Things to Know
Please accept/decline an offer by April 22nd.
If you do not accept an offer by the above deadline it will be automatically forfeited. The only offer that will always remain available is the general education program of your neighborhood school. So if your neighborhood school is Kenwood or Lincoln Park high school again you will be able to attend but you will not automatically be placed in their other programs (Magnet, IB, Honors, etc)
I highly recommend you accept an offer by the deadline date as it will not impact your waitlist status or if you decide to apply for principal discretion. However if you enter the second round and receive an offer your first round offer will automatically be forfeited.
WAITLISTS
Schools will begin to offer students on their waitlist admissions beginning April 27th. If you accept a seat then it again forfeits your original offered seat. The way this works is that if the school has 12 seats available then it will offer to the students who are numbers 1-12 on their waitlist if all 12 students accept then no one else will be offered a seat. If student number 4 and 5 says no then they call students 13 and 14 to offer those seats. It continues in numeric order until the total number of seats available in this example 12 seats are full.
Thus, it is very rare that if you are let’s say #135(just strictly hypothetical) that you will be called from the waitlist. Especially if you have an insane number that exceeds the total number of students in the school like #2096 and the total enrollment is 1200 students you definitely will not be called from the list. The district must continue to assign the numbers to keep up with the total number of students who applied.
PRINCIPAL DISCRETION
This is a separate application process where Selective enrollment schools ONLY get to accept an additional 5% of its freshmen class. For example Lane tech will admit approximately 1000 freshmen and that means they have an additional 50 seats that they will admit. This is again just as challenging if not more so to be admitted. Many of these schools (Payton, Jones, Northside, Lane and Whitney Young) each receive on average between 3000-8000 applications.
Please email me if you have additional questions mlbrewer@cps.edu