Every school day, Tequelia Dungee's children get on a bus for a two-mile trip over the railroad tracks and the Roanoke River to Virginia Heights Elementary School. At least two other schools are closer, but their Loudon Avenue Northwest address places them in the attendance zone for the Southwest Roanoke school.

Whether hundreds of children such as Dungee's should to continue to be bused across town is a question that parents and officials have been wrestling with this month.

The school board has proposed redrawing the city's desegregation-era attendance map to educate children closer to home, even though that would mean less diverse schools. On April 7, the board will pick one of three possible rezonings, carving out new elementary and middle school attendance areas and affecting more than half of the city's elementary school population.

The proposal has forced Roanoke to address often-uncomfortable questions of race, poverty and stubborn disparities in educational achievement. It has also drawn intense opposition at four community meetings across the city, with many decrying the proposal as a return to segregated schools.

Residents will have another chance to talk about the rezoning at a public hearing at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Lucy Addison Middle School.

Dungee, for her part, would like to keep her children at Virginia Heights. Under the school board's proposals, her children would be assigned to either Fairview or Roanoke Academy for Mathematics and Science elementary schools. She has nothing against either of those schools, but her children have gotten comfortable at the Grandin Village school.

"I like the principal. It's a really good school," she said. "I feel like they excel and the neighborhood is really a nice neighborhood."

The current checkerboard pattern of attendance areas dates from 1971, when it was imposed by a federal judge to desegregate public schools. It called for hundreds of students to be bused from mostly-black parts of town to schools in mostly-white parts of town. Most students from white parts of town got to stay in their neighborhood schools, a provision that was heavily criticized when the plan was implemented. Almost 1,000 elementary students, 80 percent of them black, are still bused across town every day.

Roanoke is one of dozens of cities nationwide to have looked at decades-old school attendance areas in recent years. Many of the old maps call for crosstown busing, which districts can ill afford at a time when they are pressed by state and federal mandates to improve test scores.

Norfolk, for instance, redrew its middle school attendance areas earlier this decade, a few years after it had changed its elementary attendance zones.

John Hazelette, planning director for Norfolk schools, delicately described the rezoning there as "a sensitive topic."

In Roanoke, although racial segregation is still pervasive in the city's neighborhoods, shifting housing patterns have left some elementary school attendance areas with too few students while others hold too many, prompting officials to consider rezoning.

Officials estimate the new plans could save roughly $700,000 in busing costs. They also say black or low-income students seem to do better in schools closer to home than in mostly white schools in the southern part of town.

For instance, black students at Lincoln Terrace or Roanoke Academy for Mathematics and Science elementary schools in Northwest Roanoke, a predominantly black part of town, posted much higher pass rates on state tests than did black students at Raleigh Court or Wasena elementary schools in mostly white Southwest Roanoke.

The plan would make many schools more homogeneous than they already are. For example, Fishburn Park Elementary School would go from being 47 percent white to 83 percent white. Lincoln Terrace Elementary School would go from being 63 percent black to almost 90 percent black.

All that is troubling to Heather Quintana.

Quintana moved to Roanoke from Maine in 2005 looking for a more diverse community in which to raise her family. She hardly spent any time visiting the city before buying a house, sight unseen, in Southwest Roanoke.

"The thing I was really surprised about after we moved here is that our neighborhood is almost completely white. I thought this was a diverse community," she said.

Grandin Court Elementary School, where her son is in kindergarten, is a welcome exception. Quintana said her son benefits from seeing classmates of all races and economic backgrounds at his school. Students from other parts of town also benefit from the strong PTA at the school, she said.

Losing that diversity, she said, will harm her son and other Grandin Court children.

"Let's think this through," she said. "The solution to racism, the solution to classism is not something that can be made in a couple weeks' time."

Just how diverse Roanoke's schools really are, however, is open to debate.

In the decades since the 1971 plan, residential shifts and student transfers have made schools increasingly homogeneous. Grandin Court, for instance, is 70 percent white this year. Half of the city's elementary schools are, like Grandin, more than two-thirds white or two-thirds black.

U.S. census estimates from 2007 show the city's population to be roughly 70 percent white. By contrast, white students make up only 44 percent of the school system's population, suggesting that many white families choose not to send their children to public school. The census also counted 17,000 school-aged Roanoke residents, about 4,000 more than were enrolled in public school that year. That means that almost a quarter of the city's children either attend private schools, other school districts or are home schooled.

While school diversity may not be perfect "the plan they got is going to be worse," said Robert Johnson, who attended several of the community meetings last week.

Originally from Prince Edward County, Johnson moved to Roanoke County as a child just before Prince Edward officials shut down all the county's schools in 1959 to prevent them from being desegregated. He spent years working for Kroger and as a real estate agent to put his children through college. His son, also named Robert Johnson, is today principal at Lucy Addison Middle School.

"We have been in desegregation for the last 40 years, ever since Prince Edward County," said the elder Johnson. "We're going backward. I feel that in order for us to have equal opportunities and equal education for all, we need to diversify."

Addison teachers and parents are particularly concerned about the proposals because they would increase the school's enrollment by about 200 students. The school is set to pick up many new students from William Ruffner Middle School, one of two schools the board has voted to close to save money. Addison would be 90 percent black, up from 73 percent black today.

Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson and Madison middle schools, in the southern part of town, would lose students or keep the same enrollment under the proposals.

"I don't see where busing should be an issue, because busing is what brought integration into Roanoke city schools," said Addison PTA President Barbara Phifer.

"There is a way to do that and make it more equitable," said Virginia Wooddall-Gainey, a teacher at Addison, adding that the school already serves seven housing projects and has consistently failed to meet state and federal standards, although it has improved in recent years.

School officials are refining the proposals to reduce the pressure on Addison, said school board member Courtney Penn, who has been leading the board's attendance zone discussion. Officials have also tried to include a diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds in the proposed new attendance zones, even if it means that some of them snake around the west side of the city.

Any change could be phased in over several years, to reduce the impact on children already in school, according to officials. Once changes are in place, however, the district will likely rein in its liberal policy on granting transfer requests.

Penn said he understands how the school board's proposal can summon echoes of the more shameful aspects of Roanoke's past.

"A lot of the response, whether for or against, is coming from people who have not looked at the data. It's coming from a pretty established philosophical position," he said.

In his professional career as a college administrator, Penn has worked to increase diversity on college campuses. His commitment to diversity made him wary at first of the school system's proposal to redraw attendance zones. But after studying the test scores, he became convinced that students fare better academically in schools closer to home.

To him, it's more important that students -- whether black or white, rich or poor -- do well in school, even if it means going to a school in their own neighborhood that is less diverse.

"I want these children to be successful. I want them to grow up in an environment where race and socioeconomics for them is not a big issue.

Ultimately they cannot compete in that society if they cannot read and do basic math," Penn said.

It's a personal issue to Penn. Two of his children right now travel from their home in Northwest Roanoke to Fishburn Park in Southwest every day.

Other board members have said they would be willing to consider rezoning schools, if logical attendance areas can be drawn.

Board member Mae Huff said she wanted the new attendance areas to take students' family income into consideration.

"If we can look at equality across the board ... I can vote for it," she said.

Still, she acknowledged, "it's a hard thing, and it's very personal."

Quintana, the transplant from Maine, has been struck by the ghosts dredged up in the course of the recent school discussions.

"There is a lot more history in this town than there is where I came from, in the Northeast," she said. "It is more raw here."