PROVIDENCE — Members of the Nathan Bishop Design Subcommittee had a choice: they could recommend turning the East Side middle school into a place that attracts high-performing students from the largely affluent East Side or they could create a school that would welcome children from less privileged backgrounds.

The subcommittee chose to recommend a more inclusive school, according to one of its members, Sam Zurier. If approved by the School Board, the new Nathan Bishop will offer what Zurier calls an À la carte menu of advanced classes. The subcommittee didn’t want Nathan Bishop to compete with the traditional gifted and talented program at Nathanael Greene Middle School, in which gifted students are enrolled in a separate strand of classes.

The subcommittee, composed mostly of East Side parents, decided not to create another gifted and talented program, despite the fact that a 2001 Brown University study found that 60 percent of private school parents would be drawn to this feature.

In the subcommittee’s report, members wrote that creating a separate track for gifted students could lead to an “in” group and an “out” group, with lower expectations for some students. Members also worried that a traditional advanced academic program could exclude neighborhood children who would not be able to meet the admission standards for a traditional gifted program. Finally, the subcommittee also questioned whether Providence could sustain more than one gifted and talented program.

“Some of our parents had applied to Green and been unsuccessful,” Zurier said. “We thought that we’d have a better chance of attracting those kids if there wasn’t a barrier to admissions.”

Last spring, Supt. Donnie Evans named a committee of 20 parents, educators and community leaders to study the future of Nathan Bishop. Evans decided to close the school for one year, citing, among other things, its poor academic performance. His initial plans called for bringing ninth and 10th tenth graders to the school to solve a high school overcrowding problem, but he backed down after a vocal group of neighbors turned out to oppose the idea.

Meanwhile, several East Side parents, dismayed that the city’s only East Side middle school was closing, asked Evans if they could come up with a plan to reopen the school. One of the committee’s goals was to build a school that would attract East Side families to the public schools.

“In any given year, there are 250 private school kids applying for ninth grade at Classical High School,” Zurier said. On the East Side, two-thirds of the school-age children attend private school and many families leave Providence once their children are ready for school. As Zurier said, “The hope is that we would stop losing these kids.”

The new Nathan Bishop would work like this: a student could take an advanced class in one subject, English for instance, even if he or she wasn’t doing stellar work in other subject areas. The subcommittee hasn’t worked out the details of how a child would be admitted into an advanced class, but Zurier said the decision would most likely involve collaboration between the teacher, parent and student.

“We found some very persuasive literature about schools that teach [advanced placement] Spanish to Latino students,” Zurier said. “That’s been a powerful experience for those students.”

Recruiting students would generally follow the district’s so-called controlled choice plan, in which the school sets aside 75 percent of its seats for students who live within a 1.5-mile radius. The subcommittee, however, would like to expand that zone to include the greater East Side, which would extend the zone to North Main Street and Fox Point. Fifteen percent of the school’s enrollment would come from students who live outside this zone and 10 percent would be admitted in connection with the district’s desegregation goals.

“This is going to be a neighborhood school,” Zurier said. “The idea is that the greater East Side is a diverse neighborhood. Are the number of minorities on the East Side the same as in South Providence? No. But it does seem to be a slice of the city.”

The full Nathan Bishop Committee has recommended that the school remain a grade 6 through grade 8 building, not a kindergarten through grade 8 school, which Evans is moving toward. The school would be small, with 100 students in each grade. It would have advisories, in which a teacher meets weekly with a group of 15 students, and the school would give the principal the authority to hire, and, in some cases, to remove staff.

Enrollment would be limited to 450 students because research has shown that smaller is better. Finally, the committee is recommending that the school open in stages, with sixth graders arriving the first year, seventh graders the second and so on.