Lottery and Waitlist Procedures

Student Enrollment:

The School will be open to all eligible students residing in South Carolina, with special recruiting efforts focused on those residents living within a reasonable radius of the school site. The School will not discriminate based on race, color, sex, religion, national or ethnic origin, or disability in the admission of students. The School will be nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and operations. The School will not charge tuition or fees except for those fees usually charged by other area public schools.
To ensure that the School is available to serve the residents of the School’s neighborhood, the School may elect to focus some of its enrollment efforts to target students residing within the community. Such students shall be subject to a random lottery and to the racial/ethnic balance provisions described above or any federal provisions that require a school to achieve a racial/ethnic balance reflective of the community it serves or within the racial/ethnic range of other public schools in the same school district. As provided for in South Carolina’s Charter School Legislation, the School may also give enrollment priority to the following student populations:

● Siblings of students enrolled in the School.
● Children of employees of the School.
● Children of Board Members of the School.

Lottery Process:

All applicants to HGA must submit an application prior to the published open enrollment deadline. If the number of applicants received exceeds the number of available slots for a particular grade level, HGA will conduct a lottery drawing to determine enrollment. HGA will place any applications received after the published deadline at the end of the waitlist in the order they were received. HGA will duly publicize the drawing and conduct it in a public meeting.
Parents who submitted an application by the deadline will receive notice of the lottery’s time, date, and location via the parent-noted preferred contact method. The lottery drawing will proceed as follows:

● All applications will reside in a secure online database from the initial application
through the lottery date.
● Each application will be memorialized with a timestamp noting the date and time of the
application.
● All applications will be sorted by grade level.