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Hernando Today

Magnet School Lottery Numbers Out Today

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LINNEA BROWN

Published: January 24, 2008

SPRING HILL - SPRING HILL - It's time.

Today marks the long-awaited day more than 1,000 local student applicants will be assigned random numbers by computer for the lottery drawings to get into Hernando County's magnet schools of Challenger K-8 School of Science and Mathematics, Chocachatti Elementary and Nature Coast Technical High School.

From 600 lottery applicants at Nature Coast, officials hope to have lists of names — those accepted either by lottery or portfolio — posted on the front office windows after 5 p.m. today, with acceptance letters sent out Monday.

Officials at Chocachatti plan to notify applicants of their status by phone on Monday.

But with much hanging on the pending arrival of the district's centralized gifted center at Challenger, 847 lottery applicants will likely have to wait until February or March to find out if seats are available for them or not, school officials said Thursday.

Challenger accepts 60 percent of its students by portfolio, with qualifications consisting of an essay and other assignments related to science and math.

Under a previous rule currently being phased out following a school board vote last year, siblings also get preferential treatment at magnet schools — but only for the next two years. Children are able to gain admittance to the school if an older sibling goes to school there.

The remaining seats are then filled through the lottery system.

"As the year goes on and students withdraw, others get taken off the waiting list," Challenger Principal Sue Stoops said.

Each school's list of lottery applicants is made up of new students entering the school's bottom grade, students moving to the Hernando from elsewhere and students hoping to transfer from other schools.

But this August, it may get a little harder to get into Challenger via lottery.

Two weeks ago, the Hernando County School Board's gifted education task force chose the Spring Hill school as the site for the county's future gifted education center, set to open this August.

Though the task force's site recommendation must still be affirmed by a formal board vote on Feb. 5, the center will place more than 400 of the county's kindergarten through eighth-grade students in gifted classes in one location, instead of the district's current means of offering separate classes at each school.

Because of that, the amount of available seats for lottery applicants at Challenger cannot be determined until details of the gifted center are finalized.

Decisions about enrollment are expected to be made by Superintendent Wayne Alexander, the members of the gifted education task force and the designated school's administration, secretary Debbie Schallenberg said.

However, the number of gifted students may fluctuate, with some students not willing to switch schools and new, previously-unidentified gifted students being placed in the program.

As the program expands, officials will most likely decrease the number of new students accepted to Challenger's current magnet program.

A student is defined as "gifted" if he or she scores at least two standard points above the mean IQ score, and passes at least two sections on a state IQ test.

Once identified, gifted students fall under the umbrella of exceptional student education, or ESE, and bring in about $2,100 more in state per-student funding.

Construction costs of placing the center at Challenger are expected to cost the district an estimated $100,000 to modify walls, with money for the implementation of the program coming out of the district's capital improvement fund.

Lottery applicants will be notified of their admittance status in February or March. However, Stoops said parents of applicants are not expecting letters before then.

"They know when the dates are," she said.

And the school's staff is ready for the possibility of the district's centralized gifted program at Challenger, she added.

"We're excited about working on it," Stoops said.

Reporter Linnea Brown can be reached at 352-544-5289 or lbrown@hernandotoday.com.

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