Photos by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

Aimee Porterfield listens Friday to the options being discussed concerning the format of Fishburn Park Elementary School next year.

Courtney Penn addresses concerns about Fishburn Park Elementary School during a Roanoke School Board meeting as Todd Putney (left) and Tim Spencer (right) listen.

Roanoke's 38-year-old experiment in crosstown busing will come to an end this fall after the city's school board voted Friday to redraw elementary and middle school attendance lines, capping months of discussion on often-uncomfortable questions of race, poverty and educational achievement.

By a 6-1 vote, the board approved the most radical of rezoning options, known as "option 3," that would send children to schools in their neighborhoods. Board member Courtney Penn cast the sole dissenting vote, saying he preferred another attendance zone option, "option 2," because it created slightly more diverse schools.

In an eleventh-hour change, school board members also endorsed reviving the magnet program at Fishburn Park Elementary School in Southwest Roanoke, possibly with an environmental theme.

During weeks of public meetings, parents, teachers and students opposed redrawing the lines, saying new attendance areas would make schools less diverse. Today, almost 1,000 children, mostly black, from Northwest Roanoke are bused to mostly white elementary schools in Southwest Roanoke, the legacy of a 1971 court order to desegregate schools in a city defined by rigid residential segregation.

Over the years, however, a liberal transfer policy and shifting neighborhood patterns have made many schools racially homogeneous once again.

While board members acknowledged that their action makes many schools less diverse, they said the change would allow students and schools to focus on instruction without the distractions of busing.

This has been a busy year for the school system. In February, board members voted to close William Ruffner Middle School and Raleigh Court Elementary School to save more than $3 million during a tight budget year. The board also agreed to move students from Oakland Intermediate School into Preston Park Primary School, and move students from the Noel C. Taylor Learning Academy into the Oakland building. Noel C. Taylor, an alternative program, now operates out of leased space.

Also, on Tuesday, the board voted to outsource its transportation system to save roughly $250,000, over the objections of drivers. The school system has also said it would lay off 58 employees to save money.

"I think the uncertainty surrounding the school closing process and the attendance zone process has created some angst," said school board Chairman David Carson. "I would call on the community as a whole to now focus exclusively on the education of our children."

Board members are now working on policies that would ensure an equitable distribution of resources among schools and would revise the district's transfer policy.

Board members said they preferred option 3 because it created community-based schools more than other options, while also easing the transition between elementary and middle schools.

Penn said that option 2, while it still would create some "meandering" school zones, would offer more diversity. Although it is not the school system's mission to force diversity on a segregated city, he said, "we are obligated both morally and through policy to create zones that maximize diversity, to the extent reasonably possible. Option 2 does this best."

Brenda Hale, president of the Roanoke branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, praised the school board for its commitment but stopped short of endorsing the board's decision. The group has opposed the district's rezoning options, and Hale said an NAACP committee would study the effects of the new zones.

School officials will now begin developing a magnet program for Fishburn Park. It's unclear how much such a program would cost, but administrators said they were hoping for grant money to help fund it.

The school system's first experiment with magnet schools dates to the 1980s, part of an effort to diversify public schools by allowing students to attend special programs in schools in another part of town. But administrators dropped the magnets in 2006 because grant money had run out and they had minimal success in diversifying schools. An earlier incarnation of the Fishburn Park environmental magnet program, one of the more successful ones, saw the number of applications shrink from 51 in 2002 to 26 in 2005.

On Friday, school officials suggested resurrecting Fishburn's environmental program after parents and board members worried that the school would go from 291 students to 110 under the proposed rezoning. Tom Dunleavy, the district's director of grades K-8 and a former principal at Fishburn Park, said the school could be reoriented relatively easily and attract students from other parts of town.

Superintendent Rita Bishop said she expected Fishburn's enrollment in the first year of the new magnet program to hover at about 150 students.

The school board at first planned to adopt new school zones Tuesday, but questions about Fishburn Park's small size led them to postpone the decision until Friday. Several board members appeared enthusiastic about the school's new magnet program.

"I think it would say so much to the community as a whole," said board member Suzanne Moore, adding that it would give students who live in apartments the opportunity to grow a garden.

But Penn questioned the necessity of adopting a plan that officials had spent only three days working on. He also expressed doubts that an environmental magnet program would attract a diverse student body.

"I think there needs to be due diligence done on what type of a focus program would do that most effectively," he said.

Aimee Porterfield, whose daughter would be a second-grader at Fishburn Park next year, was also not sold on the magnet school idea.

"I'm just not sure with the budget cuts and everything that it's really going to be what they hope it's going to be," she said.

Porterfield's daughter attends Wasena Elementary School this year, and Porterfield said she would probably ask for a transfer to let her stay there.