Hundreds of Cooper City parents, determined to sway the Broward school district from changing boundaries for Pioneer Middle School, protested at a public meeting Wednesday evening by wearing red, carrying signs and dumping scores of letters and a 732-signature petition at the feet of district representatives.

``We spent a lifetime building our community . . . what the School Board proposes will rip that apart,'' said parent Charles Cutler, whose two children attend Pioneer. The meeting at McArthur High in Hollywood, led by the School Boundaries Department, was the first of four to bring area residents up to date on boundary change proposals aimed to ease overcrowding in the west and fill empty desks in the east and north.

The issue has grown so controversial that part of the crowd at the meeting was directed to sit in bleachers in the school gymnasium, where parents watched on closed-circuit TV.

Leslie Brown, the district's executive director of educational programs, said the proposed changes stem from state and local government mandates that require schools to operate at no more than 110 percent of capacity -- not counting portable classrooms -- by school year 2011-12.

``The school boundary process does not operate in isolation. It is not a one-track train,'' Brown said.

Florida residents voted in 2000 for mandatory class-size reductions, and in 2005 the state Legislature ruled that cities, counties and schools work together on concurrency of growth, which means that new communities could not be developed unless schools could be built or existing schools could be expanded to hold more students.

The latest school survey conducted by the Florida Department of Education last year put the breaks on new construction in Broward. It concluded that new schools or additions were not necessary because student enrollment had decreased. Demographers estimate that county public schools will have up to 35,000 empty desks in the east by school year 2013-14.

The proposed solution: Meet school capacity requirements by busing students from schools out west to schools in the east.

Pioneer, the first of the impacted schools, could lose 173 students to Pines Middle School in Pembroke Pines or Driftwood Elementary School in Hollywood. The change will begin a shift in school population at many overcrowded schools in the west to under-enrolled schools in the east. Some Pines Middle students would then be bused to Apollo Middle School. Elementary, middle and high schools in Weston, west Miramar, Sunrise and Davie are also scheduled for boundary changes to satisfy the 110 percent capacity mandate countywide.

Parents at Wednesday's meeting argued that children should not be counted as inanimate desks. And they promised to continue fighting against boundary changes for all schools.

``Our children are not numbers, not chess pieces to be moved around like a game. And they are certainly not domino pieces to topple west to east,'' said Doug Bartel, father of a Pioneer student.

Parents, students, Cooper City commissioners and Mayor Debby Eisinger pleaded to have state, county and city concurrency agreements changed to include portable classrooms. Meanwhile, they asked to delay the Pioneer boundary change for at least one year.

``It is our job to listen to our constituents,'' Eisinger told the board. ``We need a countywide solution that allows state law to be changed . . . the superintendent's proposal is not the solution.''

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