Mill Valley board weighs interim lottery for school placements as parents press for extra Tam Valley class

The Mill Valley School District on Tuesday presented a draft interim regulation to change elementary school placement for 2025–26, proposing a priority registration period followed by a randomized lottery for oversubscribed schools and asking families to rank five choices.

Director Kate Sprague said the draft prioritizes siblings and children of district employees, then assigns new students by a random, unbiased lottery if demand exceeds capacity. "We're giving you the opportunity to pick your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th choice," Sprague said during the presentation, describing the change as temporary while the district awaits a demographic study to support long‑run attendance zones.

The proposal aims to address what staff described as disproportionate displacement of some families under the current parent‑choice system. District staff said about 90% of families receive one of their top two preferences under the existing practice, but Tam Valley had a lower first‑choice success rate: roughly 64% of families listing Tam Valley as their top preference in the priority round received that placement.

Parents at the meeting pushed back. "I kindly urge the Board to consider adding a third first grade class to Tam Valley, to accommodate students on the waitlist and ease class sizes," said Liz Couch, who described her daughter’s repeated placement away from the neighborhood school. Other parents described long daily commutes, concerns about neighborhood cohesion and requests for clearer capacity numbers for preferred sites.

Teachers and union representatives also asked for transparency on how the district will determine when a class has space. "I encourage the board and district administration to be very transparent about how you're determining if a class has spaces available, and what your planned loading numbers for each grade are," said Erin Frazier, a fifth‑grade teacher and MBTA co‑president.

Staff said the district uses loading numbers for analysis — 22 students for TK–K and 24–25 for upper elementary in their current planning — but that those figures are not a hard contractual cap. The draft regulation would also replace the currently used wait list with an annual intra‑district transfer process so that placements for the coming year are confirmed rather than left uncertain through the summer.

Trustees spent more than an hour questioning staff about how the lottery would work, how sibling priority would be handled if sibling requests exceeded capacity, and whether adding classroom sections at specific schools could be a simpler fix. Several trustees and members of the public urged bifurcating the problem: add classrooms where demand is concentrated and delay a districtwide rule change until the demographic study is complete.

The board did not adopt the interim regulation Tuesday. Trustees asked staff for additional data on capacity, the distribution of first‑choice preferences by distance, the budget implications of under‑enrolling classrooms, and options to add classrooms at high‑demand sites. Staff said they plan more outreach and will return the item to the board.

Sprague said the policy is intended as a stopgap: "We do believe that preserves the integrity of the proximity to home while we work on creating a safe routes to school and, attendance zones that support really, truly, all of the families in a given neighborhood," she said. The district expects the demographic study results in spring 2025 and said it would revisit the policy based on that analysis.