At last week’s Revere School Committee meeting Revere Public School (RPS) Assistant Superintendent Dr. Danielle Mokaba announced that Revere will hold its annual Middle School placement lottery on Thursday, May 27 at 5 p.m. The lottery will be broadcast live from the School Committee Room on Channel 22 and the School Committee’s Youtube Channel.
As many Revere parents know RPS holds an annual lottery system for its three middle schools because the city’s six elementary schools feed into the three middle schools so the lottery is necessary to ensure school choice transparency.
“There are eight lotteries this year and they’ll be done in the order of the largest school first,†said Mokaba. “So the Whelan School will go first, then Garfield, the Hill, the Paul Revere, the Lincoln, and then Beachmont. So for the Whelan School, there will be a lottery for Susan B. Anthony (SBA) only. Historically, Whalen has had two lotteries–one for Rumney Marsh Academy (RMA) and one for SBA because a significant number of students did select SBA as their choice.â€
The Middle School Lottery emerged some years ago after Revere built two new middle schools, starting with the SBA over a decade ago followed by the RMA Those two new middle schools joined the existing Garfield Middle School while the former Beachmont Middle School was discontinued.
When the new schools were built many parents wanted their kids to go to the newer schools, or wanted them to be closer to their homes on the west side of the city. Previously, both middle schools were on the east side of Revere.
The result was that scores of children annually oversubscribed to the two new middle schools – the SBA and RMA – while Garfield Middle had excess seats. That required a lottery process to fill seats at Garfield and give students a random shot at attending their first choice for middle school.