Wait Pool for SY 2024-25

SFUSD sent an email to applicants' families the morning of August 12, 2024, either with an immediate offer of enrollment, or with an update about their waitlist status.

SFUSD is making new offers every day, as new seats become available. If a seat has become available for your student, the Enrollment Center will let you know by email, text message, and phone call. SFUSD will make multiple attempts to contact families when an offer becomes available. Please wait for staff to contact you. Once we notify you that you have received an offer to your Wait Pool school, you will have a limited amount of time to decide whether you want to accept or decline the offer.

If you do not receive an email or phone call during the notification period (ending August 30), that means you did not receive your Wait Pool school. After August 30, Wait Pools are disbanded. Any remaining requests are invalidated.

Yes! Beginning August 12, you will be able to track your child's Wait Pool position in ParentVue by following these steps:

1. Log into ParentVue.
2. At the top left corner, select the name of the child whose Wait Pool you want to look at.
3. In the left-hand navigation menu, select "Student Info."

4. Scroll down to the bottom of the Student Info section to see you child's waitlist position or status. This number will be updated on a daily basis to reflect the latest information. Once you receive an offer, the position number will be replaced with your offer status: Pending a response from you, Accepted by you, or Canceled due to expiration.

No. Unlike in other application rounds, if you submit a Wait Pool application and a space becomes available for your student, we will not automatically change their enrollment. We will make multiple attempts to contact you to receive your decision to Accept or Decline. 

• If you Accept the offer for the Wait Pool school, your student’s enrollment will be changed at that point. 

• If you Decline the offer, your student’s current enrollment will remain valid, and they could continue attending the school they were assigned to previously. 

• If we do not receive a response from you within 24 hours, you may lose the opportunity to Accept the Wait Pool offer.

The Wait Pool application deadline was August 7, and has now passed. It is no longer possible to submit a Wait Pool application.

Yes, there is a late waitlist. After August 7, applicants who missed the Wait Pool application deadline can join the late waitlist for one school. Additionally, Wait pool applicants who wish to change their requested school after the deadline can choose to cancel their previous request and join the late waitlist for a different school, instead. 

The late waitlist is first come, first served  — no tiebreakers or random numbers are used, and there is no opportunity to request an appeal. If you join a late waitlist, you are joining the bottom of that list. Students in the late waitlist will only receive an offer after everyone who submitted an on-time wait pool application has received an offer, which is not guaranteed to happen. On-time wait pool applicants will always have priority over late applicants. 

Students who already received a wait pool offer are not eligible to submit another request in the late waitlist, regardless of whether they accepted the original offer or declined it. Interdistrict applicants are eligible to participate in the late waitlist, but will not get priority over applicants who live in San Francisco.

The last day to join the late waitlist was Friday, August 23. Families who still wish to enroll or transfer into a school that currently has a waitlist will have to call back to check whether there are open seats.

You will be able to find the list of schools with active Wait Pool requests on this webpage, and you will be able to see the count of wait pool requests for each school, grade, and pathway. The lists will be made available and updated on:

• Wait Pool List as of July 5, 2024 (Subject to Change)
• Wait Pool List as of July 12, 2024 (Subject to Change)
• Wait Pool List as of August 2, 2024 (Subject to Change)
• Wait Pool List as of August 9, 2024 (Subject to Change)

You can see information about the number of wait pool applications for each school, grade, and program in this spreadsheet: SFUSD Historical Wait Pool Offer Rates (Public)

The information in the spreadsheet is based on data from 2021-22 through 2023-24, and shows the average number of applications per year during that time, as well as the average offer rate (the percentage of applicants who received an offer during the wait pool notification period to enroll at that school). 

IMPORTANT: this information from prior years can be used to help you think about the likelihood of receiving an offer to your preferred school-grade-program this year. But you should not interpret this information as a guarantee about what definitely will or will not happen this year.

SFUSD cannot guarantee that Wait Pool results in the current or future year will be similar to results from prior years — each year is distinct, and results depend on individual families' choices.

You are able to see an “Availability Estimate”, which is a formula-based estimate about the likelihood of receiving an offer. That estimate may not be valid or relevant in all cases, especially when there have been few or no wait pool applications in prior years.

If you need help interpreting this information, please contact the Enrollment Center. 

If you wish to cancel your wait pool request, email [email protected] as soon as possible. 

If you cancel your wait pool request, you can join the late waitlist for a different school. For example, if you find out that you end up 100th on the waitlist for School A, you might want to consider joining the bottom of School B's waitlist if it only has 15 people waiting.

Once you have received a wait pool offer (regardless of whether you choose to accept or decline that offer), you are no longer eligible to participate in a late waitlist for another school.

Occasionally we have to change student’s positions on the list, if new information comes to light. For example, if an applicant has a sibling who gets into the same school, we apply the sibling tiebreaker retroactively and move the applicant up their waitlist to try to keep families together. Other reasons why a waitlist might change include: corrections to application information (e.g. student grade), corrections to data validation (restoring applications that were originally found to be invalid).

New late waitlist applications will never result in your position getting worse. Late waitlist applications are always added to the bottom of the list.

• All students could choose to take part in SFUSD's wait pool process, even those who applied for Main Round, Round 2, New-to-SF Enrollment or Open Enrollment. It does not matter whether the applicant already has already  accepted an assignment to a different school or not.
• Once a student has received one wait pool offer, they are no longer eligible to participate in a wait pool or late waitlist for another school.