The District of Columbia boasts the greatest access to public prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-old children in the United States, offering a full-day, school-year universal preschool program. High participation rates indicate that public investments are supporting working families and helping DC’s children thrive. However, enrollment is only one of several different steps families must take to secure a seat. In this brief, we map out families’ experiences across application and enrollment to illustrate how families come to enroll, or not enroll, in Pre-K3, DC’s public prekindergarten program for 3-year-old children.

Why This Matters

To enroll in public prekindergarten, families must work through many complex steps, including identifying schools, completing applications and verifying their eligibility, and finalizing enrollment at their chosen school. Increasingly, jurisdictions aim to centralize application processes while still providing opportunities for families to enroll if they are not assigned a school. Learning about families’ entry points to public prekindergarten and the pathways they take to enrollment can help policymakers identify opportunities to increase access and tailor supports to families.

What We Found

The My School DC lottery was the most common entry point into a public school for DC Pre-K3 in the 2022–23 school year, with 49 percent of students who enrolled doing so by accepting a match they received in the lottery (“matched applicants”).

However, 51 percent of students enrolled at a school they were not matched to. Some of these families chose to decline their initial assignment to enroll (13 percent; “matched school shifters”) while others depended on an offer from the waitlist, either because they were unmatched in the lottery (3 percent; “waitlist movers”) or because they missed the lottery deadline and completed a post-lottery application (34 percent; “post-lottery applicants”).