The SFUSD application

Every district public school sits behind one application. You don't apply to schools; you fill out a single SFUSD form (online through ParentVUE at sfusd.edu/onlineapp, or on paper at the Enrollment Center), list the schools you want in order of preference, and the district places your student. Grades, test scores, and interviews play no part. The two exceptions are Lowell and SOTA, which run their own admissions inside the same public system and have their own guides.

How placement works

Everyone calls this "the lottery," and the name does the process a disservice. It's a choice system: the district tries to place your student at the highest school on your list that has room. A random number enters only when a school has more requests than seats, and even then it comes last. First the district applies its tiebreakers, in a fixed order: a sibling already enrolled at the school, then students who attended Willie Brown Middle School, then students from the parts of the city with the lowest average test scores (the district calls this the CTIP1 tiebreaker). Only after those does the random draw decide.

No neighborhood seat

At the high school level there are no attendance areas and no feeder patterns. Living across the street from a school gives you no claim on it, and no school is obligated to your block. Every district high school is equally open to every family in the city, which is the trade the system makes: full choice, no guarantee.

Building your list

Rank schools in your honest order of preference. There's no limit on how many you can list, and a longer list never hurts your chances at the schools above it, so list every school your family would genuinely attend. What you're protecting against is the bottom of the process: a student placed at none of their choices is offered the school closest to home that has openings, which is the one outcome you didn't choose. A real list of six is stronger protection than a dream list of two.

The calendar

The main round closes in late January or early February, and assignment letters go out in mid-March. If the offer isn't the school you wanted, you can join waitlists (up to three schools) that move from late April into the summer, and an open-enrollment period follows for schools with seats still open. Our waitlists guide covers that stretch. The exact dates shift a little each year, and the district has been revising how assignment works (the current overhaul covers elementary schools, not high schools), so confirm your year's dates and rules on SFUSD's enrollment site.