An education department effort to spread gifted and talented programs around the city and to make the system more equitable could end up destroying one such Upper West Side program that has been a model of diversity, parents at the school say.

To the dismay of parents with children enrolled at P.S. 145, the gifted program there is slowly dying as a result of a Department of Education crackdown two years ago to prevent parents from applying from out of district, a longstanding regulation that had been only laxly enforced on the Upper West Side. The idea was to bring equity to a system under which parents from other neighborhoods had been able to finagle their children’s way into the area’s choice programs. One of the results was that many gifted and talented programs were dominated by white and middle class students.

Not at P.S. 145, parents say.

“They want to have cultural diversity and racial diversity, and that’s what we have here,” the school’s Parent Teacher Association president, Jennifer Naggar, said.

The school is located on the northern edge of the Upper West Side, and before the 2004 crackdown word of P.S. 145’s gifted program had traveled through Harlem, Washington Heights, and the South Bronx, districts that had fewer gifted and talented programs or none at all. The school had successfully drawn a mix of students from various socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, including a handful of students who were living in homeless shelters, Ms. Naggar said.

After the revival of the district restriction, P.S. 145 couldn’t attract enough students from the neighborhood to fill a kindergarten class in the gifted program. This year, there was no kindergarten class and no first grade.

“Parents from District 3 don’t opt for us,” Ms. Naggar said, referring to the Upper West Side. “It’s killing our program.”

Gifted programs have long been seen as a way to attract middle class families to the city’s public schools. The crackdown on out-of-district enrollments, meanwhile, was seen as a way to make the programs more equitable and diverse, and was coupled with an effort to spread gifted programs around the city. The education department has since opened 15 new programs; each of the 32 districts now has at least one.

That P.S. 145’s gifted program may fade away is perhaps an unintended result, but the education department isn’t planning to save it.

“Maybe the community can’t support filling the programs,” the executive director of Gifted and Talented Programs for the education department, Anna Commintante, said. “We’re trying to equalize the number of programs. Right now, there’s terribly unequal distribution.”

There are nine public gifted programs on the Upper West Side. A few are particularly popular among Upper West Side parents, who sometimes opt to send their children to private schools if they don’t get into them.

A parent of a second-grader in P.S. 145’s gifted program who lives in Harlem, Wandalee Cruz-Gonzalez, has fought to save the program, sending letters to school superintendents and the chancellor.

“How are you going to preach one thing and take it all away at the same time?” she said. “When they’re talking about diversity, P.S. 145 already has all these things.”

She enrolled her oldest daughter in kindergarten in 2004, and had planned on sending her younger daughter there. The district restrictions have meant she must send her youngest to a new program, more than 30 blocks away from P.S. 145. Part of the reason she wants her children to attend the same school is convenience, but she also likes the program.

“It’s an excellent program,” she said. “I’m very satisfied.”

P.S. 145 gifted students have performed well on standardized tests, according to the PTA, with 95% of third- and fourth-graders passing statewide math and reading tests in 2005.

The director of the Hunter College Center for Gifted Studies and Education, Dona Matthews, has taught several of the P.S. 145 teachers and also says the program is excellent.

“They’re some of my strongest teachers,” she said. “It speaks well of the school.”

At the same time, she says she understands the education department’s attempts to make the entire system more equitable. She offered one solution that could save P.S. 145.

“We should not be really thinking district-wide, but what school is closest” to a child’s house, she said.

For now, the department says it is focusing on spreading resources around the city, meaning the gifted program at P.S. 145 will have to fend for itself. “We believe in the end we are doing the right thing for children,” Ms. Commintante said.