Pittsburgh Public Schools officials, responding to parents' concerns, last night proposed changing several elements of their original plan to close or move 16 schools.

The changes to the plan announced March 4 include moving Miller Elementary School's African-centered program intact to Milliones Middle School, also in the Hill District, rather than "infusing" it into two other elementary schools, and making several elementary schools into kindergarten-to-eighth grade facilities.

The proposed changes are school officials' effort to reshape their plan after listening to about 100 parents, students and teachers at a March 22 public hearing on the proposed closings, according to Deputy Superintendent Andrew King.

"We think this will work," King said. "We think this is what parents want. We think this is what they're asking for."

Several parents at last night's meeting, however, shook their heads and sighed deeply as administrators rolled out their revised plan.

The changes don't do anything to help students at Horace Mann Elementary in the North Side, where parents staged a protest rally on Wednesday, Darlene Yaras said later.

Yaras said she plans to pull her daughter, Stacey, out of Pittsburgh Public Schools and move out of the city.

"I'm not sending my daughter to a school where I have to put her on a bus and send her to a neighborhood where people are getting shot at every day," said Yaras, whose daughter would attend Manchester Elementary School.

School officials, however, are hoping the changes they proposed last night will mollify many angry parents and even attract new students into the public school system.

School officials have not decided when to vote on the revisions.

The proposed changes include:

Adding a public safety magnet program at Langley High School in Sheraden and adding a purely academic lyceum, or college-preparatory, academy to the school for students who don't want to take classes in Langley's other career-training classes in health, horticulture, advanced manufacturing and teaching.

Creating an interdisciplinary studies program at Langley to carry the school's career-development theme into grades six to eight that the district plans to move there from Greenway Middle School in Crafton Heights.

Providing a performing and fine arts emphasis, beginning with pre-kindergarten, at the new Homewood Elementary School.

Keeping vocational programs in auto body repair; commercial art; plumbing; refrigeration, heating, ventilation and air conditioning; and welding at South Vocational-Technical High School's south annex on the South Side. The main building still will close.

Making Burgwin, Martin Luther King, Miller, Murray and Colfax elementary schools into K-8 facilities, and creating a Spanish-centered program -- but not a magnet program -- at Colfax in Squirrel Hill.

Those changes are meant to give parents more options, said board member Randall Taylor.

In regard to the K-8 proposal, Taylor said the board needs to hear from experts and then thoroughly debate the merits mixing children of such different ages, potentially exposing younger children to dangerous behavior, he said.

He attended a K-8 school and had a great experience, Taylor said, but that was a long time ago.

"Yes, we want to listen to parents, listen to everyone, but this is a new day and a new century," Taylor said. "There are things that happen now in schools that parents didn't have to be concerned about many years ago, when I went to school."