A version of this story first appeared in WFAE Education Reporter James Farrell's weekly newsletter. Sign up here to get newsletters from WFAE straight to your inbox.
At Friday’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools board retreat in Winston-Salem, administrators offered the school board new insights into the lottery process. That included some of the logic behind why CMS switched to using Parchment — a change that drew criticism from families after some technical glitches created confusion in this year’s lottery process.
CMS Deputy Superintendent Melissa Balknight told the board that 22,000 families participated in the lottery this year – 6,000 more than last year.
The shift to an automated platform like Parchment had been planned since 2023, Balknight told me. A slide in this presentation shows it was meant, in part, to implement recommendations from Magnet Schools of America to improve CMS’ magnet system. (Check out this newsletter from last year and this presentation).
But Balknight also told the board that the switch to Parchment — which she said is used by many schools across the country — was meant to replace a previous system that essentially relied on a single employee who had the technical savvy to run the whole lottery. That individual then retired.
“We were shifting, but if we didn't have a plan, then we would have had to hire someone else in hopes that they had the skills,” Balknight said.
It highlighted a “high-risk” situation where the entire system relied on the know-how of one person.
She added: “So we've learned a lot, and it's been great, but it's also a lesson learned that you can't have one human managing something so critical to the district.”
Still, board members have acknowledged the frustrations that the switch caused. At the retreat on Friday, Balknight showed a slide with the number 6,000 — representing how many more families entered the lottery this year than last year — and quizzed the group, asking if anybody knew what the number represented in terms of the lottery.
Board member Shamaiye Haynes quipped: “How many emails I got about it.”
