2014 Choice: some stats

Tom Lockman, the Unit 4 School Attorney and FOIA Officer, responded quite quickly to my request for aggregated stats about Kindergarten assignment for next year, as well as this year (2013 Registration). I still have to give Unit 4 a hard time for delivering data-unfriendly formats (ie, images in PDF pages – what?!?), but at least I have the data:

• Original PDF
• Transposed into Excel

 

Click to go to interactive graphs for the past 5 years

 

As you can tell, Bottenfield, Barkstall, Carrie Busey and Washington were all oversubscribed for “first choices”, meaning that of all the people who selected one of these four schools for their first choice, a small percentage were bumped to their second choice. Discounting SES ratios*, at all 8 other selections everyone made their first choice. (* a family can be denied their first choice even if there are seats available if they would upset the district-wide SES goals of 35% +/- 15%).

 

There was a very interesting trend this year, now that folks can choose 12 schools. The first thing I noticed is that slightly fewer parents registered than the year before, even though registration was open for two months longer. Also, some schools had an amazing number of choices in 11th and 12th place. Makes me curious.

The Choice RFP has been re-issued

I was recently notified that the district has re-issued the Choice RFP. I find this extremely interesting, and I wonder what it means.

 

The Ad: http://www.champaignschools.org/sites/default/files/finance/BidsRFPs/201310/Choice%20RFP%20-%2010-23-13%20%28FINAL%29.pdf

The RFP: http://www.champaignschools.org/sites/default/files/finance/BidsRFPs/201310/Choice%20RFP%20-%2010-23-13%20%28FINAL%29.pdf

 

There will be yet another mandatory information meeting, on Halloween no less. 🙂 Isn’t that scary. The new RFP is extremely similar to the previous RFP back in April/May – it goes on to paint a very broad generic picture of what they want the vendor to do, but they give almost no details as to what the program should accomplish. Last year I recommended to the Board that they resubmit the RFP of 2012 when Alves was the only one that responded. I wonder if perhaps this time they are following-up on that. So many questions, so few answers…..