Starting next month, the school lottery will open to the tens of thousands of D.C. families looking to get their kids into their preferred school. But for some disadvantaged students, this year’s lottery will be less a game of chance than usual.

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, D.C. Public Schools will give at-risk students—those who receive welfare or food stamps, are without housing or are in foster care—a preference in the admissions lottery for a new school scheduled to open for the 2020-21 academic year. The small pilot program will take place at the Stevens School, a historic school currently under renovation for use as an early education center serving kids in the city’s free PK3 and PK4 program.

D.C. schools only offer limited preferences in the lottery: a geographic preference for in-boundary public schools, and sibling preference at public and charter schools. Under the pilot program at Stevens, a certain number of seats would be set aside for at-risk students, the way seats are set aside in bilingual immersion programs.

City officials say that would ensure at-risk students fill those seats, and give parents a chance to gain admission to the school later on if they do not apply to school seats by the time the lottery closes in early March. (City data shows that 61 percent of at-risk families apply through the lottery before it closes, compared to 79 percent of other families.) And they say running the pilot at Stevens made the most sense: It will draw students from across the city, instead of smaller geographic boundaries. More still, as a new school it will have no students entering via the existing sibling preference.

“D.C. Public Schools is committed to eliminating opportunity gaps and providing our students with the resources they need to thrive. The reopening of the Stevens school offers us a unique chance to open pathways for three- and four-year-old students, as well as infants and toddlers, to receive a high-quality early education,” Shayne Wells, a spokesman for DCPS, said in an email.

“DCPS is proud to pilot a policy at Stevens that seeks to provide greater equity of access for at-risk families to the specialized programs offered in our schools and promote socioeconomic and ability diversity among our students.”

Stevens, Wells said, “has a rich history rooted in equity,” having been one of D.C.’s first publicly funded schools for African-American children. The school is named after Thaddeus Stevens, an abolitionist who championed free schools for all. “We are striving to ensure that the Stevens School is able serve all students, especially our students furthest from opportunity,” Wells added.

The move comes in response to a persistent debate over whether the city’s unified school lottery—which families use to apply to traditional public and public charter schools—is fair, especially to at-risk students who could benefit from access to the city’s top schools. Research has found that socio-economically integrated schools can benefit at-risk students. Currently in D.C., at-risk students largely are concentrated in schools in wards 7 and 8, the city’s poorest.

School lotteries are used in a number of cities across the country, and have emerged in response to the growing trend of jurisdictions giving parents the chance to send their kids to a traditional neighborhood school, a more specialized school, or a charter school. While proponents say lotteries are the fairest way to apportion out the limited number of seats at popular schools, they also concede that they operate on the assumption that every student is starting from the same place and stands to gain the same benefit from attending particular schools.

For years D.C. officials have debated offering some type of preference for at-risk students, a move that could be popular among parents. According to a survey of 405 parents by the parent advocacy group PAVE, 64 percent said that at-risk students should get a preference in the lottery. But how the preference is structured—and whether it would come ahead or behind of a sibling preference—would have an impact.

Research by the city has found that a new preference for at-risk students would improve lottery outcomes—but for less than a tenth of at-risk students in D.C. That could increase if the at-risk preference came ahead of the sibling preference, a move that would be more politically perilous. According to PAVE’s survey, only a third of respondents said an at-risk preference should take priority over the sibling preference, which allows a family a better chance to send their kids to the same school.

The issue of an at-risk preference has also been percolating in some charter schools, which currently are not allowed to implement one.

“I have spoken with every school that has fewer than 20 percent at-risk students and everyone has said to me that they support the Council passing legislation that would establish an at-risk preference,” said Scott Pearson, the outgoing executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. “We’re hopeful they consider moving legislation that would allow schools the option of having a preference for at-risk students.”

It’s unclear whether DCPS’s pilot program at Stevens will expand, but the next chance for a broader discussion on how to better integrate the city’s schools will come in 2022, when school boundaries are scheduled to be redrawn. When they were last redrawn in 2014, city officials debated a number of initiatives to better balance demographics in high-performing schools, but did not implement them.

This story originally appeared at WAMU.