Changes to Rosa Lottery in Talks at School Board

The lottery for Rosa International Middle School could be headed for some major changes, including the elimination of the annual waiting list, under proposals currently in talks at the Cherry Hill school board.

While the lottery isn’t disappearing, as some parents last spring suggested would be a good idea, the district is weighing turning Rosa applications into firm commitments—anyone accepted to the school would have to go there, wiping out the waiting list and giving fifth-graders a firm idea of where they’d be going by March.

The proposal would also make a semantic change, dropping “lottery” from the process and referring to it as a drawing, over concerns about the connotations of “lottery” assigning winners and losers in the process.

Those changes are something that’s grown out of concerns about the lottery over the last several years, including parent complaints last spring about the process and how middle school sending lines are drawn—at the time, policy chairman Steve Robbins said he’d “be thrilled to take a look at the whole thing.”

That sentiment was part of what drove the board to begin the process this fall, district spokeswoman Susan Bastnagel said.

“It’s just something that the board has wanted to discuss,” she said.

One thing the board isn’t considering is turning Rosa into a neighborhood school—at least not at this point. Beck and Carusi would also be unaffected by the changes—they’d remain bound to geography and wouldn’t be open enrollment schools.

It’ll be some time before anything is formalized, though—more formal discussions started this month at the board’s work session, and there are several other opportunities for public discussion, including at the board’s policy committee meeting on Nov. 4, the November work session on the 12th and the board’s action meeting Nov. 26.

There won’t be any discussion on the lottery at Tuesday’s meeting, however.

The district is looking for feedback on the proposed changes, either at the November public meetings or online, where there’s a community input section up on the district website.

“People have submitted some feedback,” Bastnagel said. “Obviously, we’ll keep that up until these discussions conclude.”