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

Congratulations! The next step is to log-in to your Enrollwise account at ChooseOUSD.org and accept the offer. This is a critical step. Your offer is just an offer, and must be accepted in order to be converted into enrollment. If you accept an offer, the school has committed a space to your child 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.

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.

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.

When a family receives an offer to attend a school, the system will remove all school applications ranked below that application. Once the server brings out your steak, they're not coming back to check and see if you actually wanted to order the salad. Those other schools on your application will show as "admin declined." For data quality purposes, it is important to differentiate from schools that families have actively declined.

Occasionally, families have reported errors in the way they ranked their schools. In these instances, we can support with reranking, but there are certain constraints to the process. Occasionally, families have chosen to aggressively and crassly blame enrollment staff for errors in the way they ranked their own school choices. In these instances, we can still support with reranking schools, and won’t even point out that during the application process there is a dialogue box that pops up that says “are you sure these are in the right order” and a box you have to check to confirm the schools are in the right order and a confirmation listing the order of ranked schools. We’ll just help.

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.

No. We have worked to eliminate subjectivity in this process, because subjectivity admits bias, which is exploited by privilege, producing inequity. All of the inputs in the prioritization process are objective: Does the child receive Foster Services? Does the child have a sibling at the school next year? Does the child’s guardian work at the school? Does the child live in the neighborhood boundaries as defined by the School Board? Did the family rank the school 1st, 2nd… 7th? These are clear, transparent, understandable, and verifiable criteria that are applied equally to all. They may not have resulted in the exact school offer that an individual family wants, true, but fairness--much less equity or justice--has never meant you get just exactly what you want when you want it. As a community, Oakland is better served knowing that factors like these--and not back-room deals, threats of violence (it happens every year), or (not-so) veiled references to forthcoming litigation--are the only things determining which schools are offered to which kids.

The open enrollment period starts in early December when the on-time application window opens and continues through the spring and summer, ending on the 15th day of school. Each year, the 15th day of school marks the end of open enrollment. Once open enrollment ends, all waitlists are dissolved, and we no longer make enrollment offers based on space alone. From this point forward, students must have a specific hardship reason to transfer between schools.

View hardship reasons