Three years into a school-choice overhaul designed to steer students to schools closer to home, St. Paul has yet to embrace its local elementaries.

Some of the least-wanted St. Paul Public Schools options for incoming kindergarteners are community schools that used to be magnets. Once able to offer free busing to a wide area of the city, those schools now must rely on parents to buy into the notion that the best place for their child to learn is just down the street.

For the Hamline-Midway neighborhood, that’s been a hard sell, especially for white families. The area is about 72 percent white, according to the latest census estimates, but only 11 percent of Hamline Elementary School and 5 percent of Galtier Community School students are white.

Mara Martinson, a Galtier PTO member whose daughter just finished preschool there, said her neighbors are happy to start their kids in a local preschool but look elsewhere for kindergarten.

“It’s almost like Galtier and Hamline aren’t even in the vernacular,” she said.

Clayton Howatt was certain he would send his daughter to Adams Spanish Immersion School, three miles from home, before buying into the community school model and choosing Galtier. Howatt said he visits Galtier often because it’s so convenient. He said he knows the other students’ names and feels involved in his daughter’s education.

As for why more parents don’t consider local schools first, Howatt said the mind-set seems to be, “My kid is extra special, so I need to find the program and city that’s perfect for them.”

In 2011 and 2012, the St. Paul school district identified several magnet schools as having weak programming, poor test scores or little racial diversity, and converted them to community schools as part of Superintendent Valeria Silva’s Strong Schools, Strong Communities strategy. Officials expected students would perform better in neighborhood schools by benefiting from increased parent involvement.

“If you talk to some of the old-timers, they say that’s what’s missing from our schools,” said Jackie Turner, the school district’s chief engagement officer.

But according to data from the district’s placement center, parents of incoming kindergartners continue to prefer magnets over community schools. Magnets accounted for 53 percent of all first- and second-choice schools on enrollment applications this spring.

In 2012, Galtier’s last year as a science, math and technology magnet, just 10 incoming kindergarten families listed the school as their first or second choice. In each of the three years since, that number has been eight or nine.

The district has helped fill the school by renovating the building, marketing the program to a nearby apartment complex and adding preschool seats with the expectation that some of those families would stick around for kindergarten.

Nearby Hamline Elementary was called Hancock-Hamline University Collaborative Magnet when it housed a program for English language learners. Students at Hamline University just across Snelling Avenue continue to help out at the school, but the districtwide magnet label is gone, and so are many of the students. The families of only nine new kindergartners made Hamline a top-two choice for the fall, down from 33 in 2012.

Enrollment projections for the coming school year called for only one kindergarten teacher, a red flag for the school’s long-term viability. Parents successfully lobbied for a second teacher and promised to recruit more students, but as of last week, they remained 15 kindergartners short of two full classes.

Meanwhile, the districtwide magnet Jie Ming Mandarin Immersion Academy housed inside Hamline’s building has blossomed and overtaken the community school in new enrollments. It was a top-two choice for 46 children entering kindergarten this fall.

During a community meeting last month at Hamline, neighborhood parents and others pondered the future of the Hamline-Midway schools. Some wanted to combine Hamline and Galtier, giving Jie Ming its own building and room to grow. Several said the community schools would keep more neighborhood students if they consistently offered art and music.

Others wondered what can be done to raise the schools’ reputations. They said residents remember discipline problems and major staff turnover at Galtier a few years ago and that Hamline gained a reputation for low test scores because so many of its students were learning English.

Hamline parent Jessica Kopp said she was impressed by the school on her first visit. She found funny, friendly teachers and liked the access students have to the nearby university.

“I kept thinking, how come this place isn’t flooded with people?” she said.

Turner, the district’s engagement officer, has been working with the group and said there is no clear direction for what will happen with the Hamline-Midway schools. The area has much more building capacity than students, she said, but the demographics aren’t so far off that there will be a need to close a school anytime soon.

Turner said the area has “all the ingredients” for strong community schools, and the district wants to support the parents’ efforts.

“It’s a great community; it’s an involved community, so what can we do together?” she said.

In preparing for an enrollment campaign, the district recently identified the four schools where the gap between enrollment and capacity was the largest: Galtier, Hamline, Cherokee Heights and Riverview. Each is a community school, and each had only nine kindergarten applications making the school their first or second choice this spring.

In hopes of boosting enrollment, the district will run local advertisements, design brochures, set up meet-and-greets with principals and recruit at local events.

As Hamline and Galtier face uncertain futures, Cherokee Heights’ days as a community school are numbered. The West Side school has been chosen for conversion to a Montessori magnet school, starting perhaps as early as this fall.

Like those in Hamline-Midway, the reputations of West Side schools have not recovered under Strong Schools, Strong Communities. Rebecca Noecker, who leads the group West Siders for Strong Schools, said she believes in St. Paul’s community schools approach but doesn’t blame parents for shopping around.

“The problem is the ‘strong,’ ” Noecker said. “You have to have strong neighborhood schools, and if they’re not strong, parents are going to choose what’s best for their kid.”

Josh Verges can be reached at 651-228-2171. Follow him at twitter.com/ua14.

PICKING ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

These are the most and least popular St. Paul public elementary schools, based on No. 1 or 2 rankings on school-choice applications for incoming 2015-16 kindergartners:

Most popular

— Adams Spanish Immersion Magnet, 148

— St. Anthony Park community, 111

— EXPO community, 108

— Randolph Heights community, 100

— Horace Mann community, 87

Least popular

— Jackson community, 6

— Maxfield community, 6

— Highwood Hills community, 7

— Obama magnet, 7

— Dayton’s Bluff community, 8