Edmonton Public assigns the regular program by attendance area, not by walking distance — so the school across the street can be the one your child doesn't attend. And if the designated school is full, the board sends kids to a named backup that can be nine kilometres away. Look up any Edmonton address and see all three: designated, lottery status, and the overflow.
Every listing near a good school says "steps to" that school. None of them mention that the school might not be taking new students this year.
For 2026–27, Edmonton Public listed eleven schools at capacity. If your address is designated to one of them, your child enters a lottery. Lose the lottery and the board assigns a named overflow school instead — a real school, with a real address, that you have almost certainly never driven past.
We measured the distance from each of those eleven schools to the backup the board named. The shortest is 1.7 kilometres. The longest is 9.7. That is the gap between a walk and a daily commute, and it is invisible on every listing page in this city.
Distances are measured school building to school building for the cases where the city's file gives us both locations — seventeen of them. It is not a door-to-door drive time, and it is not a prediction. It is the honest shape of what "overflow" means here.
Type an address and we run it against Edmonton Public's attendance areas, then hand you the board's own finder to confirm. Closest building and designated school are different questions.
We carry the 2026–27 lottery list. If a school isn't on it, we say "not on this year's list — confirm" rather than telling you it's open. We don't guess at the thing that decides your kid's year.
Where the board names an overflow school, we name it too, with the distance. Most maps stop at the polygon.
Anyone can paint a boundary file and call it a map. We took ours to the board's official address finder and checked address by address, grade by grade. Edmonton Public agreed with our map on fifteen of eighteen checks. Where it didn't, we logged it and left the board's answer standing.
We ran the same test on an Edmonton Catholic boundary file. It failed five of eighteen — including neighbourhoods where it returned no school at all. Extra Layers still paints that file as an unofficial ~2023 overlay, on the same map as Edmonton Public, labelled unofficial. The board's finder still wins wherever we disagree. This overlay is not Instant Price truth. A licensed current file still has to come from Edmonton Catholic.
That's the standing rule here: when the board's finder and our map disagree, the board wins, and we show you the link to check.
If one of these is your designated school, look up the address before you write an offer — the lottery and the backup are the two facts that change your morning for the next decade.
| School | If it's full, kids go to | Look up an address |
|---|---|---|
| David Thomas King | Youngstown 6.9 km (K–6); Michael Phair 1.7 km (7–9) | Look up an address |
| Donald R. Getty | George P. Nicholson 6.0 km (K–6); D.S. MacKenzie 9.7 km (7–9) | Look up an address |
| Dr. Lila Fahlman | Johnny Bright 2.2 km (K–9) | Look up an address |
| Dr. Margaret-Ann Armour | McKee 9.2 km (K–6); Vernon Barford 6.5 km (7–9) | Look up an address |
| George H. Luck | Nellie Carlson 3.7 km (K–9) | Look up an address |
| Jan Reimer | Satoo 4.4 km (K–6); kisêwâtisiwin (7–9) | Look up an address |
| Joey Moss | Esther Starkman (K–9) | Newer than our boundary file — confirm on EPSB Find a School. |
| Lillian Osborne | Strathcona 7.8 km (10–12) | Look up an address |
| Riverbend | Avalon 3.5 km (7–9) | Look up an address |
| Shauna May Seneca | Grace Martin 6.7 km (K–6); Edith Rogers 7.2 km (7–9) | Look up an address |
| Svend Hansen | Laurel East: Weinlos 3.2 km / Kate Chegwin 3.3 km. Laurel West: Daly Grove 1.8 km / T.D. Baker 2.1 km. | Look up an address |
We don't publish school ratings or test scores. The province's file didn't hold up when we went to join it, and a made-up ranking is worse than none.
We don't claim a house sells for more because of its school. We haven't measured that here, so we're not going to imply it.
A designated school is not a reserved desk. Enrolment is the board's call, every year.
Boundaries move. Ours are dated, and every answer ships with the board's confirmation link.