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The Prince George's County school board is expected to consider today a plan to create a gender-separated contract school in the county, which could open in the fall and eventually serve more than 500 students.

According to a proposal posted on the board's agenda for its meeting, the school system would partner with Imagine Schools to create the Imagine Boys and Girls Academy of Prince George's County, a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school, which will add one grade each year to eventually become a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school. If the school is fully enrolled, it would serve about 520 students.

"This will be a model where teachers know they're teaching an all-boys class or all-girls class; they can develop their lessons, their instruction and their teaching around how boys and girls learn most effectively," said Patrick Crain, Maryland regional director for Imagine Schools.

Contract schools are similar to charter schools in their operations and governance, except contract schools work more closely with the school system to develop a model for the school. Charter school operators present their ideas for a school to the board for approval or disapproval, without the collaboration.

The school would separate boys and girls for their core classes, including English, math, reading and social studies, and they would be together for lunch and special classes, Crain said.

School system officials could not be reached for comment.

Imagine Schools, a national charter school operator based in Arlington, Va., already operates Imagine Foundation Public Charter School in Upper Marlboro. The separate charter school would not be affected by the new school.

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Education released guidelines that allowed schools to offer single-sex classes in traditional public schools that serve both boys and girls. Previously, public schools were generally prohibited from offering single-sex classes because of Title IX, a 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools.

Schools are required to provide equal treatment to male and female students, and parents must be able to opt for a co-educational environment for their children if they choose to do so.

Students would enter Imagine Boys and Girls Academy through the same annual lottery process that students enter to get into the county's "choice" schools, including charter, language immersion, performing arts and Montessori schools.

Crain said Imagine Schools has several schools in other states and Washington, D.C. that have used the model. He said schools using this model have seen an improvement in test scores, behavior and overall self-confidence of the students.

Crain said the structure of the school would allow for a transition between a mostly single-sex school day in the contract school and a traditional, co-educational high school for students when they reach the ninth grade.

"I think the important thing to realize is we're going to create enough opportunities within the school day for students to interact with one another, that if students chose to go to another environment that was co-educational, we believe based on the opportunities we've provided, students would be well-adjusted, and in some ways, better off because of the structured opportunities we've created," Crain said.

This is not the county's first foray into single-sex education, Drew-Freeman Middle School in Suitland, a school that has struggled in the past with low standardized test passing rates, has experimented this year with separating boys and girls for their core academic classes.

Charles Wilson, principal of Drew-Freeman, gave the pilot plan a "C+" for its first year and said he hopes the school system will be able to provide more professional development for teachers on how to handle gender-separated classrooms. Only a limited amount of training was available for teachers due to the budget difficulties.

Although Wilson has not yet received the school's standardized test scores, he said the school's suspension rate is down and parental participation in school conferences is up. He said a few of the all-boys classes had to go back to being co-educational due to behavior problems, but overall, the separation has been popular with the girls in the school.

"This was a pilot plan, the first time it had ever been done in the county, and overall, I'm happy to do it again next year," Wilson said.

This school year, boys and girls were separated for core classes in seventh grade, and next year, the plan will expand to include both seventh and eighth grades.

David M. Sadker, professor emeritus at American University in Washington, D.C., and co-author of "Still Failing at Fairness: How Gender Bias Cheats Girls and Boys and What We Can Do About It," argues that separating boys and girls is a quick solution to a complex problem, but it's the wrong solution. He said single-sex schools give parents "false hope" that schools will improve simply by separating the sexes.

"The answer needs to be on fixing co-ed schools, so a quiet girl gets a chance to be heard, so class sizes get smaller, so our teachers can focus more on how to help each student," Sadker said.

Sadker also said there is a danger in single-sex education that teachers will teach from their background, drawing from experience with gender stereotypes such as that boys like to compete, girls would rather cooperate, boys like to move, or girls prefer to learn in a sedentary environment.

"They don't fit into the stereotype, they don't fit into the class," Sadker said. "It's just not based on research."

E-mail Megan King at mking@gazette.net.