If your family is anticipating a waitlist offer from CPS preschools, elementary or 9th grade spots, CPS has shared that they will update waitlists throughout the next few months until the 20th day of school for Selective Enrollment (test-based) programs and until January 2026 for Choice (lottery based) programs. PK3 and PK4 programs will have a color coded indicator of whether programs have immediate availability, limited availability, or if they are almost full. Because all CPS based application programs required families to put their school choices in order from most preferred to least preferred, CPS is now able to provide waitlist numbers (highlighted in yellow on the EnrollWise portal) to families who were not offered a selective enrollment seat or who were not offered their more preferred Choice or preschool seats.
Waitlist numbers can go up or down depending on scores for selective enrollment or depending on selection priorities (special needs, siblings, etc) for Choice or preschool options. Waitlists will move 2x per week for high school and elementary, and will be in “real time” for preschool. Kindergarten through 9th grade waitlist offers will go out by 10am Tuesdays and Fridays and expire within 2 business days on Thursdays and Mondays at 11:59pm, respectively.
Detailed “post offer” steps and information can be found on the following links:
9th Grade GoCPS Spring 2025 Slidedeck (Rolling Waitlist) (click here for the Zoom recording)
K-8th Grade GoCPS Spring 2025 Slidedeck (Rolling Waitlist) (click here for the Zoom recording)
Unfortunately, their slides are a little off for re-application. In the portal after you click on your childs name and see their dashboard, there will be a “View” link in the card for the particular area you’re looking at (Choice, AC or Classical/RGC) that you need to click. If you already applied to one of the schools in the Fall round, you will need to expand the “Removed Waitlists” section dropdown. Then you will see a “reapply” button you can click. After doing that, the button to “Save” might be grayed out. In case it is, I clicked on “Map” to see options and then somehow miraculously there was a clickable “Save” button in the upper right of that screen. Good luck!!! The slides say you’re supposed to click on the “Browse & Add Programs to Application” option thats right below the “Removed Waitlists” section but that wasn’t correct.
That being said, this only worked for re-apply to classical school options 🙁 Under the Academic Center section in Removed Waitlists, it listed all the AC choices we applied to in the Fall but didn’t have a “reapply” button next to the “Admin Declined/Offer Expired” messages, even though our AC score was well above the cut line for a few of them 🙁
Have been sitting on hold for for 45 mins for the OAE unfortunately but thats at least better than just getting a message that their voicemail box is full. At least there’s potential hope that I might get an answer 😉
Actually they DID document this situation (sorry CPS OAE!). On slide 29 here it shows a screenshot of the reapply button for “removed waitlists”: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v2DsYMERjKyUB0wptyScy1IAOzkDQ8l_UOFnqwg9vEA/edit?slide=id.g32d336d5435_0_4#slide=id.g32d336d5435_0_4
That being said, I’m still experiencing issues not seeing a reapply button for AC options.
We are experiencing the same issue with our child’s AC scoring and admin declined/offer expired… Very strange as our Child’s score was well above the cut off for our tier and the one above it! To add.. we have friends whose child received an offer from an AC with a score below the cutoff shown on the 25-26 SEES minimum point total… Not sure how that works?
The minimum point in the PDF was based on the first round offers. As the waitlist progresses, CPS may send offers to students who have scores below the minimum.