A “baby Booker T” arts school in South Dallas and a Montessori campus downtown are poised to launch next year as school officials near finalizing plans.

Administrators laid out timelines for the two schools at Thursday’s board briefing saying that the two will give the community choices and bring more equity to long neglected South Dallas.

Over the years, DISD has prioritized creating niche schools in order to lure back families or prevent them from fleeing the district in the first place.

But opportunities in the South Dallas area have been sparse.

Now officials say they have a “holistic” plan for schools in the area that begins with converting the Martin Luther King Jr. Learning Center into a new school for the arts for prekindergarten through eighth grade. It will be modeled after the much-touted Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts that has gained national recognition for its talent development and rigorous academics.

Officials stressed that students who attend the MLK arts program will not be guaranteed a slot at Booker T., which has admission largely based on auditions. But they hoped that giving students early access to an art-infused curriculum would better their chances to compete.

Board President Justin Henry, who represents that area, praised the proposal.

“When you put more opportunities out there, people want to go. And I hope they end up on Broadway and not Booker T,” Henry said of future MLK students. “But they don’t get that unless we invest in them.”

DISD had tried to move the MLK plans forward using a partnership with a nonprofit but scrapped those plans in October because of timing, officials said then.

Under current plans, MLK students would have access to the nearby Forest Theater where students could use the dance studio and performance stage. Other nearby elementary schools will be able to use the theater for enrichment programs as well.

Current students would be grandfathered into the MLK arts school. Future students who live in what is now the MLK attendance boundary would be zoned to the Paul L. Dunbar Learning Center but would have to opt out of MLK. Dunbar, in turn, would become a specialty school likely focused on science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.

Some families from nearby areas had expressed frustration in recent months that other projects were moving forward while their areas were ignored.

So Thursday, officials laid out plans for students for the J.J. Rhoads Learning Center to move into a reopened H.S. Thompson Elementary by August 2021.

Thompson was shut down in 2012 when the board closed nine schools because of tight budgets and dwindling enrollment. Past efforts to reopen the campus went nowhere.

After hearing community feedback this spring, officials now want to open Thompson as a STEAM school, which is similar to STEM with an added arts focus. Rhoads would then become an early childhood learning center for 3- and 4-year-olds.

And in the 2020 bond package under development, officials want to include funding to expand Rhoads so that it could also serve children younger than 3 as well and offer social services through a youth and family center at the campus.

Trustees praised the proposals, saying they will help close the equity gap that exists between South Dallas and the rest of the district, particularly for African American children.

“It’s great for our kids. … It looks like the district is investing in the areas we’ve been asking them to invest in,” Trustee Maxie Johnson said.

The board is expected to vote on MLK’s transformation this month with future votes related to the new Thompson coming early next year.

This month trustees also plan to vote on moving forward on a lease agreement with the University of North Texas System so that DISD can use part of its building for a Montessori school.

Officials want to open the new Montessori campus serving prekindergarten through second grade, which would be housed on the third and fourth floors of the system’s building on Main Street. It would be temporarily based out of university system until officials find a permanent home.

Demand for Montessori schools has been high, officials said. DISD received about 2,000 applications for 400 seats available at the four existing Montessori campuses in the district. The downtown site would start with about 300 slots.

The new campus would cost the district about $1.2 million for the first year, mostly for rent and startup resources.

If trustees approve the plan as expected, applications for the school would open in January. Priority would be given to students who live downtown and then to those whose parents work downtown but live within the district.

Correction, 8 a.m. Dec. 9, 2019: This story has been updated to correct that the new Montessori school would be housed out of the UNT System building on Main Street, not the UNT Dallas College of Law building.