Requesting Non-Neighborhood School in OUSD Lottery
Hi all,
We live in a neighborhood with a pretty good elementary school that we were thinking of ranking second on our list for OUSD's lottery. We were hoping to put another school that is K-8 as number one, even though it isn't our neighborhood school. Does anyone have advice to share about this idea? I saw someone posted a similar question over a year ago, but I have no idea how this worked out for them.
Basically, wondering how much this hurts our chances of getting into our neighborhood school if we rank it second.
Thanks,
Laura
Jul 26, 2017
Parent Replies
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that listing a non-neighborhood school 1st won't hurt your chances of getting into your neighborhood school. You should put your first-choice school ranked first, and your neighborhood school second. As it was explained to me, the system doesn't really need to be "gamed". Some years there is lots of room in the K-8 school (Hillcrest) for non-neighborhood kids, and some years there isn't much room.
However, if in doubt, you should absolutely call OUSD and ask the question.
Your local school is your default school. We didn't put our local school as any of our choices and still ended up assigned there (initially, anyway; we appealed and were finally notified we got into our top choice school in late June).
If you put your neighborhood school as your top choice, they aren't going to look any further down the list.
We don't know for certain, however we didn't put our neighborhood school (quite under enrolled recently) in our 5 options at all and we still got assigned to our neighborhood school anyways. Probably, putting your neighborhood as number two will not hurt. We then got into the school we requested in May this 2017 through appealing. We felt like the options don't matter in our experience. The appeal process did have an option to especially state that you're not assigned to your neighborhood school and you want it. I hope this information helps, even though it's quite not your situation.