Pre-K Lottery Shifts Local Schools Closer to Local-only Schools

The closed a week ago and the results came out Friday. At both local elementary schools, the pre-K classes will be filled by local children who live in-boundary for and Stoddert; several local children were wait-listed at their neighborhood schools. Hyde is of particular interest to Georgetowners; the neighborhood school class in anticipation of overcrowding at the increasingly popular school.

The results from the DCPS lottery show that all 19 slots open at Hyde-Addison were filled by in-boundary children. The top two children on the wait list are also in-boundary, the next 14 children on the list are those who live out of boundary, but have a sibling currently enrolled at the school. There are 195 children currently on the waitlist.

The two wait-listed Georgetown children were not admitted to the other DCPS pre-K programs they applied for, according to information available on the lottery website. Beyond getting in from the waitlist, these families have the option of filling a space in a less competitive program elsewhere in the system.

At Stoddert, the numbers tell a similar story. The 38 available pre-K slots were all filled by in-boundary children and another 21 in-boundary children are on the wait list. The next five children on the waitlist live out of boundary, but have a sibling currently attending Stoddert. The remainder of the 250 wait-listed children have "no preference." There is of course cross over: children who applied to Stoddert, applied to Hyde and vice versa.

"We do anticipate that waitlists will move in the coming weeks/months. ...The schools will keep wait-listed families updated on their status," said Frederick Lewis, a spokesperson for DCPS.

For families concerned about not getting into the school of their choice from the waitlist, Lewis said, "there are still preschool and pre-K seats available at some schools and we have a team of staff members who can help assist families who are interested in exploring these options."

Hyde-Addison will offer only one pre-K in fall 2011 class, instead of the two offered in 2010, and may combine classes of kindergarten and first-grade students to manage overcrowding. The elimination of the second pre-K class significantly reduces the number of out-of boundary children able to attend Hyde-Addison. 

The de facto elimination of out-of-boundary students from the pre-K programs at local schools raises natural questions about the future diversity of those schools.

In an , DCPS spokesperson Safiya Simmons mentioned the importance of the lottery for D.C. families. "It’s a huge deal for us that all kids have access to great, diverse programs and that parents feel empowered to choose," said Simmons.

But as schools are increasingly filled by local children, at very least the geographic diversity of the programs change. More than half of DCPS students attend schools outside their neighborhood boundaries. Currently for the 2010-2011 school year, 32 percent of Hyde-Addison students are in-boundary.

Beginning with these locally-packed pre-K classes, the ability of out-of-boundary children to attend schools like Hyde-Addison or Stoddert decreases. If the child gets into a pre-K or kindergarten class at a preferred school, he or she becomes in-boundary for feeder middle schools and high schools. Missing out on that pre-K acceptance leaves families with fewer chances to become in-boundary and pass a preference on to younger siblings. 

This year Hyde-Addison did not accept any lottery students for Kindergarten or first grade, largely due to concerns of overcrowding. But the total number of open slots for grades two through five was 13. Stoddert had almost no spaces across the board from Kindergarten through fifth grade, except six seemingly random spaces in third grade.

At , there were 30 open slots in sixth grade for out-of-boundary children, but none in seventh and eighth grades.

After pre-K, out-of-boundary children may have a slim chance of snagging a position at one of the Georgetown area elementary schools and then again a chance when moving to middle school. Georgetown children, of course, have a right to attend the local schools beginning in Kindergarten, so the in-boundary children who were wait-listed for this year's pre-K will automatically be accepted next year.

The significance and shift have not gone unnoticed. Local blog, The Georgetown Metropolitan, weighed in on the topic in a recent post. Metropolitan author Topher Matthews wrote, the "pre-K lottery is about to assume a pretty significant role in the ongoing transformation of Hyde-Addison, whereby the school is steadily becoming a primarily Georgetown-serving school."