Families who moved to the Spears Avenue area in North Chattanooga based on a school board promise they eventually would be able to send their children to Normal Park magnet schools have until the end of the school day Friday to sign them up to attend.

Once that deadline has passed, Hamilton County Board of Education members indicated Thursday night, children in that area will go to Red Bank schools which they will continue to be zoned to attend.

Already, 38 children who live in the affected area have been enrolled in the nationally recognized Normal Park magnet schools by their parents, according to school superintendent Dr.

Jim Scales.

A majority of board members – acting on the recommendation of the school superintendent – decided they are not bound by a 2007 pledge to expand zoning for Normal Park schools to include students who reside in the area bounded by Bell Avenue, Cherokee Boulevard and Spears Avenue.

Only Rhonda Thurman, Everett Fairchild and Jeffrey Wilson voted against breaking that promise.

Board members also decided to end a controversial pre-kindergarten program at Normal Park which requires parents to pay $5,000 to enroll their children after the 2010-2011 school year. Twelve families have already made $300 deposits to enroll their toddlers in that program next year, school officials said.

Eliminating the paid pre-kindergarten – which virtually everyone agreed is inequitable and some believe is illegal – would free up space in the school for children who want to attend kindergarten and elementary school there, Mr. Fairchild pointed out.

“The ideal enrollment at Normal Park is 800,” he pointed out. “Next year, we project enrollment will be 834. If we take out the (40) pre-kindergarten students, that will take it down to 796.”

Many of the affected North Chattanooga residents at the meeting – who had to sit through more than 90 minutes of routine housekeeping matters before board members finally began discussing Normal Park zoning – left unhappy about the compromise.

“My parents taught me that a promise is a promise,” one man told the woman walking beside him.

The controversy over Normal Park zoning grows out of a promise made in 2007 by Hamilton County school officials that they would expand zoning for the magnet schools to include the Spears Avenue area.

Encouraged by that promise, families began moving into the area. Now school officials, who had not anticipated the influx, believe that expanding the zone as they once planned could cause overcrowding and harm the quality of learning.

According to earlier statements by Dr. Scales, the new expanded zone as originally planned would increase Normal Park 's enrollment by more than 100 students. Officials would have to bring in portable classrooms and/or reduce the number of out-of-zone students who are selected by lottery.

In January, Mr. Scales proposed a significantly reduced expansion that would include only the area east of Spears Avenue and north of Cherokee Boulevard.

Ms. Thurman and other critics, however, contend that approach is flawed.

Rather than giving students in the neighborhoods near Normal Park school priority, she said, those admitted first are the children of central office staffers, teachers and other school personnel. Magnet school children also get priority.”

“Why not reduce the number of students from outside the area allowed to attend and make room for kids who actually live there?” she asked Thursday night, as she has repeatedly in the past. “I guarantee you that the people who moved to Spears Avenue so their kids could go to Normal Park spent a lot more than $5,000.”