Applying for next year

You can find out about schools at the directory at ChooseOUSD.org. Select the grade range--preschool, elementary, middle, or high--and type in your address to identify your neighborhood school. Use the filters to look for special education programs, elective offerings, dual language programs, and high school college and career pathways. You can review virtual showcases from previous years on the "Enrollment Events/ School Tours" page. You can also visit a school’s individual website. Increasingly, many schools are operating Instagram accounts and these are both updated more frequently than a traditional website and can offer a dynamic view on school life.

Also, check out our podcast: Grow With Us. We cover a wide-range of topics relevant to OUSD families, and the episode "Don’t Panic" addresses looking for schools and preparing for the on-time enrollment window.

We’ve found it’s not helpful to look for the BEST school. It encourages an unhealthy FOMO and using schools as social markers of excellence. Instead, we find it’s most helpful to look for the RIGHT school, the one where you can see you and your child thriving. We encourage folks to visit the school if possible, attend school or district enrollment events, and check out the school’s social media to get a feel for the culture. We would also advise caution in using websites that aggregate (often outdated) test scores and use these to define school quality. Teaching and learning is much more complex than this, student well-being is hard to reduce to a number, and these sites have primarily benefited the realtors that use them to drive up home prices and have contributed to modern-day school segregation.

Many schools will post information about tours and visit days on the individual school’s websites. The enrollment office compiles a list of these tours, which is available on our calendar. You can always email the school’s principal or Community School Manager (CSM) to request a visit. 

Our enrollment tool is called Enrollwise and can be found at ChooseOUSD.org. 

• Families that are brand new to OUSD should create an account.
• Returning families should log-in.
• Current OUSD families that have never used the system, should click log-in, and then click recover password.

No! They will automatically remain at the school. This is also true for 5th graders at K-8 schools, and 8th graders at 6-12 schools.

Every family has a neighborhood school, and will receive an automatic application to this school. This school cannot be removed from the application, however, families can select up to six additional schools. Community schools are the basis of a healthy educational system, and we strongly encourage all families to learn about and closely consider their neighborhood school before looking elsewhere.

In some districts, there are defined feeder patterns wherein if a student attends elementary-A they automatically enroll in middle school-B, and if they attend middle school-B, they will automatically enroll in high school-C. These types of feeder patterns do not exist in OUSD. Because the district uses an open enrollment model instead of a neighborhood assignment model, attending an elementary school near a certain middle school is no guarantee of enrollment at that particular school. Families must apply during the transition from 5th to 6th and from 8th to 9th, and these applications are evaluated based on the Board-approved priorities. Previous school attended is not one of those priorities.

Families should rank the schools on their application in order of their preference. Rankings come into play in a number of ways and impact offers, waitlists, and more. These rankings should reflect the way a family actually views the schools on their application. We do not recommend using your rankings to try and game the system. There really isn’t a way to do this, and families who try often end up limiting, rather than expanding their options.

In your child’s profile, there is a prompt to list siblings. For the sibling priority to work, you must add the sibling’s information at this stage, otherwise the system will not have a record of the relationship. For the purposes of enrollment, a sibling is understood to be close, “blood” relatives who permanently reside at the same address and will both attend the school next year. Unrelated children who have the same guardian are considered siblings. Play cousins from across town don’t count.