I urge our state leaders to take a close look at this data and use it to meet their constituents’ needs.
Published: 16 minutes agoOne of most important services an elected official can render is to ask questions which respond to community interest and whose answers can potentially improve a policy or practice. To that end, I recently asked the Anchorage School District administration for information on the aggregate number of students on the district’s lottery “waitlist,” as well as the number of students waitlisted at individual schools.
To its credit, ASD’s administration quickly provided me the information I requested. As I reviewed it last weekend, it became clear to me that a small percentage of parents engage in the lottery process. Out of roughly 43,000 current students , 1,280 applied to a school or program elsewhere in ASD next year. This figure represents a little less than 3% of ASD’s student body.
But after plotting the leading neighborhood schools of choice on a map, my hypothesis is that those families’ lottery choices likely reflect common-sense interests in both quality and convenience, albeit aligned with their commuting destinations more than their homes.
Finally, ASD’s spring lottery data suggests that many local families are interested in schools offering longitudinal and/or secondary options. More families applied for ASD’s only brick-and-mortar K-12 school , than for all of ASD’s charter schools combined.
But the moves and/or facility improvements that this may entail could be costly. It may, therefore, behoove state leaders who support the concept of increased access to charter schools to facilitate this work by providing funds — i.e. by using the State’s slightly increased— to help ASD and other districts undertake such transitions or improvements by seeding the process with funds for a bond match of some kind. This will take vision and leadership.
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