Oakland school lottery myths
hi, I’m hoping to gain some insight and debunk some ousd myths about the school lottery system. A friend just told me that you may gain priority in the lottery if you submit your application sooner in the open enrollment time. This goes contrary to all logical thought since most schools don’t tour until December and enrollment starts mid November. The city itself doesn’t even do a school fair until December. Is there any truth or founded rumor to this?
Also, if you don’t get your first choice are your chances higher of getting your second or third? I’ve heard of people playing the lottery in sf (putting their first choice second or third).
We are hoping for a non neighborhood school so mainly wanting to know if there is anything to the rumor of time of submission having anything to do with your chances.
Thank you!!!
Parent Replies
We optioned last year for TK. It was their 1st year using an online system (or so I was informed). They don't even collect the data until the close of the lottery window. Perhaps when it was paper, there were people starting an early tally, but that is not a lottery, that's 1st come 1st serve. What is true is that OUSD works out the lottery results for applications submitted within the options window before they look at late applications. Perhaps that's where the "sooner application' priority myth originated.
A friend of mine put her 1st choice as #1, 2 and 3 on her child's option form. She suggested we do the same convinced it made statistical sense. OUSD told me that is not how it works, and when I filled out our online application it wasn't even physically possible. You can't use the same school twice in the digital form.
The one thing that did help us was putting a "safety school" (i know, sounds awful) in the lower rank of our list. No one in my neighborhood wants our neighborhood school. There were 5 kids in the surrounding blocks applying for TK. Of course everyone tried for the star schools, and everyone who didn't put a "safety school" was assigned our neighborhood school. Everyone of us who did put a school with a better chance, were placed in the lower ranked/with less demand school. One family stayed in Pre-k, and a few petitioned for another placement.
The welcome center urged us to put the schools down in order of our preference.
My experience is also with TK. That is a fraction of the student population and quite a few desirable schools still do not offer that grade, so the statistical properties of that lottery are a little different, and weren't reported separately in the OUSD book to give insight into some hidden strategy.
There is zero truth to this (although apparently it was once the case--many years ago--that applications were first come-first serve and people lined up in the wee hours to submit them, and we were actually at an open house last year where a retired administrator told parents this, causing some panic!) In today's enrollment process, all on-time applications are processed at the same time. In the past, I believe the lottery has assigned a number to each application and when your turn rolled around, it ran through your list of schools looking for open spots before defaulting to your neighborhood school if none were available, so there was no particular benefit to listing a less in-demand school first (but certainly a benefit to not stacking your list with schools that are all hard to get into). That also explains why there's no benefit to listing the same school three times--if there's not a spot, there's not a spot. You're not getting a raffle ticket (as in some charter assignment processes where numbers are drawn and certain priorities might get you extra entries). However, I understand that the assignment process is moving online this year (last year just the applications were collected online, but the lottery was not run in the online system) so that may be handled differently--I'd ask and see.