Yes, Westwood, you’re right, the denominator is not the whole 1900 student body…I didn’t think it all the way through but I’m not sure what the correct denominator is. I imagine the district could explain their exact methodology…it gets kind of complicated because they do the lottery in April, publish results in March and then require everyone to make a final selection shortly afterwards. Once that’s done, they usually take a good portion off the waitlist (the 138) but this year, they reported that they didn’t have enough attrition from people who ended up declining or whatever and just a week or so ago, they posted on their website that they would not be backfilling from the waitlist as they’ve done in the past.
But even if it’s the 77% chance you cite, that represents great odds, and the way most of us locals feel is that we’re fine with the default choices (for example, if our kids hadn’t gotten in to CCA, Torrey Pines HS would’ve been our default school since we live in Del Mar, and would be the same for families living in Carmel Valley). It’s not as if TPHS’s academic performance indicators, class sizes, etc are dramatically different than CCA’s and there are even some advantages to TPHS, depending on your perception (TPHS has a more “traditional” high school experience with a football team and a lot of school spirit, a typical bell schedule of classes w/more “reasonable” pace of classwork and not the intense 4×4 CCA schedule, etc).
On another note, I think your statement is inaccurate, “The primary reason that many families chose CV over La Jolla, however, is that you can get a lot of house in CV for over $1 million (if not much yard) and not much house in La Jolla for under $2 million.”
This is impossible to prove, but having lived in the area for 10+ years and knowing many CV families, I think if you took a poll, you’d find that families do in fact move to Carmel Valley primarily for the school district, closely followed by the fact that the CV community is just simply set up for family living, much more so than La Jolla (which is of course a pro or con depending on your perception and demographic.) Carmel Valley = total Familyville while La Jolla = mix of retirees, vacation home owners, singles and families.
To say it’s about square footage when a family chooses Carmel Valley over La Jolla is skipping over a lot of other factors and oversimplifying the typical family’s home buying decision. It may appear as a logical conclusion to you when studying differences in academic performance between districts, but I bet it isn’t what you’d hear from local families.
