What’s the “weighted lottery”, why is ANCS using one, and how will it work?

This Thursday evening we will hold ANCS’s annual new student enrollment lottery for next school year.  With more applicants than space available at our school, holding a lottery is a standard practice required by charter school law at ANCS and other public charter schools, and it is an activity that happens pretty much the same way this time every year.  But this year’s ANCS lottery will be slightly different as we will be the first charter school in the state to utilize a lottery that is “weighted” for students who come from “economically disadvantaged” households.  Because of this, I thought I would devote my blog post this week to the history that led us up to this week’s weighted lottery.

Back in 2014, the ANCS board completed a yearlong strategic planning process resulting in a strategic plan that included a goal of building on the school’s current diversity to realize further diversity—particularly economic and racial—to benefit students and our school community.  The rationale for this goal and actions we’ve taken aligned to it were described in more detail in our most recent “Principles in Practice” newsletter.  Since the focus of this blog post is on the weighted lottery, I’ll simply say here that our attention to this goal has been multifaceted and that we fully realize that a weighted lottery is but one way we can work towards having a school that “honors diversity” and “challenges inequity” to borrow language from the Coalition of Essential Schools common principles.

In January of 2014, the U.S. Department of Education issued new “non regulatory guidance” that stated that charter schools could retain eligibility for federal charter school program funds if they used lotteries weighted for “educationally disadvantaged students” so long as the state’s charter school laws allowed such weighted lotteries.  Recognizing this as an opportunity to gain another tool to help us in our efforts at having a diverse school population, I began talking with a few other local charter school leaders who had similar interests.  Together we collaborated with the Georgia Charter Schools Association and an attorney with experience in understanding how different states’ charter school laws give room to charter schools seeking diversity to work with then-state representative Margaret Kaiser to advocate for to the Georgia legislature to change Georgia’s charter school law to give schools the option of using weighted enrollment lotteries to benefit “educationally disadvantaged students”, which includes “economically disadvantaged”.  In March 2015, I testified before the Georgia House education committee about why this change in law would benefit ANCS and other public charter schools, and later that spring a bill allowing for weighted lotteries passed the House and Senate and was signed into law by the governor.  In February 2016, the Georgia Department of Education issued guidance to Georgia’s charter schools about how weighted lotteries could be used.  With this guidance in place, the ANCS governing board included the weighted lottery as a new part of our school’s enrollment policy for our new charter agreement starting July 1, 2016.

The details of how the weighted enrollment policy work can be found on the enrollment page of our website.  In essence, students who come from households who meet the criteria for “economically disadvantaged” receive greater weight in the lottery, thereby increasing their likelihood of enrollment.  Over time, our goal is for our school to have a student body in which 30-50% of students qualify for free or reduced price meals so that we reflect true economic diversity and can help nurture all of the benefits that come to all students from learning in a diverse and equitable classroom.  Our enrollment data and weighted lottery projections for this year suggest we’re likely to have a group of newly admitted students that will fall into the 20-25% range of economically disadvantaged, which is more than double the current percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced price meals at our elementary campus.

There is growing interest among charter schools across the country in using policy levers–like weighted lotteries–and other steps to create diverse schools. At ANCS, we’ve taken steps in the right direction with our goals focused on diversity and equity, and the weighted enrollment lottery is one piece that’s helping us along the way.