School Choice Process
The community proposal allows for student and family choice while driving equity. Choose the school that fits your needs and know that the school you choose is guaranteed to have the resources to support learning.
Main Goals of Regions of Choice Model
Equitable Access
Retain Choice
Retain Students
Attract New/Returning Students
Drive Community Involvement
Student/Family Buy-In
Teacher Enthusiasm/Morale - Attract Better Talent
Goal Details
The underlying intent of the application process is to create a system that incentivizes and grows many of the best things PPS has to offer, but in a way that ensures equitable access for all to those ideas, programs, communities, etc.
Magnet schools help to create diversity in our schools, until the application process is abused to benefit the more privileged. Thematic learning, usually tied to those magnets, helps keep people in the district through having a choice, and having the ability to have kids involved in a philosophy/method of learning that keeps them engaged - whether that is STEAM, languages, Montessori, or whatever it is for each particular kid - none of these are right for all kids. Well resourced schools almost always perform better - so we need to balance resources across schools in a much more equitable way. Community/parent involvement, and especially student enthusiasm about their school, drives success better than any educational rubric ever will be able to achieve. Keeping enrollment up (and growing) means more resources to distribute across our schools for all of our kids - declining enrollment always hurts everyone. Better teacher morale leads to better outcomes, and a work culture where we can attract a higher quality and more diverse body of teachers. Diverse teachers drive better outcomes - when students have a teacher that they can identify more directly with, their outcomes go up dramatically.
So, how do we do all of these things? The existing structure and the current proposal will pit many of these goals against each other and force us to choose. We think our model, while obviously it can’t do everything perfectly, handles all of these as a cohesive package that can work together. Here’s how it works:
Regions of Choice
We break the city into 5 regions at the elementary level, 2 at middle school, and the whole city is your region for high school. We have more elementary schools and we think it is best to not have these young learners travel as far from home. As you get older, developing responsibility via traveling a bit further can be a benefit, and we have fewer buildings with more specialized offerings, so you need to travel further to meet your needs and interests effectively.
Universal Enrollment System
When you enroll in PPS, you are taken to a web page (could be paper option for a staffer to submit later if necessary) where you see, for example, all of the elementary schools available in your region. If you go to our home page near the bottom, you can click through a simple example of what this could look like. Right there on that enrollment page, you see a map to visualize where each school is, it’s address so you can look it up, and some basic data about the school - some examples could be thematic focus, current enrollment (school size), CTE offerings, sports offerings, extra specialized supports for IEPs, ELL, etc. You would also be able to click to open a new window of the PPS page for that school to learn more. This page/pages can be easily translated to all languages for accessibility to our English learning families.
This page asks you to rank the options in order of preference. Lets say you have 5 options in your region, you would rank each school 1 to 5, and submit. This would take you to the rest of the typical enrollment process for PPS. This part of the process is critically important to equity. Literally every single person enrolling in PPS would go through this same process. It is not a separate thing you need to know about, learn how to navigate, etc the way our current magnet application process works. You cannot enroll without selecting your preferences, and this all in one page to present you all of your options with information about why you might choose each of them, and it is pretty easy to navigate.
There would be a general enrollment period where all of these enrollments come in, similar to the existing magnet process. Unlike magnets, this isn’t a “deadline” to apply, but it is the date by which you need to apply to get into the initial admission selection process. More on what happens if you enroll after this date later.
Distribution of Seats
After that deadline, the admin would tabulate all of the enrollments, and proportionally distribute the number of available seats at each school across each region. So lets do a simple example of a region with 4 middle schools. For simplicity here, we’re enrolling all grades from empty, obviously you would account for returning students etc first and adjust all of this accordingly. They have a capacity of 400, 500, 500, and 600 for a total capacity of 2000 at 100% utilization (which is unrealistic… we target more like 60-80% to account for real world conditions, growth, etc… 80% by this metric is pretty full in realistic conditions - See our Building Data Analysis page for more about this). Let’s say 1400 enrollments came in, which is 70% of total capacity. Before we even look at the ranked choices, we would apportion approximately 280, 350, 350, and 420 seats to those respective schools (in this example, about 70% capacity to all). The entire region’s enrollment moves up and down as a group and it keeps individual school enrollment balanced across the district. It would be a little too rigid to try to hit exactly that proportionality, as it is hard to administer and reduces how many kids get their top choices.
To adjust for that, we also allow for a small deviation from those numbers to give more students/families their highest choices, while still keeping all schools from becoming under or over enrolled. Our suggestion is that the deviation from the highest to the lowest enrolled school in a region is capped at 10%. In the example above, if the 2 schools with 500 student max capacity were the highest and lowest picked, it might end up somewhere near 375 (75%) and 325 (65%) respectively, for a 10% deviance between the highest and lowest enrollments, with all other schools falling in between. No school is bursting at the seams, and no school is substantially under-enrolled. The district retains a lot of in-the-moment control without having to redraw attendance zones again.
Without going into too much detail, it would also be highly beneficial to use a similar model to allot those seats to balance classroom sizes within each school. Its a similar algorithm that would help keep our teachers from being in a really large class while another teacher has a really small one, or trying to squeeze 34 kids into one 4th grade class as has happened before at PPS. Again, with a built-in margin to allow more kids to get the schools they want, but avoiding major variations between class sizes.
Ranked Choice Admission
Now we follow a ranked choice school assignment process. This is based on the well established ranked choice voting system which we can simply follow, but with one caveat. We advocate for a few weights to be added to the system. Specifically we recommend these, but others could be considered as well:
Residing in a historically low-SES zip code. This weight compensates a bit for the historical burden of inequity we’ve placed on these communities. Any other method of achieving this goal is very much worth considering - it is just one option that seems like it would not create legal challenges.
The school you choose would be your assigned school in a traditional model. If being close to home is a priority, you get a better shot at that
Siblings - if a sibling will be simultaneously enrolled in the same school, you’re automatically accepted. If a family wants to remain together, they should be allowed to
Community Basis
The underlying theme of much of our proposal is a strong basis in the already adopted PPS community schools strategy. The concept of our proposal is that the thematic focuses and misc other small differentiations that schools can make for themselves are driven by community input about their needs and desires, not by our proposal’s suggestions or the edict of the administration. We shape the schools to fit the need of the community around it, and strive to make PPS’s schools and community hubs into pillars of the regional community.
This is important as we discuss the idea of “last choice” schools. Not only does our plan not allow them to become under-enrolled, it also calls for a mechanism to address why a school is not being picked as frequently as others. If any school fell below a certain metric (we suggest below a relative percent of the region that picks it as top choice seems like the best option, but there could be various ways to handle this), it would trigger the community liaisons for the region to gather the families, teachers, and stakeholders of the region and assess what would make that school better meet the interests and needs of the region. From there, we decide on some changes - maybe a different focus, or working with a community partner to provide on site after care, or starting a community led rec league of a sport, or whatever it might be. Let the schools organically and dynamically adapt to the changing communities they serve.
This is far more beneficial to the families and surrounding community, while also avoiding the devastation caused by constantly redrawing attendance zones and feeder patterns.
Balanced Resources
It is sometimes said that having choice leads to under-resourced schools when enrollment drops at some of the individual options. While this is what tends to happen in our existing system as people leave the district and a school starves of students, our model avoids this by proportional allocation of seats across regions. But we also have to call out the obvious here - a school being under-resourced is a decision that is fully in the hands of the administration. They don’t have to choose to pull resources as enrollment goes down. Investments could be made instead to help the school succeed. Under-resourcing a school is a district choice, not a foregone result.
Late Enrollment/Transfers/Etc
We said we would address what happens if you enroll after the initial admission selection process is complete. Public schools are required to educate residents who wish to enroll. We currently do that by guaranteeing them a seat in their local feeder school. But we don’t have to do it that way. We can use the same model for later enrollments, transfers, etc. to guarantee a quality education at a school in the region, but not necessarily at any one particular school. Applying later would go through the same process - applicant would rank their preferred schools, and then be placed based on the current enrollment proportions of the schools. If there is one more popular and one less popular school that have hit the 10% spread in that region, then likely one school would not be available at that time, but all the others would. But its still dynamic - if a few more people had chosen the initially lowest picked school since then, that would open up spots in the most picked school. Regardless, the new applicant or transfer student would most likely have their choice of most of the schools in the region, instead of just the one closest to them.
The reasoning here is that any system that has exceptions is ripe to be manipulated by those with power and privilege. As much as possible, keeping systems universal avoids this. There may, however, be exceptions to consider. Some examples may be for a verifiable higher needs IEP that has a more specialized offering at one of the schools, or for an ELL student that is early in their language journey to gain access to the more focused ELD program at one school.
A District that Works for ALL Students
This structure allows for our district to meet the individualized needs of our students, families, and communities in a much more flexible and dynamic way, which drives student/family/teacher/community buy-in and improves outcomes, while reducing/eliminating attrition due to retaining the choice that so many strongly desire, and creating equitable access for all to every type of program offering in each region.