Our analysis shows:

· Public charter schools offered 12,990 seats across various programs and grades in the SY 2021-22 lottery.

· Roughly 75% of applicants on waitlists are waiting for a seat at a Tier 1 public charter school. 46% of PCS seats offered come from Tier 1 schools.

· There were 6,032 Tier 1 seats available to students in the lottery; of these Tier 1 seats, 2,439 (40%) were available for PK3 applicants.

· LEAs with existing Tier 1 campuses, such as Lee Montessori PCS, Mundo Verde Bilingual PCS, and DC Prep PCS, continued to add grades at their new campuses. Several untiered new campuses continued to add grades as well.

· There continues to be demand for public charter school seats in PK3, PK4, and kindergarten, with waitlists totaling 8,076 for these grades across public charter schools. Since many students are on multiple waiting lists, the total represents an unknown number of duplicates.

· Grades PK3, PK4, kindergarten, 6, and 9, make up 64% of the total waitlist in the SY 2021-22 lottery.

· Latin American Montessori Bilingual PCS had a total of 1,548 waitlisted students, the longest waitlist of any public charter school program. 567 of these students were on the waitlist for PK3 across the campus’ two sites.

Lottery Seats and Waitlist Offer Data

• Waitlist results can be filtered by grade and campus here.
• This SY 20-21 waitlist data includes families who applied to the lottery by the PK-8 deadline of March 1, 2021, and high school deadline of February 1, 2021.
• For the most current information on waitlist lengths, please reach out to schools directly.

Historical Waitlist Data