KIPP’s Night Kindergarten in Newark: A Rare ‘Bright Spot’ in COVID’s Dark Days

Rachel Hodge worked as a housekeeper at a hospital and was earning an online degree in social work when schools shut their doors due to COVID. Spending hours in front of a laptop with a 5-year-old just didn’t fit into the picture.

But in the fall of 2020, her daughter Vanessa was set to start kindergarten at KIPP Upper Roseville Academy in Newark, New Jersey. With Hodge working and school still remote, Vanessa spent her days with a babysitter, who cared for multiple kids and struggled to manage the technology for virtual learning.

By November, Vanessa was one of 24 kindergartners in Newark’s KIPP charter network listed as missing from remote school.

That’s when KIPP staff created the Evening Learning Program, a condensed school day that accommodated parents’ upended schedules. The program, which ran weeknights from 5:30 to 8 p.m, remained in place until the end of the school year.

“It was really a sad and scary time,” Hodge said. “But I was like, ‘The kid’s got to learn.’ ”

As Hodge worked on her own assignments from Rutgers University, kindergarten teacher Meredith Eger led Vanessa and classmates in songs and games, and through the reading and math they’d missed since August.

“It was fun and it was kind of weird,” Vanessa, now 9, recalls. “When class was over, I didn’t have to pack up, because all my stuff was at home.”

The program is a rare example of a school that moved quickly to keep children from missing out on their first year of school — a critical transition period in which they typically start developing academic and social skills. At a time when hundreds of thousands of parents struggled to balance work and Zoom, or held their children out of school until first grade, KIPP’s after-hours program offered families some consistency in the midst of turmoil.

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