West Seattle resident Catherine Moore says she will have to move across town if Seattle Public Schools limits her choices to neighborhood schools. She doesn't feel these elementary schools are a good fit for her three children, who attend special programs in West Seattle and the Central Area.

David and Terresa Thayer wish they could be part of their neighborhood school in Magnolia, but they missed the district's deadline for ranking their choices. Rather than send their son to the Central Area middle school where he was assigned, the Thayers opted to enroll the 11-year-old in a parochial school.

Offering students many school choices with bus service — a trademark of Seattle schools for more than a decade — has become too expensive, district leaders say, and has not resulted in access for every child to stable, high-quality schools.

The district has proposed a broad restructuring plan that would give all students fixed school assignments for the first time since the late 1980s and provide yellow-bus service only to those elementary- and middle-school students who select from the schools the district offers them.

Schools Superintendent Raj Manhas says the district needs to redirect money now spent on providing bus service to strengthen academics, especially in poor neighborhoods.

School officials are feeling pressure from Olympia, where lawmakers are requiring students in the Class of 2008 and their successors to pass reading, writing and math tests to graduate. But public-school superintendents like Manhas say legislators aren't providing the level of funding that schools need to do the job.

Faced with an expected $20 million budget shortfall in the 2006-07 school year, Manhas said the changes in bus service will save about $3 million annually.

Manhas' restructuring plan deliberately steers the district back toward a neighborhood-school system.

The plan offers less choice and more predictability as students move from elementary through high school. But many parents have assailed the plan for those very reasons.

Here's how Manhas' preliminary restructuring plan — a final recommendation is expected on June 15 — would affect students' access to schools:

At the elementary level, parents' choices in each geographic cluster would be curtailed from about seven neighborhood schools to three or four. And parents would no longer be able to choose neighborhood schools outside of their cluster, even if they were willing to transport their children themselves.

The district now offers yellow-bus transportation to families who choose from two nearby middle schools and live more than two miles away from their chosen school. About three-quarters of those middle-school students ride yellow buses. Under Manhas' proposal, students would be assigned to a middle school based on their home address. Those who opt for another middle school would be offered Metro passes.

Parents now can choose from any high school in the city and are eligible for yellow-bus transportation if the district determines that the student lives more than 2.5 miles from the school and can ride on an existing route. About two-thirds of eligible high-school students ride yellow buses, costing the district $3.6 million this year. Under Manhas' proposal, all high-school students would be assigned to their neighborhood high school and offered only Metro passes. They could apply to get into any other high school, but neighborhood students would get priority.

Parents now can choose from any of the city's alternative schools, and the district generally provides yellow-bus transportation. Manhas proposes to limit choices to the one or two alternative schools in their part of the city.

Low-income students who live far away from popular schools, which tend to be in more-affluent neighborhoods, currently cannot get assigned to them because of how far away they live. If space is available at these popular schools, Manhas proposes to give low-income students priority assignment, but the district wouldn't bus them.

Busing, then school choice

Aspects of Manhas' plan echo the arguments of former Seattle Superintendent John Stanford, who a decade ago rejected the notions that busing students out of their neighborhoods helped them academically or achieved district desegregation goals.

From 1978 to 1988, Seattle automatically assigned and bused students to create racially balanced schools. Families moving into neighborhoods knew where their children would go to school from kindergarten to graduation. Because of the city's segregated housing patterns, the schools where children were bused were far from their neighborhoods.

During this period, hundreds of families left the district's schools for private schools or the suburbs. Some blamed desegregation.

In 1989, the School Board embarked on a "controlled choice" plan that continued cross-town busing. The revised plan let parents rank their preferred schools — which tended to be in their neighborhoods — with the district giving assignment priority to students whose race would help create racial balance in schools.

In 1997, Stanford set in motion the essential elements of today's assignment plan by dividing the district into nine elementary clusters, five middle-school regions and all-city high schools. The district de-emphasized race in student assignment and bused students to schools within geographic clusters or regions. Still, the district continued all-city busing for some alternative schools, which were popular with parents.

"The fact that we have choice in our system is a direct consequence of desegregation busing," said School Board member Dick Lilly, who covered the district in the latter half of the 1990s as a reporter for The Seattle Times. "The alternative schools were created at the same time. And they basically functioned as a safety valve for families, I think in many cases, who wanted to avoid busing to neighborhood schools way across town but would tolerate busing to schools with special programs."

Today, Chief Operating Officer Mark Green says the district's decadelong experiment with giving parents "generous" choices hasn't attracted substantially more parents away from private schools. Enrollment has grown from 41,000 in 1989 to 46,000 in 2005, but market share — which describes how many school-age students attend district schools — — has remained essentially flat.

Green said the sloshing of children between the district's schools has made it harder for schools to retain staff, manage their budgets and offer continuity to students.

It doesn't honor all students' choices, either: Records show that nearly all the students who were assigned to high schools against their wishes last fall lived south of the Lake Washington Ship Canal.

Yet some parents like Trinka Briggs worry that the plan sacrifices the diverse student body made possible by all-city busing.

"The friendships and bonds aren't any different than if it were a neighborhood school, but I think it's better because they're from all over the place," said Briggs, who sends her daughter to Summit K-12, an alternative school in Northeast Seattle.

Issues of equity

Of urban school districts that offer extensive school choice, Seattle is one of the few that foots the transportation bill.

Denver and Portland do not provide transportation to families opting for a school outside their neighborhood, and Portland restricts the number of seats for out-of-neighborhood transfers. Tacoma, which has no all-city draw schools, is phasing out yellow-bus service for those choosing schools outside their neighborhoods.

Denver spends about $241 per pupil on transportation; Portland, $300; Tacoma, $259; and Seattle, $541.

Chief Academic Officer Steve Wilson has dismissed the idea of allowing elementary parents to transport their children themselves to schools outside their cluster. "The haves get to do something and the have-nots do not," Wilson said. "That's a serious equity issue."

Moore, the West Seattle parent, says the district's plan makes the mistake of assuming that quality neighborhood schools will emerge by limiting choice.

"They will lose parents if they try to coerce them to attend neighborhood schools that they have already chosen not to attend," she said. "Parents have to make their decision on their own that they're going to be the impetus for change in their neighborhood school."

Parents who made that decision and were thwarted by the district's policies are ready for change.

"I'd like our son to attend school in the neighborhood he lives in," said David Thayer, the Magnolia parent. "I understand that might be a problem for people who don't live in nicer neighborhoods, but I don't have an answer for that."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com