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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You are making the mistake of assuming that popularity = quality.  The pool of kids looking to lottery and change schools starts to shrink after K.  There start to be spaces in many of the Hill area elementary schools (for example) in mid-elementary grades.  There are some reasonably good DCPS elementary schools that do not necessarily get much attention OOB.[/quote]

No, you don’t understand school differences.  There is a huge difference between Capitol Hill DCPS elementary schools and most other DCPS elementary schools EOTP.  That difference, which is the most important, is academic performance.  CH schools overwhelmingly at and above grade level, 60-89%.  Non CH around 30% so overwhelmingly below grade level.

School in CH start losing kids after 4th because of the middle school feed due to Latin and Basis. Retention of families in K-3rd is high.  Non CH schools EOTP, in contrast, start losing kids much earlier like K-1st.  By 2nd, it’s stark.  It’s not due to the middle school feed.  It’s because families are not happy like OP and they are looking for a better school and trying to trade up.

[b]There might be an exception in 1 or 2 grade where the CH schools may have space to take a few OOB kids but not common at all.  You never see CH schools on short waitlist. Where other many non CH schools you can pretty much get in any grade 1st and up and on the short waitlist almost every year.[/b]

And no I’m not in CH.  I’m in the other group.[/quote]

You are massively overstating this.  Just this year already, Brent offered 18 spots in the K lottery and has already made 22 offers for K on top of that. Last year Brent made 34 offers for 2nd grade. Ludlow-Taylor offered 4 seats for 1st and also made 4 offers, 7 seats for 2nd and also made 4 offers, 12 seats for 3rd and already made 2 offers, etc. Multiple offers in all grades last year as well. Maury is harder to get into, but last year they made 15 offers for K and 7 for 1st. Now, this isn't to say that any one particular kid will definitely get a spot at a particular school, but if you keep trying at multiple schools, chances are it'll work out.  You're being ridiculous when you say "a few OOB kids" and "not common at all". Try checking the data before you assert yourself. This site is supposed to be helpful, not mislead people.

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/aaron2446/viz/MSDCSeatsandWaitlistOfferData_draft/MSDCPublicDisplay[/quote]

OP here. None of those schools— Brent, Maury, L-T— have short waitlists. I know because I’m on them. You still have to lick into spots there.

The schools on the Hill with short waitlists are fairly similar to our current school— fine for ECE but issues after that. I’m not interested in trading one such school for another, there is no point.[/quote]

DP I would also add that number of offers doesn’t equate to number of seats. Families could decline seats, took one at another hill school that offered a seat, decide to go private, move etc…Hill schools are not adding a lot of OOB kids.  We were o the waitlist at some of these schools with decent numbers before and did not get any offers.

So yes, just because a school made 7 offers doesn’t mean there are 7 seats.  There might be 2 with 5 decline.  And if you are number #20 at the school, no way in hell there is any chance. [/quote]

Au contraire, it's also the case that people get off the waitlist without receiving an offer. The people on the Maury waitlist and the Ludlow-Taylor waitlist are an overlapping population, and if they get into one, they'll sometimes exit the list for the other. So 7 seats could get you to #20 if that happened often enough. It really just depends. You seem determined to be in despair and I'm not sure what anyone can do to help you until you change your attitude.

There is data on OOB kids. It's a little hard to understand, but you can look at it here. There are other online data sources for this kind of thing too, that report in different ways.   https://dme.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dme/page_content/attachments/SY2122_Public%20School%20Enrollments%20per%20DCPS%20Boundary_0.xlsx

So you can see that, for example, of the 431 Brent students, 284 are in-boundary. Of 440 Ludlow-Taylor students, 276 are in-boundary. Of the 531 Maury students, 443 are in-boundary. To be sure, they are concentrated in the upper grades, but still. It is simply untrue to assert, as you did, that "Hill schools are not adding a lot of OOB kids".

You'll be a lot happier, and a lot more likely to get a satisfactory placement, if you actually look at the data.
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OOB kids pull in siblings so you can basically cut those numbers by minimum 50% and likely more.[/quote]

Again, moving the goalposts. OP said "Hill schools are not adding a lot of OOB kids". Not "Hill schools are not adding a lot of only children with terrible lottery numbers".

Looking at last year's data on Tableau, Ludlow-Taylor made a number of offers nearly equal to or exceeding its initial lottery waitlist for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th.

Last year, ITS made 40 offers for a 1st grade waitlist of 50 kids. 20 offers for a 5th grade waitlist of 22. Lee was begging for 1st graders. We haven't even talked about Watkins, but last year it cleared or almost-cleared its waitlist for grades 1-5. This year Watkins had almost no waitlist at all, in the initial lottery. If OP was among the 5 kids waitlisted at Watkins for 1st, that's sad, but last year Watkins made 25 offers for 1st grade, so there is just no reason to be such a downer about it! It's not even August.[/quote]

OP is trying to get into a school without sibling preference.  What are her chances. Of course she needs to look at the data in the setting of OOB kids pulling in siblings and her chances are significantly decrease because if that.  You just can’t look at raw data when you are looking at the probability when preferences are given.[/quote]

The sibling data is only published for the initial lottery, so it's hard to do calculations about it. It's down lower on the Tableau site. [/quote]

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