• Figure out what’s important for you in a school. For example, you can use the SFUSD School Finder to identify:

  • • Schools you can walk to. You can also check the name of your local neighborhood (“Attendance Area”) school with this tool.
    • Schools with a start time that works for your family. Elementary schools start at one of three times: 7:50am, 8:40am, or 9:30am.
    • Schools that are of the size you are looking for. Elementary schools in SF range from fewer than 200 students to more than 600 students. Schools can start with PreK, TK, or K, and go through 5th or 8th grade. Schools can have anywhere from one to five classes in each grade level.
    • Schools with after care programs that have space for everyone. Some schools have multiple aftercare programs, while other schools only have one. School administrators don’t always know about afterschool programs that are available to students but operate off-site; it may be best to talk to current parents to learn more about those options. See a list of before and afterschool programs by school here.
  • • Schools with a specific language immersion program.
  • Note that school ratings most closely correlate to how well-resourced the families who attend that school are, rather than how good that school is at teaching. This video has an explainer. If you’re interested, you can check test scores based on parental education. For example here are the test scores for kids with college-educated parents at Leonard R. Flynn Elementary School. SFUSD, as a whole, has higher learning rates than national and state averages, based on research from the Stanford Education Data Archive’s Educational Opportunity Project.

If you can’t figure out if a school fits your priorities by looking up the school online, you could:

• Reach out to the school’s Parent Teacher Association, if the school has one, with any questions; you can usually find this contact information on each school’s website.
• Ask parents on social media what the school is like. San Francisco parents can be found in Facebook groups such as: 1) SFUSD Lottery Support Group, 2) SFUSD Families Forum, by SF Parent Coalition, 3) Main Street Mamas, 4) Mom / parent / family groups specific to the neighborhood of the school
• Tour the school. Tours are generally run by the school’s Parent Teacher Association, and the vast majority take place during work hours.
• Attend the SFUSD Enrollment Fair! Check out “Key Dates” on P.1 for details.

By now, you should be able to compile a ranked list of schools you would want your child to attend. If the schools you’ve listed are in high demand, you may want to list extra schools to make it more likely to get into something on your list.

How difficult will it be to get a seat at your preferred schools?

If a school has not historically had enough spots for everyone in the neighborhood (also known as Attendace Area, or AA) who applies, it may be difficult to get a seat there. You can check if that’s the case for your school on this spreadsheet, with (anecdotal) data crowdsourced from parents in the SFUSD Lottery Support Group. Schools with language immersion programs and schools on the west side of San Francisco have historically had a higher number of applicants per seat. If you are prioritizing these schools it would be wise to include some less in demand choices. TIP: Talk to families at lesser known schools – you will hear they are thrilled with their child’s teachers and the community! 

What “tiebreakers” does your family have?

A “tiebreaker” is something SFUSD applies to the pool of applicants for a school when the number of requests for that school is greater than the number of seats available. In most cases, SFUSD gives the highest priority for seats to students who have an older sibling attending a school. After that, there are several considerations for assigning spots at a school with more requests than available seats:

1. The test scores of students living in your neighborhood. The idea is to allow students in underserved neighborhoods – identified by low test scores – to attend other schools. These students have priority. You can check if you have the Test Score Area Tie-breaker here. (This is also referred to as living in a CTIP1 area.)
2. Whether or not you live in the school’s neighborhood, called the Attendance Area. You can see the Attendance Area borders for each school here.
3. For language programs, a percentage of seats are reserved for students who are fluent in the target language, and other seats are reserved for non-fluent students. Historically, the demand for fluent speaker seats is somewhat lower. If any of your language responses indicate a language other than the program language, your student will need to be interviewed in order to show that they are fluent. You can book the native language assessment after you’ve applied by calling the Enrollment Center. Also, students who have attended an SFUSD language program PreK or TK have the highest tiebreaker for a seat in an immersion kindergarten.

If you have picked only highly in-demand schools and you also do not have any tiebreakers, it may be worth adding a few more schools. You might add some schools that fit most of your priorities but not all. Consider poking around in the SFUSD Lottery Support Group, for example the thread on “unknown” schools that parents love. If you don’t get a seat at any school you’ve listed, the district will assign you to the school geographically closest to your address, that has more spots than applicants. So decide if there are schools you’d prefer over this randomized assignment, and add those to your list.

Don’t add a school that you really don’t want to attend just to have more schools. This won’t help you get into the schools you actually want. A more detailed description of the enrollment algorithm is here.

Most people submit their application online. It’s also possible to complete a paper application and email it to enrollinschool@sfusd.edu, or drop it off in person to the SFUSD Enrollment Center at 555 Franklin St. Room 100 (closed daily from 12-1), or the satellite location at 1520 Oakdale, Room 30 (Oakdale is open only on Tuesday and Thursday).

Most people (over 60%) are assigned their first choice school, nearly 90% are assigned one of their other listed choices, and nearly 95% of people who choose their neighborhood school as their first choice are assigned to it. Most applicants will be able to complete the application process after the first round and enroll in the assigned school online, through ParentVue.

If you want to remain in the lottery to get a different school assignment, SFUSD offers additional chances to be assigned to a different school.

1. All families who do not get their first choice school will be automatically added to the waitlists of up to 3 schools on their application. For example, if you get into your 4th choice school, you will be added to the waitlist for schools 1 and 2. If you don’t get a school on your list, you will be added to waitlists for your top 5 schools. You do not need to do anything to be placed on these waitlists, and you will keep your place on the waitlist throughout the process (although certain tiebreakers, such as sibling priority, may force your position to move).
2. Students who are already on waitlists are able to change their waitlist requests or add new requests by submitting a new waitlist application, with their full updated list of choices. New applications will overwrite previous requests. But if you include an existing school on your new waitlist request, your student will keep their position on that waitlist. 

Open enrollment: During mid-summer, the Enrollment Center opens up the opportunity to enroll at any school that has open spots and no wait list. You may request to change your assignment to any of those schools. Note that you can request one of these schools AND keep your name in the waitpool of additional schools.