Melissa Bailey File Photo
Festa hopes her third son can join his brothers at Hooker.
As the number of families seeking coveted spots at Hooker School again hits an overflow, parents are lining up for another high-stakes sweepstakes.
Parents will try their luck in an admissions lottery at 7 p.m. Thursday at the second-floor Board of Education hearing room at 54 Meadow St. The lottery is for students who “pre-enrolled” in kindergarten, meaning they attended New Haven Public School-affiliated pre‑K programs and live in the school’s attendance zone.
Those students get preference over regular applicants. At the other 10 schools that have attendance zones — Bishop Woods, Roberto Clemente, Clinton Avenue, Fair Haven, Hill Central, Lincoln-Bassett, Troup, Nathan Hale, Truman, and Wexler/Grant — all the kids who pre-enrolled this year will be guaranteed spots in the fall.
But at Hooker, that preference may not prove enough: 61 kids pre-enrolled for 52 kindergarten spots at the popular East Rock school, causing an overflow, according to Assistant Superintendent Garth Harries. Thursday’s lottery will determine who gets in as well as the order of the wait-list.
The lottery is technically for all schools with attendance zones, but the stakes are high only for Hooker. That’s because Hooker is the only school that didn’t have enough seats to accommodate all the kids who pre-enrolled, Harries said.
Lottery entrant Anna Festa (pictured above), a Hooker mom, said she is crossing her fingers that her third son will be able to join his two brothers at the school.
“Everybody’s a little bit on edge,” Festa said. “Especially the parents that have kids at the school already.”
There will be no sibling preference in the lottery.
The lottery came in response to a growing enrollment, and in response to input from parents on how to make the process more “fair and transparent,” schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo said in a press statement.
The requirements for getting into Hooker haven’t changed. The main change this year is that instead of wondering how the district picks the 52 lucky kindergartners-to-be, parents can see the process unfold in a public lottery run by an outside vendor.
The lottery comes on the heels of the annual magnet school lottery, where 9,333 kids competed for 2,677 seats. Thursday’s lottery will be for the non-magnet schools, where admission is based on where you live. Any student who doesn’t fare well in the lottery will still be guaranteed a kindergarten seat somewhere in the district, likely at the Strong School.
Like the other parents trying to get into Hooker, Festa lives inside the boundaries of the school’s district. People are known to buy houses inside those district lines — and even stake out the superintendent’s office—just to get into Hooker, which serves many Yale-affiliated families. The K‑8 school is perceived as one of the best public schools, if not the best, in New Haven.
Over the years, parents have called the admissions process opaque, confusing, and unfair. Outrage ensued in 2004 when out-of-district kids, including the daughters of state Rep. Cam Staples and then-school board President Brian Perkins, snagged early spots in an over-enrolled kindergarten class.
In response to parents’ objections, the school district has made changes to the kindergarten admissions, where competition is typically most fierce. Last year, the district rolled out a new lottery for kindergarten spots that weren’t already snatched up by pre-enrolled kids. That eliminated a torturous first-come-first-serve process whereby parents had to show up every day to the Board of Education to see if a spot had opened up.
Parents of kids who did not pre-enroll no longer have to camp out on the eve of May 1 to get their kindergarten applications in. They can apply anytime from May 1 to June 12; all those applicants will then face a second lottery to fill any open seats and determine the order of the wait-list.
Last year, those watching the process flagged a new problem: There were too many pre-enrolled kids to accommodate in Hooker’s 52 kindergarten seats. Students in public pre‑K programs or in private pre‑K programs that accept federal dollars to serve low-income students are all considered NHPS students, so they are supposed to be accepted as “roll-over” students at Hooker as soon as they fill out a registration on May 1. (click here to read more and see a list of participating pre‑K programs.)
Since not all kids could snag seats at the time, the lucky winners were chosen based on when the director of their pre‑K program turned in applications. So the kids whose applications were turned in last had to sit on the wait list. (Those kids eventually got in before September.)
Now, for the second year in a row, Hooker faces an overflow of pre-enrolled students.
East Rock Alderman Justin Elicker worked with the district to come up with a fairer way to handle that crunch.
Elicker (pictured) met with directors of pre‑K programs to come up with a process that would avoid pitting them against each other in the high-stakes admissions battle. They suggested that all “roll-over” applications be placed in a lottery.
The district agreed to adopt that suggestion. That led to Thursday night’s lottery.
Elicker said the district adopted a second neighborhood suggestion concerning parents who apply for magnet schools earlier in the year, but whose top choice is attending a neighborhood school. Before, they had to choose whether they’d take the magnet seat before they even learn if they got into Hooker. Now the district has fixed that problem by extending the magnet school deadline.
The district did not adopt a third suggestion from East Rock parents: that kids be given sibling preference in admissions to neighborhood schools. The district gives siblings preference in the magnet lottery but not in the new lottery for kindergarten.
Festa, who already has two sons at Hooker, said she wishes the district would weigh that factor in admitting her youngest son. She said it’s much easier for active parents like herself to focus energy on one school.
“They want parental involvement, but how can I split myself?” she asked.
Schools COO Will Clark said the district chose not to allow sibling preference this year because it did not want to make a dramatic change to the qualifications to get into the school without letting parents know in advance.
Clark said the district made the process easier this year, but “we did not change the qualifications on how to get in.”
He said the district would consider sibling preference for the upcoming school year. Overall, he maintained, the process has been made much more transparent and parent-friendly.
Parents are invited to see the lottery take place Thursday night. It will look a lot like the magnet lottery, all triggered by the click of a mouse. All parents will get a letter in the mail announcing their child’s place as determined by the lottery.
“There’s no more camping out, no elbowing,” Clark said. “We’re taking that stressful, first-come-first-served element away.”
Alderman Elicker said he’s “really happy that they’ve addressed some of the issues,” though “it always feels like it goes more slowly than one would like.”
“It’s been frustrating, but they have been responsive to some of the problems and seem to be making a good faith effort to try to fix them.”
Instead of holding a lottery for one school shouldn't all schools be as well run and supplied as Hooker? I was raised to believe we are all in this together. Guess not.
[Editor's note: The lottery is for all attendance zone schools. However, Hooker is the only one where the number of applicants exceeded the number of spots this year.]