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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"If you try long enough"

Meanwhile your kid is somewhere crappy and/or moving around a lot.

I posted upthread. We tried two schools in 4 years, losing lottery (by miles) each time. Pulled her out in 4th grade. Wish I had done it sooner, but I kept thinking "surely a good option will come up" and it never did. [/quote]

OP here. Can you tell me where you wound up going? Moving out of DC? Private?

This is the the thing about the "short waitlist" suggestion that I'm wary of. Our current school has a "short waitlist." Of 0! Because it's not a very good school and people keep leaving it. So when people tell me to use a short waitlist, I want more info about that school. I do not want to move my kid so that we can be unhappy somewhere else and then move again anyway. In that case, we might as well stay where we are at and see if we can figure out how to move to a better situation.[/quote]

Well, you gotta evaluate the school using other metrics. Waitlists are a very unreliable metric of quality. You see, some schools have a lot of building space and others don't. And that's because DCPS has the buildings it has, and it only changes boundary lines every 10 years (if that), and so not all buildings are right-sized for the number of kids who live in the boundary and the number who want to attend. A school that has a nice roomy building can make lots of offers and clear its waitlist. A school that's cramped and crowded will have a long waitlist and few offers. But that doesn't mean the second school is better than the first-- quite the opposite!

For a DCPS school, the number of lottery seats offered to out-of-boundary is based on an estimate. The estimate is done by taking a proportion of kids currently attending the school in the grade below, so assuming like 85 or 90% of them will return, and then they plan on a few new by-right kids showing up, and then they see how many classrooms that will require. Then if they expect empty seats, they'll offer seats in the lottery. So if they are planning on (for example) two full classrooms just with their existing kids and a few new ones, then no lottery seats will be offered. If they have reason to think they'll need to open an additional classroom, then they'll offer a lot of seats to fill it up. That is why you see certain grade levels with more or less seats and longer or shorter waitlists than others, within the same school. So you see, looking at the length of the waitlist is not very helpful unless you have a lot of inside information to help interpret it.[/quote]

Sort of. Size of building is irrelevant if they haven't staffed to add more classes though. A school won't add an extra 15 1st grade spots just because they have an extra classroom. They have to decide to open another class for that grade and hire a teacher and ensure they have capacity for specials, SpEd, etc. So the idea that it's just that some schools are physically bigger than others isn't quite the explanation you seem to think it is.

But sure, sometimes a school does add a classroom for a grade, and that leads to a short waitlist for that grade as they sweep in more kids. But that's actually pretty easy to figure out by looking at the Tableau data -- you can see where a school has a typical pattern for a given grade, and then suddenly this year they made way more lottery spots available than usual, or if they decide to add the class after the lottery runs (slightly less common), you'll see far more offers made by June than usual and a shorter waitlist than usual.

If a school has a short waitlist every year, that's not what is happening. In that case, there is simply less interest in the school. Now, maybe it's a "hidden gem" for some other reason -- a weird catchment that tends toward families moving more, or being more likely to send kids to private, maybe. But given the lottery and the fact that people are always looking for good schools, more likely it has short waitlists because people don't like it that much.[/quote]

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