Roanoke parents got their first look at proposed attendance zone changes for the next school year during a public meeting Tuesday night at Fallon Park Elementary School.

About 150 people listened as school board member Courtney Penn laid out three options that could fundamentally alter where children attend elementary school in the city and could have a long-term effect on neighborhood residential patterns and real estate values.

Redrawing the attendance areas represents one of the most significant changes to the school system in decades because it would send hundreds of students to schools closer to home, while changing the racial and socioeconomic makeup of many elementary schools in a way that would make them less diverse.

Parents pored over maps to see where their children would attend school under the different options. One of them, Aimee Porterfield, the mother of a Wasena Elementary School student, worried that her daughter would have to switch schools more than once if the school board decides to make further changes in the coming years.

"I chose to live in that neighborhood so my daughter could go to Wasena," she said.

Other parents, however, said they would prefer that the school board make all the necessary changes now, rather than drag them out.

"It took us over 30 years to change it; we might as well change it the right way," Melissa Bryant said.

Susie Holt, a Raleigh Court Elementary School parent, shared that view.

"If we're going to rezone, let's do it all at once, get it done and move forward," she said. The school board has already voted to close Raleigh Court and Ruffner Middle School at the end of this school year to save money.

At the heart of the school system's proposal is the dismantling of an attendance plan approved in 1971 as part of a hard-fought effort to desegregate the city's schools. From the start, the plan proved controversial because it called for busing hundreds of black students to schools in primarily white neighborhoods but did not send white students to primarily black schools.

Over the years, residential patterns have changed so that many schools are once again either mostly black or mostly white.

Now, with the school system facing a budget crisis and increasingly stringent academic requirements from the state and federal governments, the school board is considering simplifying the city's busing system to save money and devote more effort to instruction. It's still unclear exactly how much the school system would save under the different options.

Many of the city's elementary schools would become more homogeneous next year, partly because of the segregation of Roanoke neighborhoods.

For instance, white students would go from making up 47 percent of Southwest Roanoke's Fishburn Park Elementary School's enrollment to 83 percent, under one of the options. Lucy Addison Middle School in Northwest Roanoke would go from being 73 percent black to 90 percent black.

"It looks like we're going to have schools that are much more homogeneous," said Carl Cooper, education chairman of the Roanoke branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "That's always the danger when you're talking about neighborhood schools in a segregated city."

Cooper said he hoped the school system's proposal would help city residents talk about race and diversity.

"Anytime you start the discussion about race, everybody starts to get a little bit antsy," he said.

Closing Ruffner Middle and relocating its student body under the different options would also make enrollment surge at Addison, Breckinridge and Andrew Jackson middle schools. Under one option, Addison would gain more than 200 students, Breckinridge would pick up about 100 and Jackson would see 20 more students, most of them limited English speakers. Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Southwest Roanoke would lose about 50 students to the rezoning.

Enrollment in elementary schools, however, would be evened out, Penn said.

"You always hate to have one school that's at 95 percent of capacity while there's another school hovering at 65 percent of capacity," he said.

The plans would also send all the students from one elementary school to the same middle school, rather than splitting up children to several different middle schools once they finish fifth grade, as is currently the case.

The school board will hold three more information meetings on the proposal, followed by a formal public hearing March 26. A vote is scheduled for April 7, giving school administrators and families about five months to prepare for one of the most momentous changes to the city's school system in recent memory.

"We've got to get to a decision fairly fast," Penn said.