The Grand Island Central School District, in Grand Island, New York, offers Universal Prekindergarten for 43 students. This program is funded through a New York State grant. As one would guess, more than 43 students register for this program every year. The district website states: “If more requests for acceptance are made than can be placed, a lottery will be used to choose children for inclusion in the UPK program. All other children will be placed on a waiting list.”
What I discovered is that the “lottery” is not a lottery at all. An undisclosed computer program randomly chooses students at an undisclosed time. This list is then presented to parents and called a “lottery.” After researching how other Western New York schools handle this situation, I was not surprised to find that not one other district uses this method. If a district needs to use a lottery, students’ names are put in a closed container and chosen randomly in a public setting.
The goal of this petition is to end the practice of a closed-door electronic lottery selection of registered students for the Universal Prekindergarten Program. In place of that system, we ask the district to create a lottery system starting in the 2013-14 school year that is fair, ethical and takes place in a public arena. Examples of such systems can be found at neighboring school systems such as Niagara Falls CSD, where the names of registered students are placed in a container and then randomly drawn one at a time in a public forum.
In addition, we ask that the guidelines for the new lottery system are posted on the district website for public viewing by September 1, 2013.