from the list because they have gotten an offer at a school they ranked higher, but the point is that the offers are made in order according to the ranking I just described.

Everyone who doesn't receive an offer for that school, and who has not gotten an offer for a school they ranked higher, will then be moved to a waitlist and assigned a waitlist number. Note that your waitlist number is not the same as your master number because of the ranking system I just described. So your master number might be 68, but your waitlist number could be 6 or 43 or even 90 (if there are enough students with a preference to bump you that far down the list).

There's no gaming it, either as an applying student/family or within DCPS or the charter schools. The primary factor is your randomly assigned master number, and the only help you can get is from one of those designated preferences.

The end. No mystery. There are videos about this on the MySchool website.[/quote]

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