It was 1971, and Dr. Wendell Butler had recently been appointed to the Roanoke School Board when a judge ordered that the city's elementary schools should be desegregated.

In response the school system drew up new attendance areas requiring that children from black Northwest Roanoke neighborhoods be bused to schools in white Southwest Roanoke neighborhoods. The judge signed off on the busing plan, and it has stood almost intact ever since.

Until now.

The city school board is set tonight to redraw attendance areas and end Roanoke's decades-old exercise in desegregation through busing.

School board members say new attendance areas, which would send children to elementary schools closer to home, would encourage parental participation, cut down on transportation costs and help students and school employees focus on instruction rather than on transportation.

Many parents and residents, however, have protested the change, saying it would make schools less diverse.

To Butler, now long retired from the school board and from his dentistry practice, the school board's decision is a cause for concern.

"I would hate to see them go back to what we had," he said.

The 1971 plan was criticized almost from the start because the vast majority of children who had to ride a bus across town were black, while white children were allowed to stay in their neighborhood schools.

The board decided not to bus white children to mostly black schools because "the white community was concerned about that," Butler said. "We were just trying to keep down disruptions."

Still, despite its flaws, nobody challenged the busing plan, bringing an 11-year-old lawsuit to a close.

"Everybody was tired," Butler said. "We were ready."

Today, the school system is struggling to boost test scores and graduation rates in an era of ever-tightening state and federal mandates. Test statistics have revealed that black and low-income students in some cases fare better in schools closer to home than they do when they are bused to mostly white schools.

With more than two-thirds of the city's students coming from low-income families and with black students constituting almost half the student body, it is crucial for those groups -- as well as Hispanic students, who also sometimes struggle in the classroom -- to get the help they need to be successful, school board member Courtney Penn said.

"Until those three groups begin doing better, we're going to have a hard time becoming a better district," he said. "That's where our success lies, and the quicker we understand that as a city, the better."

In response to public comments, school officials have refined the new attendance areas to make schools as diverse as possible. But there's only so much diversity that can be built into schools in a city where neighborhoods are as rigidly segregated as Roanoke's.

Residential patterns have changed substantially since 1971, with the result that many city schools can hardly be said to be integrated. Roughly half the elementary schools are either two-thirds white or two-thirds black.

The school board is also set to decide on a plan to privatize the district's transportation system, which could save about $250,000. The transportation system was established after the desegregation plan because school officials at the time realized they needed buses to send children to schools across town. Until 1971, the school system hired an outside company to transport students.

To some longtime Roanokers, redrawing the attendance zones and privatizing the bus system again would turn the clock back several decades.

"If they pass the [new] zones and they farm the busing out, after three years the schools will be back in the same place they were in 1970," said George Harris, a retired judge who was a lawyer in 1971 working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to desegregate the school system.

"That will push it almost all the way back," he said.