Right there in Columbia, just below Lake Elkhorn in the Village of Owen Brown, sits an island called Hopewell.

It isn't surrounded by water and it doesn't have any sand worth mentioning, but it's not that kind of island. It's a residential island - bordered by commercial property and the lake - but those who live there say they feel just as abandoned as if they had been dropped in the middle of the sea.

An elementary school boundary line decision made more than a quarter of a century ago is to blame, and Hopewell residents say now is the time to overturn it, while redistricting is again on the table.

They have organized community meetings to discuss the situation, lobbied the Howard County Board of Education and sat down with School Boundary Line Committee members to offer potential solutions.

They have grown increasingly frustrated with the responses they are given, which basically mirror this one:

"I feel terrible for Hopewell, really," said David C. Drown, who provides technical guidance in the current elementary and middle school redistricting process. "I'm sympathetic to their plight, but the fix is worse than the current ill."

In the mid-1970s, Columbia and Owen Brown were being built out, and Hopewell built up. Schools were opening sometimes at the rate of five a year, and they were filling fast.

As families moved into Hopewell, the school board had to decide where to send their children to school because, it turned out, the nearest elementary schools - Dasher Green and Guilford - were full. The only school that had room was Talbott Springs, which is three to five miles away, depending upon where one lives in Hopewell.

The Hopewell children were sent there and have been since, earning them the "island" designation because they are pupils from outside Talbott Springs' home district.

"In the end, the feeling is that we're just fit in where there's space, and that doesn't seem like beneficial methodology," said Hopewell resident Doug Cable, who has two children.

He and his neighbors want what they say everyone else has: a neighborhood school.

They want this, some say, because research shows that having schools in the community encourages parental involvement, and it is the fair thing.

Others say they do not want their children to go to Talbott Springs because they do not like its less-than-stellar test scores, a stance that has caused further division among neighbors and children.

Nearby Stevens Forest Elementary had too few pupils for years, and the school system allowed children from other areas to go there through open enrollment to fill the classrooms. Many in Hopewell took advantage of the loophole to avoid sending their children to Talbott Springs.

Later, others followed, sending their children to Stevens Forest because their friends did, splitting the community's children between two schools. Of Hopewell's children in kindergarten through fourth grade (the group used to decide elementary school boundaries), about 90 pupils go to Talbott Springs and 25 to Stevens Forest, Drown said.

"We already have this Balkanized district," said Andrew Olek, a Hopewell resident whose two children have not reached school age, "and it's further divided by the fact of open enrollment."

Some Hopewell residents were optimistic about this round of redistricting.

An equity report prepared by school and community representatives in 2000 recommended "eliminating all islands by creating contiguous districts." Residents were sure this would provide relief as the boundary line committee weighed redistricting options.

But when the committee passed its recommendations to the school board, the preferred plan offered no fix for Hopewell, and the alternate, which did, seemed too fraught with problems to ever be enacted.

"One of these plans leaves us as an island, and the other makes us an outlying peninsula," said Steven Ferraro, whose eldest daughter is in eighth grade at Owen Brown Middle School and youngest one is in second grade at Talbott Springs.

Ferraro says he loves Talbott Springs, that his girls have gotten a great education there. But he said he would move his second-grader to a closer school if it were in the community.

Some Hopewell parents want Dasher Green Elementary to be the home school. Others support Jeffers Hill.

Still others want a school to be built on land the school system owns but has not used. Drown said four such parcels are available in Columbia, with the biggest being 10 acres - shy of the desired 15 acres. But building a school in Columbia is not an option, most say.

"It's not going to happen," said Jane B. Schuchardt, school board chairwoman. "We don't need the seats there; we need seats in other places."

Moving all of Hopewell's pupils into Dasher Green or Jeffers Hill is not possible because neither has the room, Drown said. The school system would have to bump 600 pupils to make room for Hopewell's.

"If we've got to go through this painful process of redistricting, why can't we get it over with in a way that makes sense?" Ferraro said. "We're going to move all these kids from place to place anyway. ... Let's make the moves worthwhile."

The feeder system into middle school needs fixing, too.

Pupils from Talbott Springs generally attend Oakland Mills Middle, but Hopewell pupils are districted to Owen Brown Middle, which means that next year its 30 or so fifth-graders will be the only Talbott Springs (or Stevens Forest) pupils to go to Owen Brown.

The appropriate action, parents say, would be to send the elementary children to Dasher Green or Jeffers Hill, or to reassign Hopewell to Oakland Mills as a last resort. But that would interfere with the high school feeds later.

"They need to slow the process down," said Bob Grandfield, whose has two middle-schoolers and one child open-enrolled at Stevens Forest.

"They're trying to ramrod this through by Nov. 21. I don't know what the mad rush is. We still have an untenable situation, and it doesn't seem like they've really looked at it hard enough."