@pearlescentrose I love that you are driving the process and that you are committed enough to be making this happen for yourself!
I can’t quite tell when you say you want to “improve your chances” what you mean? Do you mean improve your chances of getting into that list of schools? Or improve your chances to get your parents to allow more applications?
Assuming it’s the latter –
If it’s not financial, but about the time to apply, then I think you can make a very strong case for dropping a few of the low-admit schools and finding a few higher admit schools that are on SAO, since that would be one application more, but you could send it to multiple schools super easily.
Also, something you said is jumping out to my ears - that your parents don’t think boarding school is worth a lot of time. It makes me wonder if there is going to be a bigger issue here with the amount of time and other resources it will take if you actually do go to boarding school. The application process is a piece of cake compared to what comes next.
I don’t want to sound like a Debby downer here, but ultimately I think what happened is that you might have jumped the gun and picked the wrong schools if you are only applying to a few.
That is in the past and this is where you are now, so your job now is to decide what is the next right thing to do. In my mind, it’s either: 1. drop a couple of schools and do a few higher admit schools through SAO or 2. keep the schools, and add a few higher admit schools through SAO. (Option 3: apply to that list as-is and accept the real risk that you will not have options come march 10th and it will NOT be because you aren’t awesome, but because you didn’t cast the net wide enough.)
In your corner!