SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times

After Raleigh Court Elementary closes, most of its students will go to Fishburn Park or Grandin Court elementary schools.

KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times

John Young (center) teaches a seventh-grade English class at William Ruffner Middle School. The school board voted to close Ruffner at the end of this academic year.

KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times

When Roanoke's William Ruffner Middle School closes, most of its students will attend Lucy Addison or Breckinridge middle schools.

The Roanoke Times

When Roanoke's William Ruffner Middle School closes, most of its students will attend Lucy Addison or Breckinridge middle schools.

A day after the Roanoke School Board voted to close Raleigh Court Elementary School and William Ruffner Middle School, parents were trying to come to grips with the news.

Closing the school was the main topic of conversation in the line of cars that snaked through Raleigh Court's parking lot on an unseasonably warm afternoon Wednesday, as parents picked up children after school.

"I think it's a disgrace," said Michelle Willis-Harden, who was waiting for her niece.

"You could see it coming," said Bobby Welch, who has a fourth-grade daughter at the school.

"Shutting this down is like shutting down a community," said John Kirtley, who has two sons there.

The school board voted to close the schools to save about $3 million that will go toward bridging a $16 million budget gap in the city school system next year. The decision was preceded by weeks of discussion and community meetings around Roanoke, where parents and teachers implored the board to spare their schools or their favorite instructional programs. In the end, however, the budgetary demands proved inexorable.

"We're kind of disappointed. We put a lot of effort in. My wife is here constantly," said Kirtley, who is active in the Raleigh Court PTA and has helped the school with landscaping and construction projects such as an outdoor classroom and a trail on school grounds.

"The teachers are awesome," he said, adding that he is considering private school for his sons.

Many parents at Raleigh Court and Ruffner seemed resigned to the idea that their children would have to find new schools.

"Let's just finish the year out. This was inevitable," said Judi Bowman, PTA president at Ruffner. "We have to do what we need to do. They'll be fine wherever they go."

Board members at Tuesday's meeting said Ruffner students would find a better education somewhere else.

"I feel it's in the best interest of the children at that school to place them in another facility," said board member Mae Huff.

School officials have said that most, if not all, of Raleigh Court's students would go to Fishburn Park or Grandin Court elementary schools and most of Ruffner's students would go to Lucy Addison or Breckinridge middle schools. But students and families likely will not know where they will end up until the school board finishes its study of attendance zones sometime in April. The board has scheduled four public meetings in March to discuss changing the attendance areas, which have been in place since a court-ordered desegregation order in 1971.

The mood was quite different among parents at Woodrow Wilson Middle School. An alternative proposal had called for moving Woodrow Wilson's students into James Madison Middle School and combining Raleigh Court and Fishburn Park into the Woodrow Wilson building. That proposal was dropped, leaving Woodrow Wilson and James Madison untouched by all the changes next year.

"I'm thrilled," said Amy Lowman, PTA president at Woodrow Wilson. "We did not want to go that way because of all the hard work that we have been doing. Not just the PTA, but the staff."

The alternative plan, which found the support of only three of the seven school board members, would have turned the Fishburn Park building into a special wing for Madison's sixth-grade students.

Board members said they liked the idea of a special sixth-grade "academy" but decided against pushing the concept into reality on such short notice.

"If down the road that comes back up I'd be happy to consider it, but I would only want to consider it if it was coming from the ground up and there was a groundswell of support," said board member Courtney Penn.

Penn said he would prefer seeing a program targeted for sixth-grade students in struggling middle schools, rather than in perennially high scoring ones such as James Madison.

Some school districts in Texas and Ohio have sixth-grade schools, but they are relatively rare.

There is little consensus among education officials and researchers on the best grade configuration for middle schools, said Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform.

But she questioned the wisdom of making students move to one building for sixth grade and then to another for seventh grade.

"You would really be asking students at that age, which would be about 11, to transition from a fifth- to a sixth-grade building," she said.

"And then you're going to transition them to another building after one year. There would be some questions about that."