I am considering a move in the future for DD10 to a high ranking Jr/High school in the state,but the students are picked by a lottery.Has anyone gone through this process and know the chances of being left out?

I'm sure that it varies from school to school. You should be able to find the information by looking at the school's website or by contacting the school.

Yes, the applicant families should be able to find this information from the school. My DS entered a few entrance lotteries and we knew the odds before entering (the info at all of these schools was public knowledge).

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.

Thank you all,a call is in order.They call it a lottery but I see where siblings are given priority.

How do you guys feel about lottery to gifted school? I cannot imagine it in my area. Parents are going to go crazy about it. As it is, the magnet exam is so competitive that people advertise prep schools for them. I am amazed by playandlearn's experience.

Usually the way the sibling priority thing works is that any siblings of existing students (that meet whatever other entrance criteria there are) get in first, and then the remaining seats are given out by lottery.

But parents won't go crazy if it's lottery, right? Because there is no need to cram for entrance exams... In our area the "magnet" public schools all do lottery and I think this is much better than if every school has entrance exams.

But shouldn't the most deserving get in? The basketball team or the orchestra wouldn't choose who plays by a lottery.

My perception is that there are many more students who deserve to be in challenging programs than the number of spots available. It's really hard to design an exam that truly selects those who are "most deserving" for high-ranking high schools. These are not necessarily specialized schools that only certain types of kids can benefit from. Exams also raise anxiety levels, sometimes to absurdity, and reward those who can afford excessive prepping. This is much harder than selecting basketball players and orchestra members, where skill sets are narrow and well defined.

Also, magnet schools offer opportunities in a variety of ways. Locally we have early colleges, IB schools, and schools that offer a lot of flexibility in course selections. Who deserves to go to such schools is really hard to measure by exams.

I'm sure many, many magnet schools require entrance exams. I'm just glad that our local schools take a different approach, which, in my personal opinion, works well without making middle school into prep schools for selective high schools.

I think though there is a big difference between a gifted school or program than a magnet school or program. IMO a gifted one would be open to more kids and a lottery makes sense . To a magnet program should be more by the numbers.

I can see how the system of public schooling generally can arrive at a lottery system for gifted education. But it horrifies me. It plainly gives the lie to the idea of providing a free and appropriate public education for every kid. Giftedness indicates a different set of needs. Those needs don't go away when a child loses the lottery.

In its favor, I can see that a lottery system is probably better than no gifted education, which was the case in my own school years. And it is more fair than providing a decent education for the kids in prosperous districts, and providing warehousing for the kids in poor districts, which was and remains the norm in many places.

It continues to trouble me when gifted education is equated to a good education--the kind many private schools offer. That good education ought to be a priority everywhere. And as good as it can be, it's not the same thing as gifted education.

Agree 100%. If the norm in public education was to challenge each child according to her or his needs, with the right tools and resources, we might not see this mania.

We are not in a lottery system (there are no gifted schools, although there are programs, required by law). Whenever I hear about them, I think, doesn't the very need for a lottery say that the system needs to rebalance things in order to have the right number of slots?

Agree 100%. The so-called shortage of gifted seats is a falsely created shortage of opportunity. Rather than the current "divide and conquer" strategy of having families with gifted pupils compete for seats, public schools could repurpose a number of existing general education seats as gifted seats, providing the appropriate number of gifted seats to match the number of pupils needing an advanced, gifted education.

Matching the program to the child, rather than matching the child to the program.

I wasn't talking about gifted education. None of the schools that use lottery for entrance in our area offers gifted education, they are simply "non-traditional" high school education, including IB program, early college, art focus, etc. The original post in this thread was asking about a high-ranking school, which may not be a gifted school.

Ideally all H.S. would be excellent and we wouldn't need a lottery system to get into schools.

But given that this isn't currently true and parents at least perceive one school as better than another for one reason or another school district need ways to seem fair. A lottery is one way to make it at least seems that way. It's hard to make everyone happy. I know some of the larger school districts have complicated applications processes for their magnet H.S. I know both LA school district and NYC are very complicated.

My kids attended a 'alternative' public K-8 that used a lottery system for admittance. Siblings did have priority. This lottery was started after the lines for registration to the school got so long that parents were lining up for days. Having spots going to parents who had the time to stand in line for days certainly wasn't very fair & and a lottery cut through a perception of favoritism.

Sounds like lotteries actually are confined to magnet schools, at least for purposes of this discussion. Thanks for the clarification, bluemagic.

It wasn't listed as having gifted.And gifted ends here after the 8th grade.

Both my 7th graders applied to magnet middle schools two years ago and will be applying to magnet high schools next year. All theses magnet schools are on a lottery system and the seats to applicants ratios can vary significantly from one school to another and sometimes also vary somewhat from year to year. I have been able to access some data online and have also spoken directly to the head of magnet programs in our district for other information.

A couple of things to consider or inquire. In our district, there is a minimum assessment score, which weeds out a subset of applicants. There is also priority seating allowed (not really advertised) up to 10% of the seats that is at the discretion of each school/program. These seats are reserved for kids who scored exceptionally on the assessment. There have been times when the assessment for a particular school/program has not been difficult enough to yield a convenient number of superior applicants so that no one got in on priority. For example, if there were 30 seats for a program but 8 kids scored 99 percent on the assessment and many more kids scored 97-98 percent, then the school may choose not to set aside 6 seats for priority students. The interesting thing is that each school and often different programs within each school have varying levels of difficulty as far as their assessments standards. In the program/school that my kids ultimately chose, about 1/3 got in by lottery but less than 10 kids got in off the waiting list so there were several hundred kids who were disappointed.

Yes, it is so in many places. You run off the end of the IEP years, you run off the end of gifted.

Huh? Don't understand what you mean. IEP's can run through the completion of public H.S.?

Yes "Gifted" (GATE) ed ends officially at the end of 8th grade in my district. In H.S. has honors & AP classes that are "supposed" to fill the void but they are more performance based.

In the school district I grew up in (long before IEPs), students lose the protection of having an IEP when they leave middle school. There are no magnet schools. There are two big urban high schools and a couple of smaller ones; AP course availability varies from school to school and year to year (depending on faculty/funding/facilities availability.) You have the choice of enrolling in any high school that has space, but you have to provide your own transportation. This flexibility allows the district to claim that they meet the state mandate for gifted education. It is a largely-urban district in a depressed and depopulated industrial region.

I haven't lived there in a long time, but an old friend that I grew up with got her HG daughter through that system to graduation just a couple of years ago, and I witnessed the process starting with her middle school years.

My multi-racial nephew grew up in that district (he's now in his mid-20s) and since I'd promised many years before to support his education as fully as possible, I was involved in it from the beginning. We could not get him evaluated for the state-mandated gifted program (pull-out.) So, no IEP. He finished fifth grade at the top of his class, still no evaluation--the school (teachers and principal) stonewalled the family the whole way. Finances back then prevented engaging private testing, and anyway there was a history of the district not accepting private test results. Achievement test scores were in the high 90s. I thought he might have ADD but his scores and grades were so good that the school did not evaluate for that, either. All the schools he attended were inner-city schools, underfunded.

His middle school years were painful, and high school was a disaster. He finished his final year of high school in a special program for at-risk kids, at a local public university. He stayed at that university (a HBCU) for college, finally getting his ADD and depression diagnosed and addressed. Now, after alternating years of school with years of working, he's pretty much caught up with himself and will graduate with a B.S. soon.

While it is true that a high-ranking school may or may not be a gifted school (or have a gifted program) the ranking criteria were not revealed upthread and neither was the OP's school described specifically as a magnet school or a public school. Bearing in mind that many may use euphemisms to avoid the word "gifted", that alternative programs mentioned (such as IB and early college) are offered by some public school districts as their gifted program (or part of their gifted program) and this is a "Gifted Issues Discussion Forum", all responses on the thread have seemed to be on-topic regarding the thread's subject of "Lottery to gain entrance" and appear to be authentic to various poster's experiences.

I, for one, stand by the idea that public school districts should offer an education which mirrors the public which they are intended to serve, including offering a sufficient number of seats for advanced learners making a lottery unnecessary.

Not to veer off-topic from the thread's subject of "Lottery to gain entrance", but as described several places on the wrightslaw website, schools must have a plan for "transitioning" students with an IEP, and this begins at age 14 (typical age for a high school freshman) to age 16. This "transitioning" may give casual observers the impression that the student has aged out of IEP services.