More than 100 students and some teachers rallied before the Board of Education meeting Thursday to protest how the lottery system for citywide and selective admission high schools is causing huge enrollment drops for many of next fall’s incoming classes.
The declines mean that schools will lose staff positions and many teachers will be reassigned, since teacher allotments are done in the spring based on anticipated fall enrollment. This will destabilize these schools, demoralizing both staff and current students, teachers said.
The centralized lottery system was imposed in 2021 due to concerns about equity and access for Black and brown students to some of the city’s most coveted schools. The lottery also represented an effort to address any “implicit bias,” officials said at the time. It replaced a longstanding process in which principals made the final admissions decisions from the pool of qualified applicants.
Officials said allowing principals to make those calls resulted in a preponderance of white and Asian students at schools like Central and Masterman, even though 80% of the district’s students are Black and Latino. The lottery system also gives preference to students from six ZIP codes that rarely send students to selective schools.
But this year, teachers say, based on current enrollment projections, the lottery process is having dire consequences for a group of themed and innovative high schools that serve mostly Black and brown students. Many of those schools have relatively small enrollments.
“How is this equity?” asked teacher Jessica Way, who runs a medical assistant program at Franklin Learning Center. At her school, there are slated to be 50 open seats in next year’s freshman class and enrollment is projected to dip from nearly 1,000 students in 2020-21 to fewer than 800 next year.
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