We applied to the lotteries at 2 different gifted schools and never made it (we placed in the 200's and 300's for a total of around 70 seats). So, we knew for sure that there was no room for us even in the waiting list. In a way, it closed some doors for us decisively and we had other options that we were interested in and we moved on. Ours is an area where there are a lot of really smart kids and the parents are eager to get them into the best ranking schools. When we called the schools, they told us how many applicants were there for this year, how many seats were available and what the numbers were for the previous years. From that, we could easily figure out that my son's chances were slim.
