San Francisco school board votes to replace enrollment lottery with neighborhood schools

The 5-to-2 decision directs the district to guarantee every family a seat at a nearby elementary school starting in the 2028-29 school year, ending a choice system that commissioners say has driven families away.

By Staff Reporter

The San Francisco Board of Education voted 5 to 2 on Tuesday night to replace the city’s lottery-based elementary school enrollment system with neighborhood schools, a decision that would end more than a decade of families ranking lists of schools and waiting to learn where their children had been placed.

Under the resolution, every family would be assigned to an elementary school based on its home address, regardless of when it applies, according to a statement from the San Francisco Unified School District. Families would retain access to citywide specialized programs. The new system would take effect with the enrollment cycle that opens in October 2027 and would apply to students entering school in the 2028-29 academic year and beyond.

“After years of implementing a complicated and unpredictable lottery system, we are proud to take a big step towards building neighborhood schools,” said Phil Kim, the board’s president. “This is one of the most consequential decisions we will make, benefiting generations of San Franciscans to come.”

How the new system would work

The board adopted what the district called Option C, the proposal recommended by Superintendent Maria Su. As The San Francisco Standard reported, students would be assigned to a school based on their address even if they apply late, and the practice of ranking schools would end. Some schools would remain open to applicants from across the city because they offer programs such as language immersion, kindergarten-through-eighth-grade instruction or specialized special education services.

The board rejected an alternative that would have guaranteed a neighborhood seat to families who applied on time while still letting them apply to any school in the district. Ms. Su argued that approach would preserve too much of the status quo, with too many families bypassing the school down the block.

“Families should not have to roll the dice and try their luck in our system,” Ms. Su said at the meeting, according to The Standard. “The school down the street should be a good option and a certain one.”

The decision, she said, “puts the responsibility squarely on the district to make sure that every single neighborhood school is worth choosing.”

A split board and a hard question

The two dissenting votes came from Commissioners Alida Fisher and Supryia Ray, who questioned whether the district could improve its weakest schools before families are assigned to them.

During the debate, Deputy Superintendent John Davis said strengthening the district’s struggling schools, some of which have high teacher turnover and “too many temporary teachers,” would take far longer than the two years before the new system begins. Building strong staffs at those schools, he said, “is at least going to take five to 10 years.”

Ms. Fisher seized on that estimate. “Frankly, we are screwing over families in certain parts of the city by doing that, and we know that,” she said.

Commissioner Matt Alexander, who voted yes, said the change would bring predictability, eliminate efforts to game the lottery and force the district to improve conditions at every school. He described the decision as reflecting the district’s “responsibility to think about what’s best for all the kids.”

Ms. Su acknowledged the stakes. “I know that whatever we land on, someone is going to be upset,” she said before the vote. “But I promise that the process is going to be real and transparent, and hopefully, through that, we will regain trust with our families.”

A long road to this vote

San Francisco has tried to move away from its choice-based system before. In 2018, the board passed a resolution calling for a community-based assignment system, and in 2020 it approved a zone-based elementary policy. But the lottery remained in place through the pandemic and a series of administrative setbacks, the district said. In October 2025, the board directed the superintendent to begin replacing it; after three study sessions since August, the board narrowed four options to two on Oct. 6.

The lottery was built in part to give families in every neighborhood access to sought-after schools and to reduce segregation. Commissioners have said it has done neither well, describing a system whose unpredictability scares families away from the public schools and which has been ineffective at reducing racial disparities, according to The Standard.

What comes next

The district will now redraw attendance boundaries, evaluate the capacity of each school and develop a strategic plan to address school quality, including a redesign of its portfolio of programs and what it described as investments aimed at “historical underinvestments” and stable staffing and budgets at every school. The district has pledged community engagement sessions throughout the process.

The board is expected to review a draft policy in March 2027 and to take a final vote on April 13, 2027.

For San Francisco, the change is about more than logistics. The Standard has reported that the lottery has been a deciding factor for families weighing whether to stay in the city, and the district is betting that a guaranteed seat close to home will help persuade more of them to remain. Whether that bet pays off will depend less on the boundaries the district draws than on whether, as Ms. Su put it, every one of those neighborhood schools becomes worth choosing.