Hi there, Friend!
If you've registered for BPS (or will register for BPS if you haven't yet already), or if you've applied to the Charter School lottery or METCO Winter lotteries, you may be wondering: "Now what?"
How the Charter School Lotteries Work
Even though you applied to charter schools through a single application, each individual charter school holds its own lottery. The most important thing you can do is check your email on Friday, Mar. 6, when most charter schools will conduct their lotteries; you should receive your lottery number that same day. (You can check all lottery dates at our Registration Calendar here.)
Each school has a certain number of open seats for each grade. For example, if a charter school has 100 seats open for a particular grade, the first 100 lottery numbers will be offered a seat for that grade. If you are not offered a seat because your lottery number doesn't qualify, you will be placed on a waitlist for that school and grade.
As each charter school conducts its own lottery — and if you applied to more than one charter school — it is possible to be offered multiple seats and/or be placed on multiple waitlists.
How to Make a Decision
You might want to take all the seats you've been offered to keep your options open, because you can accept multiple charter school seats and still maintain your seat with BPS. As soon as you know where you want child to go to school for the fall, you should notify all other schools where you may have been offered a seat or placed on a waitlist — including BPS (we'll have more about the BPS waitlist in a couple of weeks).
Watch our video below for more info about how the charter lottery process works:
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