No sagging pants and grungy T-shirts will be allowed at this new Houston school.

Neither will bad attitudes.

And neither will girls.

This school, approved by the Houston board of trustees Thursday, will open next fall with only male students. The campus will start with sixth- and ninth-graders, who will have to apply to attend, and will grow annually to become a full middle and high school.

The boys at this new school in Houston's Fifth Ward will have to wear blazers and ties. They will take advanced courses, learn a foreign language and- the biggest expectation — go on to earn a college degree.

This will be the first all-boys school started directly by the Houston Independent School District, which last month announced plans to open an all-girls campus next year. The district has two other all-boys schools, but they are run by contractors and one is leaving HISD's umbrella to become a state charter school.

"We have to do something to save our young men of today," HISD Trustee Carol Mims Galloway said, noting that too many already have been in jail or are on track to land there.

The HISD board, at Galloway's request, postponed a vote on the all-boys school last month to allow more community meetings. Some in the historically black Fifth Ward were upset that the school would be housed at the E.O. Smith campus and would require students to apply - meaning the Smith students would be rezoned to other campuses.

Pastor Leonard Barksdale, of the Fifth Ward Missionary Baptist Church, told the school board Thursday that some community members still were upset that students would be displaced.

"They want me to let you know that they really love their community and they love their schools," Barksdale said. "And some have the perception that maybe this board does not know that."

Chicago school the model

Galloway said in an interview that the entrance requirements for the all-boys school have not been set, but she plans to advocate for reserving more than 50 percent of the seats for students from northeast Houston. The school will be modeled off the nationally touted Chicago Urban Prep Academy.

Christopher Whisler, an eighth-grader at E.O. Smith, told the board he's ready to sign up.

"I think the boys school is a great idea because, well, we will be able to concentrate more," he said, drawing laughter.

The number of public schools serving a single gender has exploded since 2002 thanks in part to a loosening of federal rules. Today, the United States has 95 single-gender schools and another 445 campuses that separate boys and girls for some courses, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.

Other all-boys schools

In addition to the all-boys schools in HISD, the charter network KIPP has an all-boys school and an all-girls campus in North Forest. The first two all-boys contract schools in HISD are Pro-Vision and the William A. Lawson Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

WALIPP, which opened 2002 and now is on the Texas Southern University campus, recently won approval to become a state charter school and to open an all-girls campus next year.

Unlike HISD's new single-sex campuses, the WALIPP schools don't have entrance requirements for students, according to Cheryl Lawson, the WALIPP executive director. Her father, the Rev. William Lawson of Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, founded the school.

"The boys always tell me, 'I just didn't want to come because there were no girls. But now that I'm here, I'm glad because I'm learning more,' " Cheryl Lawson said, adding that she expects the same reaction from the girls next year.

ericka.mellon@chron.com