SFUSD Does Away With Lottery

SFUSD SFUSD Does Away With Lottery By San Francisco Richmond ReView on November 10, 2026 • ( Leave a comment ) By Kleigh Carroll The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) board voted on Oct. 13 to replace its longstanding lottery for assigning elementary school students with a neighborhood-based system. Beginning in fall 2028, kindergarten students will be automatically enrolled in their neighborhood school, with a few options to apply elsewhere for special programs such as bilingual or special education, language immersion and K-8 campuses. The policy passed 5-2, with Phil Kim, Jaime Huling, Matt Alexander, Lisa Weissman-Ward and Parag Gupta voting in favor. The option also had the support of Superintendent Maria Su. Alida Fisher and Supriya Ray voted against it. “After years of implementing a complicated and unpredictable lottery system, we are proud to take a big step towards building neighborhood schools,” Kim, President of the San Francisco Board of Education, stated in a press release. “We are preserving meaningful choice while guaranteeing a neighborhood school for everyone… We will continue to work closely with Superintendent Su, families, and the broader San Francisco community to get this right.” Under the current lottery system, implemented in 2011 to help promote diversity, families rank their preferred schools but are not guaranteed placement at any of them. The district uses an algorithm that considers whether students live in a low test-score area, the attendance zone of a school, or have a sibling at a school. Assignments are sent out in March, at which point parents can either accept, enter a second round or opt out altogether. The district assigned schools on a neighborhood basis until 2002. The lottery system introduced then used individual or neighborhood racial criteria to try to balance school demographics. They abandoned the diversity index model in 2011 in favor of the current system when it failed to address issues of racial isolation in schools. Parents have long complained that this process is overly complicated, stressful and confusing. Many parents in the Richmond and Sunset districts opt for private schools instead, simply to avoid the uncertainty of a system that they say scatters their kids across the City. Laura Foulke, a single mom who runs a college admissions advising company, raised her daughter in a sage green house on Kirkham Street in the Inner Sunset. After not receiving placement in any one of the 15 elementary schools they applied for through SFUSD, she decided to go private. “We had about 10 or 12 kids growing up on our block at the same time and every single one of them was at a different school,” Foulke said. “It was insane.” Natasha Titov grew up in the Outer Richmond in the ’70s and went to the Bayview District for elementary school despite living across the street from Lafayette Elementary. When it was time to send her own kids to school, she describes similar frustrations with the lottery system pushing her to go private. “My kids were a couple blocks from Lafayette and being sent to Marina and Chinatown,” Titov said. “Then my son couldn’t get into Washington or Lincoln High School despite his language pathway only being available at those two schools. I ended up putting him in private high school… They need to bring all schools up to par and allow local choice.” According to Kate Solimin, president of the Sutro Elementary Parent-Teacher Association and founder of the Public Chat, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing public schooling enrollment and engagement in S.F., families opting out of the system has been detrimental to the health of SFUSD. “I think the intention is that, if you center people around a school that’s close to them, I do think there’s more care… there’s more concern for the health of that school,” Solimin said. “Where I really see the biggest gap, and this is data driven, is white, and mixed white, privileged families, meaning homeowners with income levels that are well above City averages, predominantly opting out of the public system.” Solimin thinks that if parents know they are guaranteed a spot in a school in the Richmond or Sunset, they might be less likely to go private. “All of our Richmond schools are amazing. Like, the envy of people not in our district,” she said. “I do hope that, at the very least, by saying this is 100% guaranteed, that it removes the ability for anyone to say, ‘the lottery didn’t work for me’… You can’t use the lottery as an excuse for opting out of the system.” In 2018, the school board decided to do away with the current lottery and design a new system. This October, they were considering three options – designated Option A, Option B and Option C – which they ultimately chose. Option A would have created enrollment zones and guaranteed students a seat in one of three to five elementary schools near their home, but not necessarily their first choice. Option B would also have automatically assigned students to their neighborhood school, but with the option of applying to SFUSD schools elsewhere, and if there were empty seats, they could be assigned there. Historically, students in the Sunset and Richmond have been more likely to favor neighborhood schools, while some in the Bayview, Mission Bay and Excelsior have preferred schools outside of their neighborhoods, due to concerns that local schools are under-resourced. “We do have a lot of students who commute from other areas,” Solimin said of Sutro Elementary where her children attend. “My daughter has a friend who lives in Proctor Amazon, and another friend who lives in Bayview.” “I don’t really have feelings about (the new system) because it’s something that benefits me,” said Hannah Cram, a parent of two pre-k children. “We live right by Alamo Elementary so I was hoping to send my kids there anyway.” New attendance areas will be drawn by the board in the coming months and finalized in April. Staff have been directed to implement the change in a way that creates strong, well-resourced schools in every neighborhood. The details of how this will be achieved have yet to be worked out. 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