The Seattle School district has presented a plan to parents that would assign their students to schools based first and foremost on their home address.

At a public meeting at Ballard High School last night, many parents arrived ready to hear where the boundary lines would be drawn for the district's new Student Assignment Plan. But they were told that information would nor be known until this fall.

District representatives said they want to ensure the plan balances every school in every neighborhood with high quality programs, diversity, opportunities for special education and bilingual services and decrease transportation costs by avoiding shipping kids clear across the city.

Tracy Libros, manager of enrollment services at the district, said that the plan would be more predictable and less complex for parents to decipher where their students will attend school beginning at the elementary level and leading to high school.

A major goal with the new plan is to have more families attending schools closer to their homes, thereby bringing services closer to the students who need them and encouraging greater family participation in education, according to the district.

Though some said they were in favor of access to programs in all schools and the predictability and ease of knowing where their students would be assigned, parents still had a few concerns about the new plan.

Many pointed out that over time expectations of where a student will go to school would not be as easy. The predictability could eventually be affected by the growth of a neighborhood and the capacity of how much a school could actually hold, some said.

Parents said they wanted to make sure the district would take in to account walkability; how big the geographic proximity would be for attendance areas and defining what an ‘Option School’ actually entails.

In terms of the Option Schools, or alternative schools students must apply for as their second choice, parents were told that will need further definition regarding the program itself, student assignment and transportation. The Council of Great City Schools has agreed to conduct an audit this spring.

The district will be posting questions and comments from each meeting on their Web site in the days to come and said they will do their best to answer and take them all into account before their final decisions.

Before they finalize the attendance boundaries this fall they will be conducting further community meetings to collect more feedback.