Amid the hustle and bustle of a rejuvenated downtown Dallas, there’s something missing, says Downtown Dallas Inc. CEO Kourtny Garrett.

Schools.

“We find that people want to stay downtown, but we need to provide them the things that they need to have in order to do that,” she said.

Garrett’s organization is trying to change that — and not just through cajoling or negotiating.

On Dec. 19, Garrett’s organization submitted a proposal through Dallas ISD’s public school choice application process, asking to open a pre-kindergarten through eighth grade Montessori school in the city’s center.

Their reason was simple: The demand is there.

The district, though, isn’t as certain.

For the past four years, DISD’s Office of Transformation and Innovation has thrown an open casting call for interested parties to submit plans for new campuses. The Public School Choice process has spawned some of the district’s best success stories, such as all-girls science and engineering elementary Solar Prep and Hulcy STEAM Middle school.

According to the district, 26 teams were working on proposals for this year’s process, 19 of them redesigns of existing neighborhood schools. DISD’s budget allows for one start-up and two redesigns per school year.

The bottom-up approach, created by former chiefs Mike Koprowski and Mohammed Choudhury, is rooted in the idea that educators will be more vested in the success of a school and more innovative in its implementation and operation if they are the creators of it.

Garrett admits she’s coming at the process from a unique angle.

“We’re a little bit different, in that we’re not coming at it as educators,” Garrett said. “But we definitely are smart planners and understand what neighborhoods need. So we’ve leaned on some great education resources to put the proposal together, and now it’s in. We’ll see where it takes us.”

The submitted proposal is the culmination of a six-year process, when Downtown Dallas Inc. first commissioned an education task force, she said.

“First, so much of our efforts were about bringing residential back, and then following it with retail — more things to do, more services,” Garrett said. “And as that residential population has really begun to grow, then the need for more education resources has become very apparent.”

Trying to extrapolate how many children, young families and young couples are downtown is an inexact science, though.

Garrett’s group estimates that there are over 7,000 adults between 25 and 44 living downtown, basing calculations on census projections and housing unit counts. That number is likely to spike in the coming years, she said, and that’s not even considering the massive growth within a 2-mile radius, which includes parts of Uptown, Oak Lawn, Deep Ellum, Trinity Groves and the Cedars.

Yet, without enough elementary school options — currently there are two charter campuses, Pegasus School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Uplift Luna, and no DISD elementaries — families are leaving once their children hit school age, Garrett said.

Population estimates from the American Community Survey, which serves as a proxy for census figures, show a significant population dip in the 5-9 age range and a similar drop for those in their early 30s, Garrett said.

“Speaking retail lingo, we have leakage,” she added. “We have an opportunity to capture new kids into the district if we can provide them with what they need and they don’t have to leave.”

While Garrett doesn’t think it’s likely that residential numbers alone could sustain the start-up of a pre-K through 8th grade campus, she pointed to Dallas’ commuter community as another source of students.

“We have 135,000 people working downtown, and the ability to be able to bring your child close to where you work is appealing for a number of reasons: Your child gets sick, you get to spend more time with them during commuting, more access to public education, and so forth,” Garrett said.

DISD’s innovation chief, Billy Snow, loves the idea of downtown schools, too. In fact, earlier this year during a board meeting, Snow floated the idea of having four different specialty schools, such as Montessori and STEAM, in the downtown corridor.

The concept was met with skepticism by trustees — and for good reason.

DISD’s experience in downtown and nearby neighborhoods hasn’t all been stellar.

While the district’s performing arts high school magnet Booker T. Washington has thrived in the Arts District, CityLab — an urban design and planning high school not far from City Hall — hasn’t met enrollment projections. The school, in its first year, had space for an incoming freshman class of 120 students, but only 80 are enrolled.

Superintendent Michael Hinojosa also pointed to two elementary schools in Oak Lawn: Ben Milam and Sam Houston. Despite burgeoning development in those areas, enrollment has dwindled.

“I’m all gung-ho, and interested for downtown to happen,” Hinojosa said. “I live in Uptown, and I see a lot of those possibilities. But then I see where Sam Houston and Milam, which are very close to downtown, are under-enrolled.

“So, I’m looking at it with a skeptical — but excited — lens.”

Snow now admits that four schools aren’t “realistic at this time,” but he hasn’t given up on the area.

His department is in the final stages of completing a market analysis of the entire district, looking at all the possible pools of students, including commuters. The district will pair that information with a map that pinpoints the types of programs DISD offers, allowing Snow to highlight which parts of the city are in need of specific types of innovative programming.

In early 2018, DISD will also create five task forces for the “brands” of schools DISD wants to develop: entrepreneur; leadership and languages; single-gender; STEAM; and visual and performing arts.

Snow hopes the changes will help streamline and target the application process.

“Our mission is to become a premier urban school district, and I think when you look at the things that we’re doing right with innovation, like the early college high schools and the choice schools and the magnet programs, you already have a lot of people super-interested in those,” Snow said.

“I think that Dallas’ economy, when the city’s trying to work on a proposal for Amazon, and you have so much construction, Dallas is just one of the premier cities in America. We have an opportunity, with the current focus on innovation, to offer certain choices to people that they will respond to.”

If the growth of school options is going to happen downtown, DISD will likely have to be the driving force.

Sara Ortega, director of communications for Uplift Education, said the Luna Primary School campus near the West End is near capacity. With the recent opening of Uplift White Rock Hills, at Interstate 30 and Ferguson Road, further expansion downtown is unlikely, she added.

Garrett is hopeful that her submission will stand out, but she understands why DISD might be a little skittish, because “downtown is a new market.”

“Asking an institution like Dallas ISD to understand where we are headed, I understand what kind of ask that is,” Garrett said. “But this is not slowing down. Where Dallas is growing is in its urban center, and if we want to sustain that, we need to build that complete neighborhood that includes schools.”