Configuring a No Priority Lottery

Learn how to set up a lottery if you do not use lottery priorities or do not run a lottery.

What's included in this article?

• Creating a No Priority Lottery
• Creating a Zero "0" Seat Lottery

If your lottery process does not include priorities or placement rules, or you do not need to run a lottery at all (i.e. there are more seats available than applications or students are manually placed on the offered list), either a “No Priority” lottery or a "0 Seat" lottery should be configured. 

Creating a No Priority Lottery

In Enroll, students may only be offered a seat from a lottery list. Even if you do not use lottery preferences to order students on a lottery list, a lottery must be run to facilitate making offers. 

1. Create a priority called "No Priority" that will be assigned to all applications as they are marked as eligible for the lottery. The easiest automatic priority to create would be based on application eligibility status where application.status is 1.

2. Create a lottery design with only the "No Priority" priority in sub-lottery 1.

3. Run your lottery with the Sorting option needed per your lottery policy: Randomized order, Date Submitted, etc.

4. Students will be assigned to the Offered List or Waiting List based on your Cutoff Numbers. Families will be notified of their lottery placement once the lottery has been Published.

Creating a Zero Seat Lottery

A "0" (zero) seat lottery is recommended if you do not have any available seats or if you want to manually place students by moving them one at a time from the Waiting list to the Offered list. This is achieved by setting your Cutoff Numbers to 0 for the grades/programs and then running a lottery.

You can navigate to the Cutoff Numbers page from the Run Lottery page or from the Settings > Manage Lotteries area.

Example: All students run in the lottery for Earth Elementary School will be placed on a grade-specific Waiting List.

If seats become available to be filled from your existing waiting list, you may update your Cutoff Numbers and update your lottery list automatically.  This help article will walk you through the options when updating your cutoff numbers after having run a lottery.