This week I’ll be a part of a panel at the Georgia Charter Schools Conference with other charter school leaders discussing weighted enrollment lotteries as one strategy to attaining a socioeconomically diverse student body. With ANCS’s new student enrollment lottery coming up later this month and this being the second year in which we are using a weighted lottery, I wanted to use my blog this week to provide a little history about how a weighted lottery came to be at ANCS, why we use one, and the way in which it works.
In January 2014, the U.S. Department of Education issued new guidance for charter schools that said, if state law permits it, a charter school could give additional weight in its enrollment lottery for “educationally disadvantaged students”, which the DOE defined as students from low-income backgrounds, students with disabilities, homeless students, and/or students who qualify as English language learners. At ANCS, we recognized that a weighted lottery could be one tool that we might want to use in our efforts to have an economically diverse school. Therefore, we were a part of a group that included other charter schools, the Georgia Charter Schools Association, and others who worked over the next year with the Georgia DOE and legislators to get Georgia’s charter school law amended in the 2015 legislative session to allow charter schools the option of using a weighted enrollment lottery, making Georgia one of only four states that expressly permit the use of these lotteries in state law.
Last year, after the Georgia DOE issued guidance about how schools could implement weighted lotteries, ANCS became the first charter school in Georgia to use one, specifically giving more weight to students who come from households that qualify as “economically disadvantaged” (you can find a more detailed definition of this in the enrollment policy page on our website). During our enrollment application period, families may voluntarily indicate whether a student comes from a household that qualifies as economically disadvantaged, and then, in the lottery, such students receive up to 4 times as much weight to increase their chances of admission. Following the lottery, families of students admitted through the weighted lottery must provide evidence of their economically disadvantaged status; if they cannot, the student is placed at the end of the waitlist.
So why do we use a weighted lottery? Because it is one very helpful tool for helping our school achieve our goal of being racially and economically diverse. We seek this diversity because of the academic, social, and civic benefits to our students (a topic about which I’ve written several times here before–click here for an overview), and we work to reach it by doing work as a school community on addressing issues of equity at ANCS with our students, teachers, and families, by building relationships in pockets of our school’s attendance zone from where we have had fewer students enroll in the past, and by doing what we can to remove potential barriers to enrollment families–especially from economically disadvantaged backgrounds–might face. And then, after all of that work, for families of lower income levels who do seek ANCS for their students, we employ the weighted lottery because, in an attendance zone that has seen a marked increase in the median real estate value in the past 15 years, we have vastly more applicants who do not qualify as economically disadvantaged than those that do. So while the weighted lottery tends to get more of the attention, it is really the the last–and, frankly, least important–piece of ongoing work our school is doing to be both truly diverse and an place where students, regardless of background, can experience success.