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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Agree with many of the prior posters.

1.  Just in the interests of managing your time and stress, I think it's important to go into the process with a strong fallback plan -- whether it's your in-bound school or a charter that always gets through its waitlist but that you can live with for a year or two, or even deciding that by year x, you'll head for the suburbs.  This gives yourself a couple of years until you find your way into a longer term solution -- or even to allow your "safety school" to become your longer term solution.  This will let you play the lottery from a position of relative "strength" and safety and avoid devastating yourself if you aren't lucky the first round.

2.  Others will disagree, but unless you have a lot of time on your hand and are unusually good at compartmentalizing your feelings, I suggest skipping the open houses and multi-school fairs.  From my perspective, having skipped them myself and hearing other parents who spent a lot of time on them, any benefit these events offer are often offset by causing parents to fall in love too soon with "dream" schools that they never even get into, as well as to reject as "unacceptable" schools that you might seem to compare unfavorably due to false comparisons with dream schools (see above), when they might be the school you could get into later.  Instead, I found it beneficial to stick to online information that I could more efficiently and objectively rank while keeping at a healthy emotional distance, until after each round of the lottery was over and I could devote a more focused burst of attention on those schools where we had an actual likelihood of admission.  Many schools are pretty good at offering last-minute open houses and tours to help low-waitlist-numbered and recently-admitted parents make a decision.

3.  Prepare for the long haul, including the prospect of at least one if not two or three moves for your child.  I know many parents think this is damaging to kids, but we did it with no apparent ill effects. And even assuming it isn't ideal, that might be the price worth paying in the long run. Also at least prepare for the likelihood of spending summers and even early fall following up with higher demand schools as their waitlists move.  If you are prepared for that ahead of time as part of playing the game, you'll be able to handle the stress of it and take advantage of slots that open up late and when waitlists speed up after other families who aren't willing to stick it out and decide to cut bait.

4.  Try to remember that as an involved parent who values your child's education, whatever warts or flaws your school might have can be significantly compensated by what you add to their educational experience through being involved, giving them supplemental enrichment, and so on.  Just look at test scores for high SES students across the District, who not only outperform high SES students elsewhere in the country, but are consistently and similarly high whether your child is at Janney/Deal /Wilson or at an EOTP charter or DCPS alternative.

Good luck. [/quote]

We too, did not attend any open houses and I don't regret that decision.  For us, commute was a huge deal so we only listed those schools with realistic commutes for our family (can we walk or bike to the school)?  [/quote]

Why wouldn't they want to get as much info as possible?  Your post is strange, the one above inane. Don't go to open houses because you might learn things about a school that make you fall in love with it and then you will be disappointed? Instead be ignorant of facts (good and bad) because then you can protect yourself? It's a brave new world where everyone gets a trophy...[/quote]

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