About 300 people gathered in the auditorium at Lucy Addison Middle School on Wednesday evening with many voicing their opposition to Roanoke School Board plans that would close at least two city schools.

Because of the city's deteriorating financial situation, the school board is considering two alternatives, both of which would shutter Raleigh Court Elementary School and William Ruffner Middle School. Board members will adopt one of the plans on Tuesday, saving the school system between $3 million and $4 million, and forcing hundreds of elementary and middle school students to change schools next year.

Parents at the hearing said closing the two schools would be disruptive to their children and could jeopardize their property values.

"There's no way you're going to do this without putting more trailers up. Leaky, cold trailers," said Theresa Gill-Walker, the mother of a high school student.

"The closing of any school would inevitably lead to the degradation of neighborhoods," said Dick Kelley, the school system's former assistant superintendent for operations.

In addition to the school-closing plans, the board has proposed scaling back educational programs, reducing administrative staff, outsourcing the transportation system and laying off up 100 teachers in an effort to bridge a $16 million budget shortfall.

"Big cuts have to be made," said Jeff Vanke, a parent of a Fishburn Park Elementary student. "I hope that teachers' jobs can be saved as much as possible."

School board Chairman David Carson said the board was more concerned about protecting instructional programs and teaching jobs than buildings.

"We can potentially close some of those buildings and devote some of those resources to our students and to our teachers," he said.

The board also laid out a proposal for redrawing the city's school attendance zones. Conceived in 1971 as part of a court-ordered desegregation plan, the current layout carves the city into a patchwork of attendance areas that require students to be bused across town to go to school. Demographic shifts and tight budgets have made those attendance areas outdated, according to school officials, who have been working for two years on redrawing the lines.

It remains to be seen whether the school board will have the stomach to change the lines at a time when it's also discussing school closings. Board members will host a series of public meetings on the attendance zones next month and decide whether to redraw the lines at their April 7 meeting.

School enrollment has been dipping for a decade in Roanoke, with the result that the school system finds itself maintaining crumbling buildings for fewer students. Elementary school enrollment is expected to be about 2,000 students shy of capacity next year, according to officials. In middle school, the gap between capacity and enrollment is expected to reach 1,700 next year.

The board's first alternative would disperse students from Ruffner Middle and Raleigh Court Elementary to nearby schools. Addison and Breckinridge middle schools would likely get most of Ruffner's students. Fishburn Park would absorb Raleigh Court's kindergarten, first- and second-grade students, and Grandin Court Elementary would house third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students from Raleigh Court.

The second alternative would also send Ruffner's students to Addison and Breckinridge. It would combine students from Raleigh Court and Fishburn Park elementaries into the building now occupied by Woodrow Wilson Middle School. Woodrow Wilson's students would move to James Madison Middle School and create the city's largest middle school at about 900 students. Madison would take over the building vacated by Fishburn Park and turn it into a sixth-grade wing.

Leslie Adams, a reading teacher a Woodrow Wilson, said she did not like the idea of converting the school into an elementary building.

"There is nothing that makes sense about disrupting that many humans," she said. "I don't think we need to convert Woodrow."

But leaving Woodrow Wilson as a middle school could force current Raleigh Court students to change schools several times, worried Raleigh Court parents said.

"I'm very concerned about my kids going through two elementary schools instead of one," Angie Covington said.