San Francisco Unified Moves to Replace School Lottery; Board Votes Tuesday on Two Neighborhood-Guarantee Options
The San Francisco Unified School District is moving to scrap the lottery system that has decided which elementary school a child may attend, years after voting to kill it. The school board will vote Tuesday, October 13, between two replacement designs, and the winner would reshape how roughly the city's youngest students are assigned to schools.
Under the current system, families rank school preferences anywhere in the city, and an algorithm assigns seats, giving priority to students from the 20 percent of the city with historically low test scores. The district voted back in 2018 to eliminate the lottery after data showed it had not reduced socioeconomic segregation as intended, but a replacement was never implemented. Parents have described the process as one of the most stressful parts of family life in the city: months of uncertainty with no guarantee of where a 4- or 5-year-old will go to school.
Two options are on the table. Option B would give families who apply on time a guaranteed seat at their neighborhood school while still allowing applications to other schools across the city. Option C goes further, guaranteeing a neighborhood placement even for families who apply after the deadline, but limiting additional applications to citywide programs such as K-8 schools and language immersion programs. Either way, the district also plans to redraw the attendance boundaries that link each address to a neighborhood school.
A district survey of 2,725 families found about 71 percent preferred Option B, while 48 percent favored Option C, suggesting a clear but not unanimous lean toward the first design. Rebecca Kee, executive director of the SF Parents Coalition, told KALW that the unpredictability of the lottery has been a core complaint fueling parents' stress for years.
If the board adopts a new policy in April as planned, the new assignment system would launch in the summer of 2028. For families navigating San Francisco's school choices today, Tuesday's vote is the first concrete step toward the neighborhood-guarantee model the district promised eight years ago.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: King of Hearts 摄，CC BY-SA 3.0（Wikimedia Commons）
