Portland parents are getting a chance this month to weigh in on proposed changes to the attendance boundaries for the city’s public elementary and middle schools.

A small group of parents attended a meeting Thursday at Lincoln Middle School to offer thoughts on how those changes could affect commuting distances or interrupt their children’s education.

Chris Dana, a parent of two Portland students, said his family purchased a house specifically so his children could walk to school at every level, kindergarten through senior year. Under the proposed changes, that won’t be possible.

“That’s a pretty major disappointment,” he said.

Thursday’s session was the third of five scheduled throughout October. There will be two more opportunities later this month before final recommendations are made to the school board.

A 15-member committee has been meeting for more than a year to develop and propose changes to the boundaries. It’s the first time in two decades that Portland has reviewed its attendance zones and in that time, the city has seen major shifts in population centers and demographics.

The city’s eight mainland elementary schools and three middle schools now vary widely in how full they are, and what proportion of students are economically disadvantaged.

The committee has been tasked with creating more balanced enrollment at each school while prioritizing walkable neighborhood schools and short transportation times, and minimizing the number of students impacted.

Sarah Lentz, who chairs both the school board and the attendance boundaries committee, said Thursday that the group had been grappling with tradeoffs revealed throughout the process, including the tension between equalizing the number of socioeconomically disadvantaged students in schools and creating longer transportation times for those students.

“These changes were not what we were hoping to get to by the end of this process,” she said. “Especially the schools that had the high utilization and the high economically disadvantaged to begin with … those schools don’t see that much change here in the current boundaries.”

About 350 students would attend different schools under the latest proposed maps.

“My daughter’s very happy at Ocean [Avenue Elementary School],” one mom said Thursday night. Her child would move to a different school under the current proposal. “She’ll be in third grade next year, so I really think that would be horrible to her.”

Other parents said they were concerned about their children changing schools partway through their education, having to cross busy streets to get to school, and being separated from friends they’ve made at their current schools.

Lentz said that at an earlier listening session geared toward multilingual families, parents were especially worried about transportation.

She told families that the committee will incorporate feedback from these sessions into the boundary map discussions, and will spend its next two meetings considering implementation policies, like when exactly any changes would go into effect and whether the district will adopt a waiver system for families for whom the change is a distinct hardship.

Lentz said the group is also looking at reviewing the boundaries more regularly going forward.

There are two remaining public sessions on the current proposal, one on Oct. 29 at United Way on Forest Avenue, and one on Oct. 30 that will be virtual, both at 6 p.m.

The committee is expected to make its final recommendations on the boundary changes in November, after which the school board will vote.