Melissa Diaz, KIPP Houston alumna,
graduates from Columbia University

On September 7th, Ms. Diaz, fifth-grade Non-Fiction Studies teacher at KIPP Infinity, will meet her first students. Diaz graduated from Columbia University just weeks ago but can hardly wait to get into the classroom. As soon as she finishes her initial Teach For America training, she’ll join KIPP Infinity teacher Layla Bravo to begin her classroom experience and her KIPP-specific instruction. While this will be Diaz’s first teaching experience, this won’t be her first time in a KIPP classroom. In fact, Diaz is an alumna of KIPP Academy Houston. And it’s those middle school years with KIPP that Diaz credits with helping to shape both the work ethic and educational opportunities that allowed this recent graduate to have her pick of careers from Wall Street to Washington. This is precisely why she chose to return to KIPP. Diaz hopes to become a catalyst for students to discover their own unlimited options, dreaming beyond what they ever imagined for their lives.

Education has always been a priority for Melissa and her family. Diaz recalls her mother’s relentless search to find the very best middle school for her daughter. While researching school possibilities, Diaz’s mom found out about KIPP and the two attended an informational meeting for KIPP Academy Houston. There, they heard KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg and as Diaz explains they were “simply spellbound by Feinberg being Feinberg…telling the kids this is why you should want this [opportunity] for yourself.” Diaz started her sixth-grade year as a Houston KIPPster in 1999.

The boarding school experience

While KIPP certainly provided the academic challenges her mother hoped for, Diaz excelled. By eighth grade, Diaz was thinking about applying to some of the most competitive college prep programs in the country, let alone in Houston. With the encouragement of her family and the KIPP staff, Diaz secured admission to Connecticut’s Choate Rosemary Hall and received the Carl Icahn Scholarship to cover her tuition. For Diaz, leaving Houston and her family for four years of boarding school was an option she never could have imagined just three years earlier. While Diaz knows that her own hard work got her to Choate, she also knows that without KIPP she never would have even considered Choate as an option. As Diaz explains it, she “always had the ambition, but KIPP gave me the execution.”

Her four years at Choate weren’t always easy. The level of academic pressure was ratcheted up again, and Diaz jokes that she went from always being one of the brightest students in classes to being just one student in whole classrooms of the brightest students. At the same time, Diaz was acutely aware of standing out in a different way. She was the only Latino girl in her graduating class, which at 1,700 miles from home, was a distinction to which she was particularly sensitive. Despite these challenges, Diaz always felt supported by her KIPP community. And she held on closely to the idea that she “had worked so hard to get to Choate it would be a shame to not make the most of this opportunity.” Instead she excelled.

Melissa Diaz graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall with multiple college acceptance letters and hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarship offers. This was concrete proof for Diaz that “education opens doors you didn’t even know existed.”

Melissa at Choate Rosemary Hall H.S. graduation
with former KIPP teacher Elliott Witney and her sister

As Diaz reached the beginning of her senior year, a time when many of her peers are just beginning their job searches, she had her pick of career opportunities to consider: from returning to politics to continuing on to law school or graduate school. But none of those seemed the right fit for right now. While Diaz admits that working on the Obama campaign was “one of the most fulfilling and enriching experiences of [her] life,” and something she definitely plans on sharing with her students, she was more inspired by the campaign to try to change lives outside of politics. For Diaz, joining Teach For America was clearly the best choice for reaching that goal. She feels fortunate to be in a position at such a young age to make a difference and have long-term impact on the lives of children. Her own educational experiences have taught her that teaching does matter, that it can change lives, and most important, that it gives kids options they may never have imagined.

The future ahead in the KIPP classroom

Diaz is only several weeks into her training at TFA’s summer institute. She knows that these first weeks are a time for new teachers to work with those that have more experience “to practice and find out what teaching styles fit best and the methods that work and don’t work” and she’ll be refining what she learns here for years to come. But when asked if she has a message for her students, she answers without hesitation. She wants her kids to know “that they are here to work as hard as they can to give themselves the options their parents or siblings didn’t have. Their own work is what will give them the ability to make choices, to have their pick of opportunities. It’s not really about what choices they make, each will do what’s right for them, it’s just about having the choice.” And she has an idea that she thinks will really help her students understand that message. Each year, Columbia University holds a special graduation ceremony for its Latino students. The bilingual ceremony is simply an opportunity for each of the school’s Latino graduates to give speeches of gratitude, to tell their friends and families how hard they have worked and how grateful they are for both the opportunity and the support it took to get them to that moment. Next spring, Diaz would love to take her students there, to let them see and hear – and even feel – where they are going. Diaz understands what it takes to succeed and will make sure her students not only understand but put their ideas into action and make connections to their future in her classroom.