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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just got an email from TPMS that my kid is in!! Notification letters are also on ParentVue, which is great because our mail had not arrived.

Kid was in the pool for both lotteries, accepted at TPMS which is his home school.[/quote]

I think a certain percentage of spots at TPMS are reserved for home school students. I am not sure if it's the same for Eastern.[/quote]

25 are set aside for those in the TPMS catchment, so there is something of a separate lottery for them (same criteria, different pool).  I think the ratio of seats to total MS population ends up being about 3 times greater.[/quote]

That sounds really wrong. The odds of getting in have to be significantly higher. 
TPMS has roughly 380 kids in each grade each year. If the top 15 percent are in the pool that's 57 kids. If there are 25 inbound set-aside seats that's a 44 percent chance of getting in!
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You'd need to back out the 100 non-catchment magnet seats, so 25 of 280, or about 9 percent of the overall catchment population gets in.  That compares to 100 seats there for over 7000 6th grade students from the rest of the lower portion of the county, closer to 1.5 percent of the population.  So it's about 6 times more likely to end up in the magnet if you are within the TPMS bounds.  That's without considering the relative proportions of those who might qualify based on grades, reading level and locally-normed MAP percentiles (the result is less than the top 15% of MAP scorers).  Your estimate of an over 44% chance for pool qualifiers may be on the low side.

As a PP said, it was done that way to make TP a more attractive place to buy back when the program was set up.  Problem is, a good portion of the SFH area in TP already was desirable, and was the most likely place for folks magnet-hunting to land.  I think it's also outlived its purpose.  Politics.  What's really a shame, though, is that they didn't expand the program to meet the need, or even to keep pace with population growth.

The set aside for Eastern was smaller (12), but King and Clemente had 25 in-catchment reserved seats to compare with only 50 for out-of-catchment.  A real head-scratcher was the set-aside for Potomac for the Chinese Immersion program.  Did they need their area made more attractive? 
Was it to assuage the already-well-to-do about the influx of hoi palloi from out-of-bounds?  Those with outsized influence get everything...[/quote]

Interesting discussion. You are right about taking out the magnet kids so you have more like 280 TPMS kids in-bounds. 15 percent of that is 42 kids. 25 spots for 42 kids in the lottery means that 60 percent get in. Could this be correct? 60 percent of kids in the TPMS catchment area with lottery qualifying scores get into the magnet?[/quote]

No that's not right. Look at the at a glance #s. It's more than 280. [/quote]

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