PP here. Thanks for clearing up my confusion!

Our enrollment secretary was a little puzzled when I requested to enroll our child, too (she was going to be applying for K immersion the next year). When I explained that it was for the immersion lottery, though, she understood what I meant. It's kind of confusing, and I think the application process has changed a bit since we went through it. Good luck!

I think that you're confusing what they mean by enrollment here. In order to apply for the language immersion lottery, you need to submit your enrollment paperwork to your home school, basically you need to sign them up, give them your birth certificate, show that you live in bounds etc . . . but your child doesn't need to attend. In fact, the OP's child can't attend as they aren't old enough yet.

I think it might be the same for the magnet programs. That is, that you need to go through the registration process, or at least part of it, to show where your child lives and that they are age eligible. But there's definitely not a requirement that they attend an MCPS school in order to apply.

I posted asking whether your child can apply for a magnet from a private school. This thread confuses me - are the rules different for the immersion lottery?

Yes, you need to enroll in your homeschool and they are responsible for sending your application in.

DC will be in K in the fall and we want to apply for language immersion. If I a reading the application correctly, it says that the application must contain a MCPS ID number and that we have to get that number from our home school. Yet when I went in person and asked the home school about this, the enrollment secretary acted huffy and annoyed and surprised, and said "Well, to give an ID number we would have to actually enroll the child here!" Emphasis hers--in other words, it sounded like a) she just didn't want to do her job, LOL, since she is in fact the *enrollment* secretary or b) I am wrong and DC doesn't need to be technically officially first registered at home school before the application? This secretary is not new to the school so it seems odd to me that she would have this reaction given that we can't possibly be the only people over the years from our school who have applied to immersion.