2010-11 Lottery

21st Century Charter School @ Gary held its annual admissions lottery on Wednesday, March 31st. A group of families spread out around the school’s lunchroom tables to watch the lottery process, hoping that their children would be drawn to enroll for 21st Century’s 2010-2011 school year.

27 available spaces for the upcoming school year were filled (in addition to a brand new kindergarten class), and 103 students were added to 21st Century’s wait list. Both before and after the lottery, Principal Angela West, Academic Coach Rodney Williams, and classroom teachers were available to give school tours, answer questions, and meet prospective students.

Every year, 21st Century has a limited number of spaces available for new students to enter each class. The lottery is an annual process that gives children interested in enrolling in the charter school equal chances of being selected for those spaces. This year, all lottery applications were accepted until Friday, March 19th.

Students who completed a lottery application were assigned a lottery number. At the lottery, each number was listed on its own lottery card. One by one, the cards were drawn from a box, read aloud, and written on a chart that showed the available spaces and wait list spaces for each grade level.

Students applying for next year’s 11th grade class were drawn first. After drawing all 11th grade lottery numbers, cards for the upcoming 10th grade class were dropped in the box and drawn one by one. This process continued class by class down to kindergarten. To serve families, younger siblings were given priority status as their older siblings were drawn.

Cards for all 159 lottery applicants were drawn, and every student was either placed in a class or on the 2010-2011 wait list.Students whose lottery numbers were drawn for available spaces will receive notification by mail regarding the required paperwork and deadlines for official enrollment. Students whose lottery numbers were drawn for wait list spaces will be contacted in the order drawn if additional spaces become available at 21st Century. Interested students who did not participate in the lottery are still invited to visit the school and complete an application to be added to the wait list.


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