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KIPP Memphis today will announce plans to open a charter elementary school and a second middle school in 2012. If all goes according to plan, its leaders say the feeder schools should produce one of the strongest public high schools in town.
The high school has been approved to open this fall at the former Caldwell Elementary in North Memphis.
Like many KIPP schools in other cities, the schools will be led by former Teach for America corpsmen, now participating in KIPP's two-year principal-training fellowship in New York.
Twenty were selected nationally for the program.
Grace Williams, who started her career as a TFA member in Helena-West Helena, Ark., will lead the elementary school, projected to open with 120 kindergartners, also at Caldwell.
KIPP, which stands for Knowledge is Power Program, came to Memphis in 2001. It is a national program that has been successful in boosting test scores among students in high-poverty, inner-city schools.
Like most charters, KIPP grows by adding a grade each year.
Andrew Bobowski, who started as a TFA Spanish teacher at East High School and taught fifth-grade social studies last year at KIPP, will lead the college-prep middle school. That school will be KIPP's first foray on a second campus in Memphis.
School leaders have not decided where the school will be located, saying they are looking at sites that offer "suitable economics."
"We think it will be ideal to have two middle schools to potentially feed the high school," said Jamal McCall, executive director of KIPP, which started in Memphis in 2002 with KIPP Diamond Academy, a middle school.
Charter schools are public schools allowed certain creativity in exchange for achievement gains.
If they do not meet academic gains outlined by No Child Left Behind legislation for two consecutive years, they must close.
KIPP is the first to announce expansion plans after the Tennessee legislature this year significantly improved the growth outlook for charter schools. It eliminated the cap on the number of schools permitted and did away with rules that said only economically deprived children in failing schools could attend.
If both new schools are approved this fall by the Memphis City Schools board of education, KIPP will be the largest charter school operator in the city, with four schools and an enrollment of 900 students.
By 2015, KIPP projects it will have 10 schools, serving 2,800 students. When fully enrolled, the schools will have 4,000 students here.
But it is also expanding in an era where the law gives local school boards power to reject charter applications if they can prove new schools would fiscally weaken the traditional board-led system.
McCall, on the verge of more than doubling his operation here, says, "I cringe when I think of it.
"I was not there for the back-office conversations that led to this piece, so it's hard to determine whether it's a good opportunity or not," he said.
In Memphis, with more charter schools than any city in Tennessee, school board members have watched attentively as the law eased to allow charters more flexibility.
"The bottom line is you have certain people who believe charters are the answer to all public education ills," said Dr. Jeff Warren, board member.
"Although they are good in certain instances, like anything, you can have too much of a good thing.
"As long as they are allowed to kick out children that don't meet with whatever standard they want to impose, they have the potential of harming public education," he said.
Shelby County Schools will get its first charter this fall. The SCS board rejected the application, but it was approved on appeal to the state board of education.
