QUESTION OF THE DAY: Do You Wish There Was A Charter School In Wilmington?

Do you wish there was a Charter School in Wilmington?

Let Wilmington know your thoughts on charter schools by leaving a comment on the Wilmington Apple Facebook page, via the Wilmington Apple Twitter page, in the comments section below, or via email at wilmingtonapple@gmail.com. Responses may be included in a future article.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education issued the following press release yesterday on charter school demand in the state, noting that roughly 34,000 Massachusetts students are currently on a charter school waitlist.

MALDEN, MA – The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) on Thursday released the most recent report of how many students are on a waitlist for admittance to a charter school in 2015-2016 based on data from October 1, 2015. This is an update to initial waitlists established in March 2015 that indicated approximately 37,000 students were on charter school waitlists. According to the October 1 data, approximately 34,000 unique students remain on a waitlist at one or more charter schools.

“My staff and the charter school sector have worked hard to ensure the accuracy of the waitlist. I am confident that these numbers reflect parental and student demand for additional high-quality educational options,” said Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Mitchell D. Chester.

Each spring, charter schools submit to ESE the number of students enrolled for the upcoming school year as well as the number of students who were placed on their waitlists through each school’s initial lottery. The March 2015 collection reported on the number of students who applied for admission for the 2015-16 school year and were put on schools’ initial waitlists. The information provided today is updated through October 1, 2015 and reflects late offers of admission and/or new lotteries for seats that opened up over the summer and into the school year. The resulting reduction of several thousand students from the initial spring list is consistent with the fall reductions reported in recent years.

The March 2015 initial waitlist reported that 75 out of 82 charter schools had waitlists and collectively identified 49,444 entries representing 37,470 unique students. Of the 75 charter schools who submitted initial waitlist data in March 2015, 74 schools continued to have a waitlist as of October 1, 2015. As shown in the table below, the 74 updated charter school waitlists contained 43,294 entries representing 33,903 unique students.

It is important to note that not every student on a charter school waitlist would necessarily accept an offer of admission if, and when, it might be proffered. Therefore, the number of students found on each charter school’s waitlist should not be understood as the number of students actively willing to accept an admission offered at any moment in time. This is particularly true for schools that have chosen to rollover their waitlists from one year to the next for waitlists established prior to March 31, 2014, as permitted by 603 CMR 1.05(10)(a), allowing students to remain on the waitlist for several years. A recent ESE survey found that approximately 75 percent of charter schools indicated that they chose not to rollover their prior year waitlists for the 2015-2016 school year. The Department is exploring ways to identify how many students continue to be rolled over in future waitlist submission cycles.

Despite the significant and continuing improvement efforts ESE has made in recent years, it remains impossible to quantify the exact number of students who may be actively waiting for admission to a charter school unless ESE makes speculative assumptions, and ESE has avoided doing so in compiling the numbers presented today. The unique waitlist counts provided in this report should be taken as ESE’s best understanding and representation of existing demand for the time period covered in the collection rather than exact numbers of students willing to accept offers at each school.

The Department has implemented a few changes to the most recent collection process to achieve as accurate a matching process as possible. Because the current collection process requires significant resources from both the charter schools and ESE, ESE will continue to explore other efficient and accurate methods for collecting future waitlist information.

In the following chart, some students are included on more than one waitlist:

There are 43,294 names on the wait list, which reflect 33,903 unique individuals. Of those 33,903 students, 4,833 students (14.3 percent) are on an average of about 3 different wait lists, but they are only counted once.

The full report can be viewed HERE.