Kindergarten Sibling Waitlists Explained

Thanks to StepJ who let us know the district had posted a document about the kindergarten sibling waitlists. There are 148 siblings on the waiting lists for schools that are not their attendance area school. There is a fairly even city-wide distribution of siblings who didn't get their sibling assignment with the largest for Kimball at 19 and John Hay at 18.

Here's the document summary:

"The following chart shows results for non-attendance area K siblings who applied for their
sibling’s attendance area school during Open Enrollment. In summary:

• 556 non-attendance area K students applied for their older sibling’s school.2
• 73% of these applicants (408 students) were assigned to their sibling’s school.
• 27% of these applicants (148 students) are on waiting lists for their sibling’s school.

These results are in addition to:

• Students assigned to their attendance area school their older sibling attends.
• 132 K siblings assigned to the Option School their older sibling attends.3

Of 54 attendance area schools:4

• 65% of the schools (35) have no waitlisted siblings
• 15% of the schools (8) have 1-5 waitlisted siblings
• 11% of the schools (6) have 6-10 waitlisted siblings
• 6% of the schools (3) have 11-15 waitlisted siblings
• 4% of the schools (2) have 16-20 waitlisted siblings

Waiting lists will be managed aggressively by the Enrollment department beginning after Open
Enrollment and through September 30. (This will continue throughout the summer.) It is
anticipated that, as schools work with their enrollment data, additional K siblings on waiting
lists may be offered seats at the requested schools.

2
Graham Hill has two entry grades: PreK (3‐year‐olds) for the Montessori program and K for the general education
program. Information includes combined data to reflect both entry grades.

3
Since the entry grade at South Shore is PreK, information is for PreK siblings.

4
Total does not equal 100% due to rounding. "

Other interesting items from the document:

• "One potential strategy, eliminating full-day K classes and offering only half-day K classes at some schools, was not employed as a strategy to accommodate non-attendance area K
  siblings. "
• "A link on the Enrollment website where families can indicate if a child will not be
  attending Seattle Public Schools has been upgraded to make it easier to compile data
  submitted online. This will help us collect data to see if attrition is going to be higher
  than projected and, therefore, where additional space is available to admit waitlisted
  students. "
• "Portable classrooms will be added at a small number of schools."
• "In other cases, a classroom at an upper grade level could be freed up by increasing
  class size in upper grades, and/or by creating split grade classes. "
• "In some cases, K class size was increased slightly. This was a common approach if the
  number of siblings who would have been waitlisted was small."