Franklin Towne plans to join the lottery system most city charters use. Here’s how it works.

Following allegations reported by The Inquirer this month that Franklin Towne Charter High School’s former CEO rigged its lottery to exclude certain students and zip codes, the school is planning to join a system that handles applications for charters across the city.

Franklin Towne has signed a memorandum of understanding with Apply Philly Charter, a program that began in 2018 and allows families to simultaneously apply to multiple charter schools. School choice proponents say the goal is to create more equitable access to Philadelphia’s charters, which are publicly funded and not allowed to pick and choose students.

While most of the city’s 83 charters participate, some don’t. Here’s how the system works and why some charters still manage their own applications and lotteries.

To attend charter schools — which serve about one-third of Philadelphia’s public school students — families have to apply. If a charter has more applicants than seats, it must hold a lottery. (There are some exceptions: So-called “Renaissance” charters, former neighborhood schools turned over by the district to charter operators, enroll students from their catchment zones on a first-come, first-served basis.)

Charter schools can have different applications and deadlines. Apply Philly Charter sought to streamline that process — enabling families to log onto one website and apply to numerous charters at once.

The system was launched by the former Philadelphia School Partnership, now Elevate 215. The nonprofit, which distributes grants to district, charter and private schools, says it funds the bulk of Apply Philly Charter, though participating schools pay a $1,500 annual fee toward the costs.

It’s not just a tool for accepting applications. Apply Philly Charter, which uses Salesforce software, is “the application system, it’s the lottery system, the waitlist system and the seat-offer system,” said Eileen Walsh, senior director of access initiatives at Elevate 215.

Schools are “active users” of the platform, Walsh said, setting the number of seats available per grade. They also review applications: An applicant who claims a sibling at the charter, for instance, is flagged for verification; many charters give siblings priority in admissions.

But schools can’t remove applications, Walsh said.

The software can take into account a charter’s preference groups — like siblings, or zip codes a school may be allowed to prioritize.

“It’s not a situation where schools are acting very independently in running their lottery,” Walsh said. “They are essentially hitting a button.”

Lottery results for participating schools are sent on the same day, and families have a set amount of time to accept a seat — this year, offers were issued on Feb. 10, with a Feb. 24 acceptance deadline.

The system also assigns students places on waitlists. After the acceptance deadline, schools with open seats can make offers to students on their waitlists.

But “they have to make an offer starting from the top down,” Walsh said. For a student that ranks 25th on the waitlist to get an offer, for instance, those in the first through 24th spots must be issued offers first.

Currently, 72 charter schools are part of the Apply Philly Charter system, while 30 others aren’t. (While the Philadelphia school district counts 83 charters in the city, Apply Philly Charter breaks schools down by campuses, leading to a larger tally of schools.)

Some school leaders said they didn’t see a need to join.

“For us, it’s just really not practical,” said Alberta O’Brien, CEO of Community Academy Charter School in Juniata Park. As a K-12 school, Community Academy’s open seats are concentrated in kindergarten and ninth grade, and many are already spoken for, O’Brien said, noting that “one-third of our school is siblings.”

She was also hesitant about families applying to the school that don’t know much about it. “I always know that when a kid applies to CAP, they want to go to CAP,” O’Brien said.

Still, Community Academy experiences some enrollment “shakeout” at the start of the school year, O’Brien said: “I can’t imagine if you’re in a system where everybody is getting multiple acceptances, how much worse that would be.”

Freire Charter School, which enrolls students in grades 5 through 12 at two campuses in Center City, left Apply Philly Charter this year.

“Over the years we have seen applicants apply to Freire Schools through Apply Philly Charter without specific interest in or understanding of our schools. This made predicting enrollment very challenging,” spokesperson Melanie Reiser said. She said the charter “decided to return to an in-house admissions process to see if our yield rate would increase as families applied directly to Freire Schools.”

David Saenz, spokesperson for Elevate 215, said data from Apply Philly Charter’s five years of operation show that “nearly all families are applying in a deliberate manner.” While the number of applicants each year has changed, the average number of schools to which students apply has not, “generally falling between four and five applications per student.”

Philadelphia Charters for Excellence, an advocacy group, said it “has and will continue to encourage all of its 80 member schools to utilize Apply Philly Charter to conduct their enrollment lotteries, not only for the ease of use for Philadelphia families but to ensure the process is unbiased and fair for every student.

“No student should be excluded from a public charter school due to their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, economic status, academic or behavioral history, or special education needs,” said Scott Peterman, the group’s CEO.

According to an administrator who came forward to the Inquirer, Franklin Towne Charter High School’s January lottery — run on Microsoft Excel — was manipulated at the direction of former CEO Joe Venditti, who had school staff exclude students with behavioral or academic problems and others from certain zip codes, among other allegations.

Venditti resigned Feb. 27, citing health problems. The school says it’s investigating the lottery allegations.

At a meeting of the high school’s board of trustees last week, new CEO Brianna O’Donnell said the school had been vetting lottery vendors and was leaning toward Apply Philly Charter. A spokesperson for the school, Ken Kilpatrick, said Tuesday the school had signed a memorandum of understanding with the system.

Franklin Towne Charter Elementary School is also adopting a new lottery system — though it isn’t going with Apply Philly Charter. The school announced last month that it would be conducting next year’s lottery through another platform called Lotterease.

The elementary school’s CEO, James Rodgers, said he had concerns about using Microsoft Excel “after seeing it in action during the January lottery, which was my first as CEO. My concerns were that the system was too manual in nature and the software simply did not provide enough security to protect the integrity of the lottery.”

Upon learning of the high school lottery allegations, Rodgers said, “a review of our lottery became a high priority.”