Accepting, Declining, and Waitlists: Deciding what to do with your offer

In some cases, when a family applies to only the highest demand schools, or only applies to a single school, they may not receive an offer in the first round. In these instances, we select the next closest school with space and offer that school. In this way, the family is assured of a space in at least one school.

If you accept an offer, your child is taking up a seat for next year and you are joining that school’s community. You will begin to receive communication from that school, the after school program, and so on. In some instances, an offered school won’t work for a family under any circumstances. In that case, the family should not accept the offer.

It depends. You will stay on the waitlist for any school that you ranked higher than the one you accepted. For example, if you accept an offer to your 3rd ranked school, you will automatically stay on the waitlist for your 1st and 2nd choice schools. At the same time, accepting an offer will automatically decline any schools you ranked lower than the one you accepted. For example, accepting a 2nd choice school, will decline the 3rd, 4th, and 5th ranked schools.

If you accept your first choice offer, all other schools will be removed from your application. Once you order steak, no one asks if you really wanted the salad. If you made an error in your rankings, and more preferred schools were declined, you can log back-in to your account and re-apply to the declined schools; however, this will be considered a late application and could impact waitlist space.

As long as it is before the decision deadline, you can log-in and change your response.

With very few exceptions, the waitlist numbers remain relatively constant during an offer period. Once we release a batch of offers, we don’t make new ones until a set period of time has elapsed--usually three weeks, then two weeks, then one week as we get closer to the first day of school. During that time, the waitlists won’t really move. When we get to the next offer period, families will see new offers, and/or a change to their waitlist status.

Although counterintuitive it is possible to go down on the waitlist, from number 4 to number 5 for example. This usually happens when another application is updated with a similar or higher priority number. For example, if a family forgot to include a sibling in their child’s application, and then edited their application, they would likely move up on the waitlist because of the higher priority they now have. 

Additionally, at the end of the on-time application widow, we start to include late applications. On-time applications that have the same priority group as a late application (for example, if both were in the neighborhood group), will be ranked ahead of late applications. If, however, a late application has a higher priority than the on-time app (for example, the late application has sibling priority and the on-time application neighborhood), the late application would be placed above the on-time one.

Unfortunately, the only strategy we can offer is patience. In the not-so good ol’ days, families were advised to write long, sad emails, or bring cookies to the folks at the front office, or get a School Board Director to intercede. Those things all smack of iniquity, and we don’t do them anymore. Throughout the spring and into the summer, new offers are released roughly every two weeks, so there are many opportunities for students to move up on the waiting list and receive an offer to a preferred school. At the same time, OUSD has many, many quality schools--far more than the small number that are most famous!--and we encourage folks to look into all of their options.