CMS school choice lottery results are arriving soon. Here’s what you need to know.

Over the holidays, thousands of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools families will be waiting for a special piece of mail to arrive.

In the last weeks of the calendar year, CMS conducts the first round of its school choice lottery. It’s the process for assigning students seats in the complex and sprawling system of magnet programs in the district. There are 65 schools and 90 programs in total, each with a different theme or educational approach targeted toward student interests.

The magnet program is part of the district’s push to break up concentrations of poverty in its schools and advance its equity work, said Walter Hall, director of magnet programs for CMS. Those trends are largely a product of housing patterns in the district, and the lottery weighs a variety of priorities, including socioeconomic status, to assign students to schools across the county.

“We know in general, more diverse classes allow opportunities for all students, whether they are they are of the highest socioeconomic status or the furthest away from opportunity,” Hall said.

Hall says that interest in the lottery has grown steadily each year since he started working in the office about five years ago. The final numbers for this year’s lottery were not yet available, he said, but in the 2018-2019 school year, roughly 26,000 children were assigned via the program and more than 4,000 were waitlisted.

That number does not fully capture the reach of CMS’s magnet footprint, Hall said. Some schools are designed as partial magnets, where the entire school is taught under the program’s theme while only some of the seats are assigned by lottery. The rest of the students in partial magnets are there because the school is their neighborhood assignment.

CMS runs two rounds of the lottery. Each round places students through a complicated matching process, where guarantees and priorities like siblings in the school, transportation zones and socioeconomic status are taken into consideration. The first round of applications closed on Dec. 13 this year, and Hall says families can expect placement letters over the holiday break.

After the first round assignments are completed, Hall says, CMS will use data from those placements to conduct more targeted recruiting and outreach to families who fit the criteria to apply in the second round. That application period runs from Jan. 2 to Jan. 22 next year.

“Our whole goal is to have diversity in our schools,” Hall said. “For instance, if the school is in a high socioeconomic area, I’m looking at neighborhoods with lower and middle socioeconomic status that fit in that transportation zone.”

Hall says the most important thing for parents to understand is that they should not submit an application in the second round if they have already applied in the first. Doing so would make them lose their place in the process and put them in the back of the line, he said, noting that the second round is designed for targeting families who might not have known about the lottery in time for the first deadline.

“Families just need to patient,” Hall said. “Those letters will come home in the mail. They’ll be there sometime over the winter break.”