Thursday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down race-based practices to determine public school enrollment could lead to a re-examination of Roanoke's 36-year-old attendance zones.

The court ruled 5-4 that two school districts, Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., unconstitutionally used race to determine which school a student attends.

It's hard to say what impact Thursday's ruling will have on Roanoke, legal experts said.

Roanoke does not use a student's race to determine which school that student attends. But the city's patchwork of attendance zones, which was set in 1971, is intended to create a more diverse classroom by busing students from predominantly black parts of town to schools in predominantly white parts of town.

The question now becomes whether the plans in Roanoke and other school districts nationwide are allowed under the ruling, said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a professor of law and history at the University of Virginia. School districts across the country should brace for a torrent of litigation intended to answer that question, she said.

"The upshot of this opinion is that the battle over how to integrate schools, if school districts want to do that, is going to be fought at the local level all over the country and it's going to be hard for school boards," she said. "But on the other hand, that's democracy. School boards have to respond to their constituencies and people in localities have to think about race and what it means today."

Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a concurring opinion, agreed with the majority that the Seattle and Jefferson County school districts erred in using a student's race explicitly in assigning that student to a particular school. But he didn't rule out that school districts could take race into account when developing programs or attendance areas.

"School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of diverse backgrounds and races through other means," he wrote. Those include "drawing attendance zones with general recognition of the demographics of neighborhoods."

That, according to Brown-Nagin, seems to indicate that Roanoke's plan would be permissible under Kennedy's reading of the law.

But it's unclear how a court would rule on the matter if the city's attendance zones were legally challenged.

"It's just not clear how far these general race-conscious measures can go," said Jim Ryan, another law professor at the University of Virginia, noting the significant "gray area" in Kennedy's dissent.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said he thinks the city's plan is safe.

"I don't know whether it [a challenge] would be successful necessarily," he said, noting that the city's plan appears to focus more on what neighborhood a student lives in than what that student's race is.

A federal judge approved Roanoke's school attendance plan in 1971, ruling that city schools were officially integrated. The plan, which is still in place, capped an 11-year legal battle to desegregate the city's schools.

Several generations of Roanoke schoolchildren who live within walking distance of one elementary school have been bused to other elementary schools miles from their homes.

For instance, students who live near the intersection of Madison Avenue and Gainsboro Road in Northwest Roanoke travel more than four miles by bus every day to go to Crystal Spring Elementary in South Roanoke even though they live within walking distance of Lincoln Terrace Elementary School.

In the past three and a half decades, however, housing patterns have changed in Roanoke, in some cases diluting the busing plan. Students who live on Melrose Avenue between 35th and 36th streets Northwest are bused to Roanoke Academy for Mathematics and Science Elementary School even though they live closer to Fairview, Westside or Forest Park elementaries. All four of those schools are majority black, defeating the original purpose of the busing program.

In the past year some school board members have floated the idea of redrawing attendance zones in order to save money on transportation and building maintenance costs.

A state report on the city's schools released last month recommended doing just that, noting that the school system would need 20 fewer buses with more unified attendance zones. That would save the district up to $2.2 million over five years, the report said.

School board member Courtney Penn said he would be willing to examine redrawing the attendance lines to save money. The 36-year-old attendance areas, although they have become ingrained in the city's educational fabric, have not been very successful in integrating the schools, he said.

"I'm not sure they create a whole lot of racial balance," he said. "I believe that we shouldn't have holy cows, that we should really study these boundaries, study what the effect of any change would be and not be afraid to have a community discussion about any of these things."

At the same time, however, redrawing the city's attendance zones is bound to be a contentious issue. For that reason, some school board members have called for studying new attendance zones and involving residents before making a decision.

"They're decisions you make with a whole lot of other people so we'll take our time and we'll all get there together," Penn said.