Officials of the Pittsburgh Public Schools yesterday said they're studying suspension of the open enrollment process for the next school year because they're concerned that the proposed closing of 20 schools would strain capacity at other buildings.

J. Kaye Cupples, executive director of support services, said the district is not currently accepting open enrollment applications for 2006-07.

Dr. Cupples said the district also is considering the possibility of reassigning to their feeder schools students already attending other schools under open enrollment.

Besides open enrollment transfers, he said, the district may review the cases of students who have been assigned to schools outside their feeder patterns because of medical reasons, safety concerns or family convenience.

Students in magnet school slots would not be affected.

"Feeder patterns" refer to the network of streets and neighborhoods from which a school draws students.

Traditionally, if a student wanted to attend a school outside his feeder pattern, and the school had excess seats, he or she could apply under the open enrollment program.

Sometimes, as with Colfax Spanish Academy in Squirrel Hill, parents like a school's reputation and want to enroll their children there. Dr. Cupples said transfer students were accepted on a first-come, first-served basis until the school ran out of seats.

While the district is not accepting applications for open enrollment, it will continue to accept transfer applications for medical reasons, safety concerns or other special circumstances, he said.

Dr. Cupples stressed district officials have had only preliminary conversations about transfer students and said he's "very confident parents are going to get the choices they need."

"If we don't have to move children, we're not going to move them," he said.

But the district's wavering didn't please Mary Catherine Dykhouse of North Point Breeze, whose son, Jacob Stuligross, is a kindergarten student at Colfax, close to his child-care provider.

"Unfortunately, we cannot wait while the school system plays roulette with Jacob's school assignment next year," she said in a letter to the school board. "If we want to secure a place for him in a private school, we must act immediately. Many private schools' application deadlines have already passed, and the magnet application period for the PPS has closed for this year."

Superintendent Mark Roosevelt has proposed closing 20 schools and reconfiguring more than a dozen others, saying the plan would save money and concentrate students in the district's higher-performing schools.

The plan would cut 8,400 classroom seats -- about 19 percent of the district's capacity -- and reassign thousands of students to different schools.

With so many students moving, Dr. Cupples said, it's not immediately clear whether remaining schools would have room for students who transfer voluntarily. He said administrators hope to have an answer soon.

"We're exploring the impact of the 'right-sizing' plan on all transfer students and have not arrived at a final recommendation. However, we will make every effort to accommodate the preferences of parents and guardians," Mr. Roosevelt said in a statement provided by Dr. Cupples.

For the first time in recent memory, the district yesterday conducted a lottery for 1,898 magnet slots without parents present.

About 2,560 students applied for slots this year. He said parents may call his office or the magnet schools for lottery results.