Admissions FAQs

Endeavor Charter School is a public school and admits students without regard to race, sex, disability, color, religion, national or ethnic origin. All applications submitted for students must originate from parents/guardians who are legal residents of North Carolina.

In accordance with NCGS §115.C-218.45(f), Endeavor Charter School’s Admissions Policy offers enrollment priority for siblings of currently enrolled students and ECS alumni as well as children of ECS staff and Board members in the order outlined in the policy.

Within the application period, interested families may apply on-line or on a paper copy available at our front office. An application must be submitted for each prospective new student seeking admission to join Endeavor Charter School.

A third party, Lotterease, facilitates our lottery, and families must submit a separate application for each student applying for admission through their website. On Lottery Day, Lotterease will run our lottery via an online process and produce a randomly generated list of accepted and waitlisted students at each grade level. The lottery is open to the public but results of the lottery will not be publicized until the lottery verification process has been completed, which may take several hours. Once the process has been verified, parents may login to their accounts to discover if they have been offered a seat or their place on the grade level waitlists. Parents of selected students will also receive an email from Lotterease with detailed information regarding tours and accepting/declining offered seats.

No. The lottery is an online process conducted by our third party vendor, Lotterese. Applicants who wish to attend the lottery can attend virtually or in person.  A Zoom link will be available on the ECS Master Calendar prior to the lottery date.  Families do not have to be present to be admitted.

Non multiple-birth siblings will be assigned different lottery numbers. If one sibling is admitted, it does not guarantee or improve the wait list position of any other sibling during the current school year.

Multiple birth siblings will be assigned one lottery number (for admission or placement on the waitlist), but a separate application must still be completed for each child.  The single lottery number means that all multiple birth siblings would be accepted or placed on a waitlist together.

The lottery takes place in February of each year. For a specific date, please see our calendar of events.

Following completion of the lottery, a parent will receive an email from Lotterease within 24 hours of the lottery indicating a student's acceptance or status on a waitlist.  Parents may also login to their parent account on the Lotterease website to see which students were accepted for open seats. If a family was not offered an open seat, they see their place on the waitlist.

When seats become available in the spring and summer, Lotterease will notify students on the waitlist via email. Instructions will be provided within the email and provide families with details and deadlines to either accept or decline the offered seat.

If selected for admission before July 1, parents/guardians must notify the school in writing of their decision to accept the seat within one week.  A lack of response within that time period is considered a declination of the seat.

If selected for admission between July 1 and the first day of the school, parents/guardians must notify the school in writing of their decision to accept the seat within 2 days.  A lack of response within that time period is considered a declination of the seat.

From the first day of the school year through day 20, parents/guardians must notify the school in writing of their decision to accept the seat within 1 day.  A lack of response within that time period is considered a declination of the seat.

Endeavor will use the general admission wait list for each grade until the 20th day of the school year. A separate waitlist will be maintained for siblings of current ECS students. Endeavor will use the sibling wait list for openings in each grade until the last day of the school year.

A prospective new student qualifies as a Sibling of a currently-enrolled student or ECS alumnus if he or she is a sibling, half-sibling, step-sibling, or foster sibling, who resides in the same household as the currently-enrolled student or ECS alumnus.

While we understand a family’s desire to visit our campus for a tour, due to the high volume of interested families every year, we do not offer tours until students are offered admission to ECS. Students offered admission will be provided a tour before having to accept or decline their seat.

We do, however, offer a general open house every year in January, and families can find those dates here.

Families may apply for Endeavor if their child is eligible to attend public school in North Carolina in July of the year you apply. Applicants must apply for the appropriate grade level or risk placement at the bottom of the waitlist. The ECS Lottery Admissions Policy contains a grade placement provision to ensure students are enrolled in the appropriate grade level.

A few common examples:

- A family can apply for kindergarten if their child will be 5 no later than August 31 of the same year they apply. 

- A child did not make the birthday cut off for public school in North Carolina, so the family sent their child to private kindergarten this year and the child is on schedule to move to 1st grade next school year. Because that child will have completed kindergarten, the family may apply for 1st grade. 

- A child is currently in 4th grade, but the family and his/her teacher agree that the child needs to repeat 4th grade next school year. The family can apply for 4th grade (however, if they apply for a 4th grade seat, that is the only seat we can offer. We cannot offer a 5th grade seat if the family changes their mind.).

No, Endeavor does not accept any testing for early entry into kindergarten. A child must turn 5 by August 31 of the year he/she would start kindergarten to apply for and enroll in kindergarten at Endeavor, no exceptions.

Endeavor does not have an age requirement for grades 1-8. In order to apply to grades 1-8, we only require that the child is currently enrolled in the grade prior to the one you apply for and that the child is currently passing that grade.

The exact number of kindergarten applications varies year to year, but ECS usually gets 500 - 700 applicants for 80 kindergarten seats. Although applicants who qualify for priority admission will fill a portion of the kindergarten seats, we have never had a year where those students took all available kindergarten seats. Therefore, we anticipate always having some open kindergarten seats for the general public.  After we run the lottery and all Kindergarten seats have been filled, we will continue to establish a waitlist in case any Kindergarten seats are not accepted.