The invasion will begin in late August, 1993.

A vanguard of some 250 junior and senior class high school students will storm into the normally sedate and decorous galleries, theatres and studios of the Spirit Square Center for the Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A monster field trip - the kind that make docents and security folk tremble? A big league form of cultural saturation to imbue a taste for the arts?

No. The 250 feisty kids will be going to school. From 8:30 a.m., five days a week, one of the community's major cultural facilities, located in the heart of center city's cultural district, will become a bona fide public schoolhouse. It will have all the traditional trappings: a principal, a faculty, an assortment of classrooms.

But a traditional school it is not. It is an Arts Magnet School. And the perpetrators of the Magnet - the Board of Education and the District Superintendent - recognized that a collaboration with an existing arts resource would more efficiently, effectively and economically serve the purpose of a learning environment for uncommonly talented teenagers. (p. 1)

The concept of an Arts Magnet School - a strategy that incorporates the disciplines of basic education with intensive training in art, music, dance and theater - is certainly not a Charlotte, North Carolina, invention. They are all over the country - Washington, D.C., Cincinnati, Dallas, Milwaukee, Ft. Lauderdale, even the South Bronx.