Seattle Schools Enrollment - Assignments and Waitlist Now Available

From SPS Communications:

If you submitted one of the 5,300 choice applications we received during the Open Enrollment period, you can now view the results. The Assignment and Waitlist link has been updated for the 2015-16 school year.
Use the link to see your student’s 2015-16 assignment and any wait list placements. You will need your student’s identification number and birthdate. 

If you did not request a different assignment during Open Enrollment and have not submitted at change to your home address, your student’s assignment hasn't changed.
Printed assignment letters will be mailed to home addresses the week of April 27.  

Second applications for choice enrollment will be accepted beginning May 1, 2015. The choice forms remain posted on the Admissions main page. 

If you have questions about school assignments for the 2015-16 school year, please call the Service Center at (206) 252-0760.

But not until Monday.

Comments

Anonymous said…
But no waitlist numbers published for schools yet, right?

HP
4/17/15, 9:10 AM
Lynn said…
Is anyone familiar with the way wait lists have worked in the past? I thought as long as there was an empty seat in the requested school, a student could enroll there. The Friday Memo released this week includes some information on enrollment in SE high schools.

It sounds to me like students who live in RBHS's attendance area but want to attend another school will not be allowed to do so if this will have a negative effect on the RBHS budget. Is that fair to these students?

In another attachment to the memo, we hear that Chief Sealth's enrollment will be dropping by 139 students next year. Very surprising. The only change I'm aware of is the transfer of Sanislo's attendance area from Chief Sealth to WSHS.
4/17/15, 9:15 AM
Anonymous said…
What is the second application for school choice that is due May 1st?

-HS Parent
4/17/15, 1:37 PM
Anonymous said…
Have applications for Spectrum/APP schools been processed then too? I thought assignments to those programs were waiting on a Advanced Learning to finish appeals.

SL
4/18/15, 9:37 PM
Anonymous said…
@HP
I am confused by the second application round for school choice, too.

It doesn't say the choice forms are due May 1st, it says that second applications for school choice will be accepted BEGINNING May 1st.

Though, if you click on the instructions for the school choice process, it clearly states in red that school choice applications are due during open enrollment. I couldn't find any info regarding a second round of choice applications.

I have no idea what these second applications are. Are they a second chance to try to get into a school other than your assigned school? Did you have to put in a first application during open enrollment to be eligible to put in a second one after May 1st?

Very strange and confusing.

- North-end Mom
4/19/15, 8:10 AM
Anonymous said…
Haven't you always been able to submit a school choice form up through Sept 30th? (But if you did so after the end of open enrollment, you would miss out on schools that fill up during processing of those open enrollment applications.)
Maybe this is just an official dividing line between open enrollment forms and the "rest"?

Also, advanced learning applications are probably continuing to come in, so I'm not sure where those fall in this.

SL

4/19/15, 10:46 AM
Lynn said…
I think the explanation is in this statement: The Open Enrollment period is your best opportunity to request a different school or program for your student. You must first register your student for school, and then you can submit your Choice request between Feb. 23 and Mar. 6.

Spectrum assignments have already been made. If you requested and were assigned a Spectrum seat and your child didn't qualify for Spectrum, you'll be bumped out and the first person on the wait list will get that spot.

I would think Spectrum assignment isn't as much of an issue anymore (except at Fairmount Park, Lafayette and Whittier.) in middle school, all qualified students are guaranteed a seat. The other elementary programs are blended models - so there'd be no reason to limit those seats.
4/19/15, 10:51 AM
Anonymous said…
But not all the appeals have been processed. I had read that they were not making any assignments to Advanced Learning programs, Spectrum included. Spectrum seats are still limited in Wedgwood and View Ridge, if not others.

SL
4/19/15, 1:53 PM
Anonymous said…
I wonder when they will publish the wait list numbers. I'm really surprised by where my kid is on the wait list. - if I am remembering correctly, it's well below the total number wait listed last year. Ouch! Maybe there are spots open somewhere for the second window, but I feel like the numbers as of now should be made public. If there's already a 30+ person wait list at many schools, why bother having another window?

NE Parent
4/21/15, 7:48 PM
Anonymous said…
What is going on with the waitlist. I applied for a neighborhood school during open enrollment. During that period the Seattle Public Schools website listed tiebreakers for attendance area schools as 1) sibling and 2) lottery. I noticed that at the end of April the school district posted a new tiebreaker list with 1) sibling 2) distance and 3) lottery. My child has been at #4 on the waitlist since it came out. I confirmed with someone in the enrollment office yesterday that there was one sibling preference in the #1 spot and all other were lottery. Today he has been moved to the last spot on the waitlist!??! I am at a loss on how to rectify this. (Besides calling the enrollment office who told me that they think that someone made a mistake and recalculated.) We did not apply for a school near our house and the tiebreakers that were posted during the period of open enrollment definitely influenced our decision on where to apply. How do I get the spot that was calculated in the initial lottery reassigned. This is nuts.
5/20/15, 2:15 PM
Anonymous said…
The wait lists have been changed, but no one has been notified yet unless you go check. My daughter was moved from number 2 on the wait list at our choice school to the number 9 spot. When I called I was told that they district changed the priority after the enrollment period to include distance as a factor. There was no notice about this. We have two other elementary schools closer to us that I would have chosen. I am extremely frustrated by how unfair it is to change the prioritization without notice prior to the selection process! If you are similarly situated please call, email, and write to complain so that the school district will not implement changes until next year when there is proper notice.
5/28/15, 12:32 PM
duplex said…
I noticed the same thing. This is completely unfair to families. It's unclear 1) how many students were admitted to schools who wouldn't have been admitted if the tiebreaker policy as of 4/27 was in place at the time of the lottery 2) how many families would have prioritized different schools if they had know the tiebreaker policy. I've already emailed the board and the staff of SPS. If any of you are interested in having a conversation offline about this, email me at ashley.jochim@gmail.com
5/29/15, 1:53 PM
Anonymous said…
Distance has always been part of the tie breaker policy, however, the school district just failed to apply it when they first issued the 2015/2106 waitlist. As a result, they have subsequently gone in and corrected the issue. So essentially, students are now where they should have originally been on their respective waitlists. The criteria didn't change, just the appropriate application. There are probably some circumstances where students would have been sequenced so they would have already received a spot. I would recommend contacting the district ombudsman if you're concerned this happened to you. I called admissions recently with an inquiry and they were very good about researching my student's waitlist placement and responding to me within a few hours.

I expect the waitlists to have a lot of movement between now and the beginning of the school year. There isn't much incentive for parents who know their students won't attend schools next year to notify the school district this far in advance. I would expect as kids choose to go to private schools, move from the district, get off the waitlists at other schools, etc ... we will see movement as more spots open up. I can definitely empathize with the frustration of not knowing, but I also recognize how difficult it is to coordinate the volume of applications, etc ...
6/4/15, 9:15 AM
joe said…
Your information is incorrect. Distance was to be phased out of the assignment plan beginning this enrollment year. It was made permanent in the growth boundaries debate in 2013 but few people new this had happened, including apparently the enrollment office. The enrollment office advertised only one tiebreaker for neighborhood schools at the beginning of 2015 - siblings. It ran the lottery, assigned students to schools and waitlists based on this criteria. Then it realized its mistake sometime in April. It did not rescind any offers of admission but instead just re-ordered the waitlist, resulting in some families being admitted to schools under different rules than other families. The only way to correct the mistake is to allow families to resubmit their applications because had they known that distance was a tiebreaker, many would have applied to different schools.
6/4/15, 9:20 AM
Anonymous said…
In our case resubmitting our application now, with what we would have chosen had the distance tiebreaker been shared with the public would not be helpful. We need before and afterschool care and all affordable programs for the school that we would have picked had we known of the distance tiebreaker are full with long waitlists. The decisions that families made weren't made in a vacuum. I'm sure there were a lot of families that made time sensitive decisions based on the published tiebreakers. The tiebreakers were communicated on the website and by enrollment staff as 1) sibling and 2) distance before open enrollment, during open enrollment and after open enrollment up until 4/27/14 when distance was added.

T
6/5/15, 3:50 PM
Anonymous said…
I meant that the tiebreakers were communicated on the website and by enrollment staff as 1) sibling and 2) LOTTERY (not distance) before open enrollment, during open enrollment and after open enrollment up until 4/27/14 when distance was added. Sorry!

T
6/5/15, 3:53 PM
Unknown said…
I have a question for the forum. I don't understand how the waitlist this year will move forward when there is no motivation to accept or decline a position at an option school. Wouldn't the waitlist see more movement and be more fair if people had to accept their assignment with a certain period of time, and if they do not accept the child would bounce back to the regular assigned school?

We are on the waiting list for our closest school (also an option school) but am concerned that the waitlist will be dissolved Aug. 15. Last year I had friends on this same waitlist and people weren't even contacted until the first week of school. If people are not reporting if they will be attending or not, how are these numbers worked out until school starts?

Confused and very frustrated!
4/17/16, 4:06 PM
Anonymous said…
I heard today that you can change the waitlist your child is on, on May 2, as long as you indicated interest in the school on your choice form. (For example, if you are on a waitlist for your first choice, on May 2 you can switch to the waitlist for your second or third choice school.) What I don't know is A) how to request the change and 2) if your kid will be sent to the bottom of the new waitlist or if the district will apply the same tiebreakers that they would have applied had you been on that waitlist originally.
4/28/16, 12:22 PM
Anonymous said…
I just talked to the district and they say they have not begun making any waitlist moves yet. They say "enrollment planning" has not given the green light to make those moves. As such we cannot know the current enrollment at our reference school (which the school principal indicated does not work if we have more than 66 kindergartners set to go there next year, so this is pretty critical information) nor do we have any idea whether there is a prayer of making it out of the waitlist at our option school. Anyone know who to contact at the district to at least get a date for when they will start making waitlist moves?
4/29/16, 3:48 PM
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