It is application season, and Julia's daughter starts kindergarten in the fall. One evening, Julia opens New Haven's enrollment portal and ranks two schools: the one her neighbor's son attends, and the one closest to home. A message tells her the list carries some risk. She makes a note to come back to it, and the week gets away from her.

Weeks later, with the deadline closer, a second message arrives. This one is harder to set aside. It shows her odds at each school on her list, updated with the applications already in, and together they leave a real chance her daughter will not match to either of her choices.

Below the odds are a few suggestions: schools that match what she told the district she is looking for. One sits on her route to work. She has driven past it for years without going in. That night she opens its profile in the district's school explorer and sees what the classrooms look like, how the day runs, and what its teachers say about kindergarten. She adds it, and then one more.

Then she hesitates over the order. Should a safer school go first, just to be sure of getting something? She starts second-guessing every choice, until the application reminds her she doesn't have to: the match is built so that ranking schools in her true order of preference can never hurt her chances. She puts them in the order she actually wants and submits.

The following spring, the email comes. Her daughter is matched to one of her choices. There is no celebration, just relief, and none of the worry that families like hers used to carry into the summer.

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Julia's first list, and her first reaction to the warning, are both common. In a recent New Haven cycle, nearly half of applicants submitted initial rank-order lists carrying a high risk of non-assignment. Lower-income families in New Haven carry the largest information burden in the choice process and are the least likely to seek out guidance on their own. The warning Julia saw is the one New Haven tested in the field in partnership with academic researchers. Today thousands of New Haven families receive personalized feedback reports each cycle, resulting in hundreds of matches that otherwise would not have occurred.

Julia's story is the district's story too. New Haven does not wait for families to find help, or for placement results to reveal a problem; it builds the help into the window, at the moment families are deciding. After years of academic research and collaborations with partners like New Haven, Tether Education's platforms and warning mechanisms are built with Julia in mind. Read on to see the financial stakes that unmatched families represent for districts, or how this approach scales across districts and whole countries. The district's full account is in the New Haven case study.

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