Parents navigate latest changes to Philadelphia high school admissions

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To help her deal with a situation that’s “a little frightening” to her, Karimah Lynum has her spreadsheet.

On one tab, Lynum lists the five selective public high schools in Philadelphia that her eighth grade daughter Kendi wants to attend, detailing their admissions requirements and other details about them like their racial composition and graduation rates.

Another tab lists Kendi’s standardized test scores. Now a student in a private school, Kendi has taken several of these tests to increase the chances that her scores on at least one will qualify her to apply for her top choices.

A third tab lists private schools that are affordable and might match her daughter’s interests, just in case Kendi doesn’t win the lottery — in a real, not just metaphorical sense — and get an offer from a public school she wants to go to.

For Lynum, finding the right high school for her daughter practically amounts to a full-time job.

“It seems like a simple process,” Lynum said, “but it’s not.”

Starting now and running through February is school selection season in Philadelphia, when eighth grade students apply to high school. Since the lottery system for high schools began just a few years ago, the district has tweaked the system several times, and the process has provoked criticism and even anger from students as well as educators. Getting the high school admissions system right has been one of the bigger challenges of Superintendent Tony Watlington’s tenure, which is now in its third year.

In talking about her journey, Lynum noted that she is fortunate enough to afford options beyond public school, and can make time to do research. She worries about those who have fewer resources and less time to devote to understanding the ins and outs of the system.

“It must be really hard for them,” she said.

The window for students to apply opened Sept. 13 and runs through Oct. 23. Students will receive offers and wait-list decisions in January.

Officials will hold town halls and application assistance labs to help parents and students through the process . Schools will also hold their own open houses, and a high school fair is scheduled for Sept. 27 and 28 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

In 2021, the district changed its selection process in an effort to make it more equitable and “anti-racist.” Instead of a process that had been heavily dependent on the judgment of principals, students who met basic qualifications for selective schools would instead be entered into a lottery.

Officials also sought to open opportunities to a wider range of students, especially those living in neighborhoods impacted by multi-generational and concentrated poverty.

To do that, it gives preference to students in several ZIP codes which historically rarely sent students to highly selective schools like Central and Masterman. Students from those prioritized neighborhoods are automatically accepted to their top choice if they meet all the qualifications.

For the system families are using this fall that affects enrollment for the 2025-26 school year, the process once again has new rules . For the first time, students will rank their five choices in order of preference instead of just listing them. The priority ZIP codes for automatic admission to qualified students have been modified this year. And through a new algorithm, students will get an acceptance to just one school, while being wait-listed only at those that are higher on their list.

It is still theoretically possible that students could fail to get any offers, but the new system makes it less likely.

District encourages parents to ensure applications aren’t ‘wasted’

Lynum was among a few dozen parents and guardians who attended a town hall earlier this month at Carver High School of Engineering and Science in North Philadelphia, where Ericka Washington, the deputy chief of student enrollment, and Melanie Harris, the district’s chief information officer, explained the new process.

They stressed that students and families should carefully look at each school’s criteria before putting it on their list.

“We continue to see families who apply to schools for which the child does not meet the criteria,” Washington said. “That is a wasted option.”

They also emphasized that the criteria are fixed. If a school requires a student to score in the 80th percentile on a standardized test, a student will be ineligible if they scored in the 79th percentile on math, say, even if they meet or exceed all the other qualifications. Similarly, if only nine unexcused absences in a school year are allowed, having ten is disqualifying.

For selective admissions, the district initially looks at grades and attendance records from sixth and seventh grades, but only uses students’ best numbers in determining eligibility for a given high school.

Washington and Harris explained that before the lottery, there may have been some wiggle room with the official qualifications if principals made the final choices. Not any more. Students won’t even go into a lottery for a school if they don’t otherwise qualify.

In five high schools that also have middle grades — Carver, Girard Academic Music Program (GAMP), Hill-Freedman, Science Leadership Academy @ Beeber, and Masterman — eighth graders will automatically be offered a spot as long as they put that school down as their first choice and otherwise qualify.

For some schools, like Creative and Performing Arts High School (CAPA) and Science Leadership Academy, which is project-based, students must be interviewed or present relevant work just to be entered into the lottery for that school, in addition to meeting the other criteria.

Once the application period is over after Oct. 23, families can appeal decisions that declare students ineligible for certain schools to which they applied in December and January.

Parent hustles to learn more about Philadelphia schools

What worries Lynum is that it is still possible for students who do well to get no offers. That’s why she has her backup plans that include private schools.

Lynum, who lives in Mount Airy, goes to every event she can where people might be discussing Philadelphia schools. While she has lived in Philadelphia for 16 years, she grew up in Tampa, Fla., so she feels she doesn’t know the system inside out.

“I feel it’s a disadvantage that I didn’t go through the school system here myself,” she said.

Picking five choices and ranking them in order of preference is not as straightforward as it seems, she said: “I had to learn about this from word of mouth and asking people questions.”

So in addition to attending events like the town hall, Lynum seeks conversations with city natives wherever she can find them, asking them where they went to school and why. She also plans to attend open houses with her daughter at the five schools that will be on Kendi’s list.

In addition to academics, she feels that a school’s demographic makeup and overall atmosphere is important — she said she doesn’t want Kendi to go to a school where she would feel isolated as a Black student.

She has also hired a tutor to help Kendi with her test-taking skills, just to be safe, but she doesn’t worry about her daughter acing any required interviews. Though a teenager, Lynum said wryly, Kendi “is engaged as a kid, she speaks in full sentences, she can carry a conversation.”

Even though she and her husband are scientists — they both work in the pharmaceutical industry — Kendi has another career in mind.

“She’s an artist,” said Lynum, with both pride and a bit of befuddlement in her voice. “I don’t know where she got that part of her.”

Lynum noted that Kendi has many talents. She draws, she designs dresses, makes clothes, and sings: “She’s nothing like her parents.”

But she’s also sure to add that Kendi “is also good in science and math.”

So what’s Kendi’s top choice for high school? The High School of Creative and Performing Arts.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org .