The Learning Curve is a weekly column that answers questions about schools using plain language. Have a question about how your local schools work? Write me at Mario.Koran@voiceofsandiego.org.
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It’s that time of year again. San Diego Unified has opened its school choice window, and parents across the district can now apply to send their kids to schools outside their neighborhoods.
If you’re interested, you’ll want to jump on it. The window has been shortened and the deadline moved up.
In years past, parents could submit choice applications from Nov. 1 to Feb. 15. This year, the window will stay open from Oct. 3 to Nov. 14.
How to apply for schools is one of the most common questions I get from readers and parents. There are all sorts of reasons parents look for alternatives to their neighborhood schools. They might want to avoid the low-performing school closest to their home. Others search for high test scores, language schools or simply a school that’s on their way to work.
Whatever the reason, school choice gives parents options. In honor of this yearly event, I put together a short guide to the process.
How can I find my neighborhood school?
Simply go to San Diego Unified’s website to see its neighborhood school finder. You type in your address and hit “find.” It will tell you your assigned school, which is the school your kids would automatically attend if you don’t opt into other schools.
How do know which school is best?
This one’s tougher. If you’re a parent whose kids are already in the district, you’re connected with teachers, principals and other parents whom you could ask for advice.
But new or incoming parents might not know where to start. Lucky for those folks, San Diego Unified put together this handsome brochure on what different schools have to offer.
Handsome brochure notwithstanding, that information likely won’t answer all your questions about the school, so your best bet is to narrow down your options and pay those schools a visit. That will give you a chance to look under the hood. And you can tell a lot about a school’s culture by how well you’re treated by principals or front office staff.
How do I apply?
Once you’ve circled your top options, you can submit your application online. It doesn’t matter how early you submit the application, so long as it’s in by Nov. 14.
You can apply to your three favorite schools. Then you wait to hear back from the district about which of those schools have room. Available seats go first to students who live in the surrounding neighborhood. So if the school is popular with neighborhood parents – like schools are in La Jolla – parents from outside the area will have a smaller chance of getting in.
You can also take a look at the number of choice applications a school typically receives and how many it accepts by looking at numbers from the previous year.
Parents from outside San Diego Unified who want to choice into a district school can find information here.
How does the district determine who gets into a school?
It really comes down to space. Elementary schools in La Jolla, for example, generally take very few choice students, if any. But if seats are available, the district has a list of priority considerations.
Parents looking for magnet schools or schools with specialized programs not offered by their nearest school will get priority consideration. Same goes for district employees, students who want to transfer out of low-performing schools or students who want to attend the same schools as their siblings.
Can I apply to charter schools, too?
Yup. And that application process is separate from the district’s. So while the district limits you to three choices, you can apply to as many charter schools as you want. Parents who want to boost their chances of landing in their preferred schools improve their odds by applying to both charters and district schools.
You can find a list of all charter schools in the district here.
Why was the choice window shortened?
San Diego Unified spokeswoman Jennifer Rodriguez says the change was made to give both families and schools extra time to plan for the following year.
Schools typically create budgets for the following year starting in December and January. In order to budget appropriately, schools need to have a good idea of how many students are coming in. So the district is hoping this earlier application window will help lock things in place earlier.
Rodriguez said the change might also help schools know how many teachers to staff earlier in the year, so there’s less teacher-shuffling at the beginning of each school year.
The rub is that if enough parents don’t know about the shortened application window, they’ll miss the deadline. That could hurt schools that depend on choice students to fill up seats, like magnet schools, which are intended to draw students from all over San Diego in an effort to make schools more diverse.
How does school choice square with the district’s broader plan to keep students in their neighborhood schools?
It’s complicated. School board members and district officials understand that parents want options. And that if they took those options away, some parents might leave the district all together.
The district’s overarching goal, as outlined in its Vision 2020 plan, is to create a quality school in every neighborhood. And one metric it uses to measure that is how many parents are choosing their neighborhood schools.
But a study released last year showed 42 percent of parents across the district choose to send their kids to schools outside their neighborhoods – about the same percentage of students who opted out of neighborhoods schools in 2011, the year the district created Vision 2020.
School board members realize it would be a political nightmare for them to eliminate choice completely. Instead, they want to market magnet and specialty schools, which rely on choice applicants to fill up their seats, while promoting the strengths of its less popular schools.
That’s not to say marketing and promotion is a bad thing, so long as schools are able to deliver on their promises when students arrive.
VOSD staff writer Mario Koran is also a fellow at New America California.