KINDERGARTEN LOTTERY IN EFFECT

Enrollment in Cape Girardeau kindergarten classes will be the luck of the draw for some students next fall.

Seventy-one kindergarteners are already enrolled in Charles C. Clippard Elementary School's two kindergarten classes, 21 more students more than the school can handle. Principal Stan Seiler recently informed parents in the district that a lottery process will decide which students will be reassigned to a different school within the district.

Board of Education president Dr. Ferrell Ervin said board policy sets a maximum capacity of 25 students in every kindergarten class. The lottery is a district-wide policy that has been practiced several times in recent years, he said.

"It's been a procedure we've tried to use uniformly," said Ervin. "To try to be economical with the public's money, we simply move students to the next school with an available slot."

Seiler said he has received responses from several concerned parents about the lottery this week. Most parents were concerned because their child may not be able to attend kindergarten in the neighborhood they live in, he said, but the reassignment is only temporary and past experience has shown that students were not adversely affected by the arrangement.

The process was chosen over the "first-come, first-served" assignment option so that every child would have an equal chance to attend the school, he said.

"We're in a situation where we have two sections of kindergarten and we have a limit of 50 students," said Seiler. "Right now, we have 71 students enrolled, and we'll be accepting students right up to the first day of school.

"When the first-come first-served process was used, some folks said it was unfair to them because they moved in over the summer or some parents work and aren't able to enroll their students until late. To those parents, it was unfair, so we changed it to a lottery system to make it more fair for everyone."

Seiler said he will receive lists in early August that indicate the number of available kindergarten slots from the other five elementary schools in the district. To fill the slots, administrators will "put names in a hat and draw them out," he said, beginning with the school closest to Clippard and moving further out with each lottery draw.

"We'll start with Alma Schrader because it's the closest, then we'll go to each next closest school and assign them students," he said. "This school will still be their home-base school, and they'll be back here for their first-grade year."

Seiler said reassigned students will be transported to and from their kindergarten by the school district. This process was used last fall at Clippard and ran smoothly, he said.

But Kathy Wolz, parent of a kindergartener enrolled at Clippard, said she was told while enrolling her daughter that she "was number 38" and "didn't have to worry about it." She questions the lottery process because she believes kindergarteners need to be prepared for the school they will attend.

"I was really disappointed because when you're dealing with kindergarteners, you don't deal in the abstract," said Wolz. "You don't say `Oh, you're going to school,' because kindergarten is a big deal. You say ,`This is your school' and `Here's where your sister will be.'"

Wolz said she has written Seiler a letter expressing her disappointment and requesting more than two weeks' notice for the results of the lottery. That's the least the school can do, she said, so that parents who did prepare their students to attend a specific school can explain the reassignment to them.