After the San Francisco Unified School District released its school assignments last week, reactions spread quickly through group chats, Facebook groups, and birthday parties, where families compared placements. Some celebrated. Others nursed hard feelings.
The stress stems from SFUSD’s uniquely complex, choice-based assignment system — known as the “lottery” — which has frustrated parents since it was introduced in the 2011–12 school year. Rather than being assigned a school based on where they live, as in most districts, San Francisco families can tour and rank more than 100 schools across the city. Placement is determined through a complicated mix of tiebreakers and chance.
About 90% of incoming kindergarteners (opens in new tab) who ranked their attendance-area school (opens in new tab) first were admitted this year — down from roughly 93% last year (opens in new tab). Despite that decline, district officials have described the results as more “predictable” than (opens in new tab) any in recent memory, though a closer look at the data shows a more mixed picture.
Across the city, parents described a familiar mix of confusion and frustration. Two families who shared their experiences with The Standard both opted for private schools because of lottery results that sent them to campuses on the other side of the city. They are among the latest in a longstanding trend of parents leaving the city or district due to the unpredictability of SFUSD’s school assignment system.
San Francisco continues to have one of the highest shares of K-12 students enrolled in private school — more than 30% — and SFUSD has lost several thousand students over the past decade, a drop that directly reduces state funding tied to enrollment.
When an elementary school has more applicants than openings, the district uses three main tiebreakers, giving priority first to siblings of current students, then to children living in neighborhoods designated as Census Tract Integration Preference zones (the 20% of the city with historically poor test scores), followed by families who live in the school’s attendance area. Additional tiebreakers (opens in new tab) exist for specific situations. If applicants are still tied after those factors, seats are distributed randomly.
One mother, who requested anonymity for privacy reasons, was frustrated to find that her youngest couldn’t gain admission into Transitional Kindergarten (TK) at Chinese Immersion School at De Avila, despite the fact that her oldest — a third grader — already attends the school. Instead, her child was assigned to George Washington Carver in Bayview–Hunters Point, an elementary school with drastically dwindling enrollment that is miles away from their home in the center of the city. The mother reported that 14 siblings, including her own child, failed to be admitted to TK at the school this year.
For the 2025–26 school year, state law required that SFUSD dramatically expand TK to guarantee all 4-year-olds in the city admission. But with that came unpredictable placement. Many schools offer just one TK classroom, and some don’t offer it at all, limiting available seats at desirable schools. Just 74% of incoming TK families received any one of their ranked schools — the same figure as last year. That’s compared to 96% of incoming kindergarten families receiving one of their school choices.
The mother who spoke with The Standard is worried that her family will next year find themselves in a similar situation. She’s concerned that her daughter will be denied admission to a top-choice or nearby school, especially since they live in the attendance area for Clarendon Elementary, one of the most competitive schools. “I’m pretty jaded at this point to think that the lottery is going to be on my side,” the mother, who works in finance, said.
She’s now touring private schools that offer transitional kindergarten next year — and expects to keep her youngest there at least through the elementary grades. When asked if she can handle the pricetag of private schools, she asked whether anyone wants to pay tens of thousands a year. “We are still trying to get by with two working parents, grinding,” she said.
A dad named Sam, who also requested anonymity for privacy reasons, is among the archetypal well-educated SF parents who consider school placement one of the most important parenting decisions they will make.
Sam and his wife, who bring home annual salaries a bit over $200,000 combined, moved to the city during the pandemic, drawn by lower rents and preparing for their first child. They chose Noe Valley in part because of Alvarado Elementary, a well-regarded school they began building a connection to years ago.
“Even when our older son was a baby, we’d go to stuff at Alvarado,” said Sam, who works as a scientist in South San Francisco. “They’d have festivals, Día de los Muertos — we’d go every year. It felt like, OK, this is where we’re going to be.”
Rising rents sent them into a rent-controlled Diamond Heights unit with rent in the mid-$3,000s per month, still (barely) within Alvarado’s attendance area. The plan, Sam said, was straightforward: they’d send their kids to private preschool, then to a public school they could walk to. Because of the dismal odds, they didn’t even try to get into TK, but hoped kindergarten would be a good bet. A new SFUSD system meant to offer families more predictability and guaranteed admission to a nearby school was supposed to launch by the 2026–27 school year, so Sam said he felt safe in that assumption.
But, amid a revolving door of district leadership, efforts to revamp the process have stalled, and SFUSD has yet to announce a new timeline for the updated assignment system. “In the meantime, we continue to improve the current policy to make it more predictable for families,” SFUSD spokesperson Laura Dudnick told The Standard last week.
The family wound up receiving its eighth choice in the lottery: Alamo Elementary School. They are now 20th on the waitlist for Alvarado. With a 7:50 a.m. start time and a 30-minute trek each way — on top of Sam’s commute to South San Francisco — the Alamo assignment seemed infeasible. While they could hypothetically move closer, they are opting for private school instead.
“It felt like we didn’t have an option,” Sam said.
Sam wonders about the efficacy of a system that pits neighbors against one another. He says several of his neighbors — many of whom own their homes — were also frustrated to discover they didn’t get into Alvarado. Sam said most of his friends, whether they lived in the Alvarado attendance area or not, also didn’t gain admission into the schools closest to them. He imagines that if he owned his home instead of renting, he’d be even more “furious.”
“If you get into a school close to you, it feels like you’ve won something,” Sam said.
The result last week didn’t just change Sam’s plans; it changed how he and his wife understand the system itself.
“I think the expectation was that if you live in the neighborhood, you at least get a very strong likelihood that you will go to that school,” he said. “I definitely don’t have that impression anymore.”