Portland Public Schools will

for freshmen who want to transfer in from other neighborhoods with lower-achieving high schools.

The upshot is that nearly all current eighth-graders in Portland Public Schools will have to attend their neighborhood high school next fall, a big change from recent years when transferring to

,

or

high school was routine for students living well north or east of those sought-after high schools.

That is an intentional move by school district leaders, who are trying to create similar-sized high schools with equitable course offerings in every part of town.

Currently, the nine neighborhood high schools range in size from 400 to 1,600 and some lack band, vocational courses or a spectrum of Advanced Placement classes -- offerings the school board has said will be found in every neighborhood high school starting this fall.

Today is the first day that Portland students and families can

The final day to enter is Feb. 28.

The widest open choices for high school students are to try for a spot at

, which will admit 240 freshmen for this fall, or at

.

Girls also can apply to attend the

a sixth- through 12th-grade all-girls magnet school. In addition, three charter schools in Portland serve high school-aged students.

Students wanting to transfer to Cleveland, Wilson or Franklin high schools are out of luck, however. Those schools are considered full to the brim with neighborhood residents and, for the first time in decades, have no open slots for transfer students.

Grant and Lincoln will also be tough for out-of-neighborhood students to attend. Each of those schools has just 25 open slots for freshmen, and those spots are almost certain to be taken by the students who have first dibs on them -- those who live in the Roosevelt or Jefferson attendance zones, who are entitled to federally mandated transfer rights under the No Child Left Behind law.

In recent years, most students living in the Jefferson, Roosevelt, Marshall and Madison attendance boundaries have attended other high schools. Partly as a result, those four high schools have had a concentration of low-income students, small enrollments and gaps in their curricular offerings.

The school board voted last fall to close Marshall, convert Jefferson to a small college-oriented magnet, shrink Benson and drive more students to attend high school in their own neighborhood.

Madison and Franklin are expected have significantly larger enrollments this fall, due primarily to the closure of Marshall, and Roosevelt also is projected to gain students.

-