The complex process of determining where students are placed requires the use of special filters and randomly set numbers due to the volume of candidates.
By THOMAS C. TOBIN
Published August 29, 2004
As parents and students navigate the choice plan, they will never have more control over the process than right now - that is, during the application period.
The next two months, from Sept. 1 to Nov. 1, is their time to research and visit schools and complete an application.
After that, it's out of their hands until Feb. 1, when the results of the choice computer lottery are mailed to families.
Here is how the process works behind the scenes:
As parents submit their applications by mail, fax, personal delivery, phone or the Internet, the information makes its way into a district database.
Next, the district determines how many seats will be open in each "choice attendance area school" for the lottery.
First the district gets a count of how many students will be returning to each school. These "grandfathered" students are assigned seats.
Next, the district determines which students want to exercise their "extended grandfathering" right to a seat in the middle or high school they were zoned for before the choice plan was started. These students are placed in seats as well.
After that, it's time to place students who filled out choice school applications and ranked their top five choices. Thus begins the "computer match process," when the district computer doles out seat assignments based on whether a sibling goes to one of the chosen schools, how close the child's family lives to those schools and how the child's race affects the racial quotas at each school.
These are known as the "family," "proximity" and "diversity" preferences. The proximity preference is applied only to first-choice applications.
The computer's first step: assigning each application a random number.
The numbers are used for a lottery in cases where the number of applications exceeds the number of spaces available.
Here's how the computer match proceeds after each application receives a random number:
The process goes school by school and grade by grade, assigning students by first choice, then second and so on.
For each grade, the computer culls first-choice applications eligible for a family preference and sorts them by random number. Starting with the lowest random number, students with a family preference are placed at their first choice school if a space is available.
Then the computer determines the number of spaces available for the proximity preference. First-choice applications are sorted by distance and random number. Students are then placed in available seats.
After that, the remaining first-choice applications are sorted by random number and placed into available seats.
The computer also considers whether a student's race would affect the rule that no school's enrollment be more than 42 percent black.
The process continues in the same way - minus the proximity preference - through the second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-choice applications until every student who applied for a choice school is considered.
The hope is that the 17,000 to 20,000 students expected to participate in choice this year will have been fairly and legally distributed among the district's schools - and that most of them are happy with their assignments.
