The end may be in sight for Lusher Charter School’s neighborhood-based admissions district, after the Orleans Parish School Board unanimously passed a new set of charter-school policies Thursday that will also bring about an end to individual admissions lotteries at Lusher and Audubon.

For years, families who lived in a six-block-wide stretch of the Carrollton-university area were given automatic admission to Lusher’s incoming kindergarten classes, as were siblings of current students. The remaining kindergarten seats were then split between children of Tulane faculty and gifted students who tested in, doled out in a lottery conducted every year by school officials.

On Thursday, the Orleans Parish School Board voted on new policies for all its charter schools — which in the Uptown area include Lusher, Audubon Charter and the new Cypress Academy — and neighborhood admissions appear to have landed in its crosshairs. “It is the intention of the Legislature that the best interests of at-risk pupils be the overriding consideration” in creating charter school policies, the document notes.

Schools already in place like Lusher and Audubon may continue to select incoming students based on their academic records, language proficiency or other criteria, but they will be subject to new requirements:

“Each charter school with academic admissions requirements shall maintain citywide access for all students,” the policy reads. “No neighborhood or other geographic priorities shall be permitted. For charter schools with existing neighborhood boundaries, the provisions of this subsection shall be effective not later than the enrollment process for the 2017-18 school year.”

When their charter is renewed, they must begin participating in the central, computerized OneApp enrollmemt system. They will be able to maintain their own waitlists of students that meet their admissions criteria, however, rather that participating in the mid-year “backfilling” process for empty seats.

“The percentage of at-risk pupils in the charter school shall be equal to not less than the percentage of at-risk pupils enrolled in the school in the year prior to the charter school’s conversion, unless otherwise negotiated with the Orleans Parish School Board,” the policy reads.

Audubon does not have any geographical preferences, and school administrators at the meeting said they expect eventual participation in the OneApp system to be the only change in their admissions practices. Their primary concern with the policy changes, said operations manager Alisa Dupre, is how new transportation requirements will affect budgets for some charter schools.

Frank Israel, director of development and operations at Lusher, said after the meeting that Lusher administrators are still examining how the final wording of the new policy will directly apply to Lusher.

Lusher CEO Kathy Riedlinger did not attend Thursday’s meeting of the Orleans Parish School Board, but she had given the Lusher governing board a vague warning late last month that changes were afoot, saying the school had been negotiating with new Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. over some provisions of the policy. In the August meeting, Riedlinger did not specifically mention the neighborhood boundaries, but did urge board members to “read the whole policy.”

In fact, Lusher officials have looked askance at the neighborhood admissions policy for years. In 2010, Lusher said they would re-evaluate the policy on a year-to-year basis, and have said the unique arrangement places undue pressure on them by parents moving into the district to gain admissions. In 2014, Lusher’s removal of language regarding in-district admissions drew outcry from some neighbors with young children, but Riedlinger said they intended to keep the policy in place for that year, but were “always considering what to do there.”

When it came time for the OPSB vote on Thursday, no one from Lusher spoke in opposition. Lee Reid, an attorney representing Lusher, Audubon, Hynes, Lake Forest, Ben Franklin and Einstein charter schools, praised the OPSB administration’s efforts in the policy negotiations.

“We’re ready to move forward, put this in place and move forward to the next challenge,” Reid said.