At Wilson, by contrast, half as many students are living in poverty and about 60 percent are proficient in math and reading. About half of its students are black; white and Hispanic students each constitute about one-fifth of the population.

Parents who live firmly within Wilson’s boundaries also worry that changes will lead to a whiter and more affluent school, further segregating a system with few diverse schools.

“What I would like for my son is to have the opportunity to go to a high-quality diverse school,” said Ken Archer, a Georgetown father of a 4-year-old.

Archer is among several parents who are pushing the school system to confront overcrowding as part of the school closure and consolidation discussion. They propose moving Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a selective magnet school in Northwest, to Roosevelt High, one of the system’s under-enrolled high school campuses in Northwest.

Roosevelt could be renovated to provide an appropriate venue for an arts school that is centrally located near a Metro station, they argue, and Ellington’s current building could become a neighborhood high school, providing west-of-the-park seats that would be attractive to a wide range of families.