Data - January 2025 Kindergarten Lottery

We share documents containing four tables of data from last year’s January 2025 Kindergarten Lottery and projections for the upcoming January 2026 K Lottery.

Please know that we provide the data with the understanding that no data from past Lotteries will predict what will happen in the future. Families choosing their preferences for Kindergarten enrollment should not infer from this data the likelihood or percentage of chances their child will be assigned to their school choices.

There are many reasons as to why predicting an individual student’s likelihood of enrollment in a specific school is impossible. Those reasons include, but are not limited to, how the lottery assigns a favorable weight to students whose siblings are already enrolled in specific schools and how capacities at schools can change from one year to the next due to the fluctuations in specialized programming to support students qualifying in high-need categories (i.e. Special Education, Multilingual Learners and Economically Disadvantaged). The total number of families participating in the lottery as well as the school by school preferences of lottery participants also varies on a year to year basis. In addition, subsequent to the lottery, the enrollment capacity at a particular school may be affected by families who were assigned to the school’s waitlist the preceding year when their child was in Pre-Kindergarten.

For these reasons and the fluidity of available seats in a specific school, the most sound method of participating in the CPS Kindergarten lottery is simply to identify three schools that are most preferable for a respective family to enroll their child or children.

These critically important qualifications notwithstanding, below is data from the SY 25-26 Kindergarten Lottery and SY 26-27 Kindergarten Lottery tentative projections:

Tables 1 & 2 use current information - kindergarten capacity, PK’s rising, and estimated seats available for new students at the K Lottery - and data from the 2025 K Lottery - prior year’s K siblings and prior year’s applicants who received proximity points (table #1) or program language bonus points for the immersion programs (table #2) in order to determine an estimated seat availability per school for students with no priority points (column F).

Table 3 shows the outcomes from the January 2025 K Lottery by school for those who selected the schools as choice #1, including the number of students assigned to that first choice, the number of siblings and the number of students with bonus points who were also assigned to the first choice. It also shows the number of students who were assigned to schools whose families chose a school as choices #2 or #3.

Table 4 briefly analyzes the general outcomes from the last 12 Lotteries, including the 10-year average of JK/K Lotteries (2014-2023) and the two recent K Lotteries (2024 and 2025). It also contains a snapshot of the outcomes from the January 2025 K Lottery.

If you have any questions about the tables, please e-mail Kathy Sampson at ksampson@cpsd.us.