Boston parents who do not get their choices of kindergartens for their children in the first round of the lottery now have the option of letting the School Department pick a school for them under a change that went into effect last week.
The change offers an alternative to the controversial decades-old system in which parents registering their children for kindergarten had to try their luck repeatedly in the School Department’s lottery until they got a school with an available seat — a stressful process that has left some children without a school to report to in the fall.
Comments
Wouldn't neighborhood schools solve this non-problem? If you live within an area, your child goes to this school, period. If the parents didn't want little Roquefort III attending the neighborhood school, fine, let them pay for a private school. Problem solved.
This seems a trivial change, but maybe it will help. Most parents know to list at least 10 schools to avoid being unassigned, but I know of one case where a parent listed 13 schools and got none of them. With the checkbox, I guess they would have been assigned to the Trotter and could have avoided many months of uncertainty. But for parents who list only 3 or 4 schools...they have already decided that the nearest school they did not list is unacceptable.