Some students will be barred from being a part of the lottery such as:
Students identified as experiencing housing instability or homelessness
Foster Youth
Students with disabilities whose IEP designates they require a specialized academic setting
Students who have been administratively transferred
Students with a sibling attending the school
Students whose parent is an employee of the school.
Students who were ConCapped into or out of the current school they attend the previous school year.
The settlement with the state also will require Sacramento City Schools to develop a new Board Policy and Administrative Regulation about concapping and to form a concap work group.
The group will include staff from school sites most affected by concapping and parents and guardians of current students who have been concapped.
They will review data on how concapping affects different student groups, gather community input, and make suggestions on how to improve the ConCapping process. Members of the public will also be allowed to public meetings during the school year where families and community members can share their views.
Sacramento City Unified will announce each meeting on ParentSquare 20 days, 10 days and 1 day before the meeting, and will post a summary of each meeting on the district’s website within 14 days.
Faye Wilson Kennedy and Carl Pinkston, members of the Black Parallel School Board, said these changes come amid broader concerns on how open enrollment and school choice policies can affect students differently depending on race, income and access to information and resources.
They worry about concappings new lottery system as they believe it is not the most equitable and can limit the number of Black and brown students.
“To ensure ConCapping will not harm Black and brown students, all students should have access to quality schools and education in their residential neighborhoods,” they said.
“Also, a lottery-based program is not the best program for Black and Brown students to address systemic racism in educational institutions.”
They hope the district will fully implement the California Attorney General stipulation which will prohibit Sacramento City Unified and schools from using additional criteria to determine a student’s eligibility for open enrollment. Some additional criteria could be site-based forms, volunteer-hour commitment and school tours.
Open enrollment allows students to attend schools outside their assigned neighborhood or district, depending on the rules of the school system.
The Black Parallel School Board also hopes the district will make a public preliminary list of schools with open enrollment seats by grade and incorporate equity considerations into the enrollment process.
During the 2025-26 school year, Sacramento City Unified enrolled approximately 42,000 students. Of the district’s students, 42.6% identify as Hispanic or Latino; 16.1% as Asian; and 11.8% African American.