Community Collaboration Spurs KIPP: St. Louis

Daniel Davis: I'm Daniel Davis with the Community Development Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. And I'm sitting today with Kelly Garrett, executive director of KIPP St. Louis. Kelly, the conversation today is all focused around understanding the process that KIPP St. Louis has gone through to come up with the money to fund the initiatives that you're taking part in. I'm curious if you can speak a little bit about your organization. Tell me what it does. How did it get its start?

Kelly Garrett: Thanks, Daniel. It's great to be here. KIPP stands for the Knowledge is Power Program. And KIPP nationally is a network of 162 schools across the country, serving about 59,000 students today, on a trajectory to serve 100,000 students and be one of the largest public charter school operators in the country. In St. Louis, though, KIPP St. Louis is its own independent, not for profit entity.

And so as we began about five years ago in 2009, we opened up our initial charter school, KIPP Inspire Academy, that's been operating for, now, five and a half years. In this past summer, we opened up our second school, KIPP Victory Academy Elementary School to help serve low income kids from across St. Louis. And KIPP typically tends to serve-- we say students who need us the most. And we define that as students who live below the poverty line, who tend to live in neighborhoods where they don't have access to high quality schools. So for us, the opportunity in St. Louis to serve, eventually, thousands of students every year and help those students climb the mountain to and through college.

Daniel Davis: What steps has KIPP taken to ensure that there's community buy-in for just the work your organization does? And I'm especially curious if you can speak a little bit about any steps that were taken strategically to ensure that there was buy-in in the financing process.

Kelly Garrett: In 2009-- I have to confess, first of all, I wasn't part of the founding team in KIPP. I didn't join the team officially until 2011 when I became executive director. But from what I understand, there was an extraordinary amount of community investment and buy-in from the very beginning. It largely centered in the business community, where organizations like Civic Progress, the Regional Business Council, and Washington University in St. Louis said we need to find better alternatives for children in St. Louis in terms of providing high quality educational programs.

Those organizations came together and really began by developing a board that was originally called St. Louisans United to attract KIPP, or SUTAK. The SUTAK board was made up of several business leaders representing those organizations I just named. And they went on a mission to find high quality school leaders and to recruit them to come found KIPP schools in St. Louis. It was largely a business effort that then shifted to an academic effort, where Wash U started to generate enthusiasm within the University across the campus to bring in different schools, to say we want to help support this effort.

And then finally, when the leadership team was recruited to come to KIPP, it was largely then about recruiting teachers and students. And KIPP, because we have a commitment to serving the kids who need us the most, that recruitment effort looked like our school leader going door to door in the Peabody Clinton Housing Development and knocking on doors to say, would you please send your fourth grader to my school? We're opening next year. We're going to be high performing. And about 70 families signed on to send their fifth graders to our school. But it was definitely a community wide effort from the business community, to the educational community, to the families and teachers who signed up to join the KIPP team.

Daniel Davis: So what role has leadership played? We know that leadership can be the essential component in so many projects and initiatives. So as you saw to obtain financing as you've done your work, what role has leadership played?

Kelly Garrett: KIPP has five pillars that we believe are critically important to the success of any school in any region. So in KIPP St. Louis, those pillars include the power to lead. And leadership has always been a hallmark and a key component of high performing KIPP regions and KIPP schools. And for us, that begins with the school leader as a key lever of change and excellence. So for us, the school leader matters a lot. But that then translates up to the regional level, both at my level as the executive director of KIPP and at the board level. All three of those leadership organizations or leadership centers have to be working in tandem to make sure that we are creating, first of all, great schools for children and then also getting people to invest in our model.

And we're very careful to talk about investing in St. Louis as opposed to making gifts or grants to KIPP St. Louis. Because we do expect that there will be a significant ROI, return on investment, for the moneys that are contributed to KIPP. So for us, that meant reaching out to foundations, to corporations, to individuals to say, if you look for different outcomes, if you're looking for a return on your investment in education, if you invest in KIPP, we're going to see kids make significant academic gains. We're going to help them get into high performing high schools, because we will catch them up.

And we often start with fifth graders who start out academically severely delayed. But by the end of eighth grade, those students, on average, are exceeding the state average by a significant margin in all subject areas. And they're also developing and showing signs of the character traits that we know to be successful in college and in life. So that's what we're asking people to invest in. And we have, I guess, a very clearly defined marketing campaign to try to find investors who believe in the mission and want to support our students and their growth.

Daniel Davis: How significant has collaboration been in ensuring KIPP's success? And are there specific partners that you've brought to the table to help advance the work?

Kelly Garrett: Our vision at KIPP St. Louis is to see that every child in St. Louis has equal access to high quality, high performing educational programs, preferably free, public, open enrollment programs. And that's just not the case today. At the same time, we don't ever plan to run every school in the city of St. Louis. So we know, just at a very basic principle, that if every kid is going to have great access, it takes more than just KIPP to get all schools to high performing levels.

So along those lines, we know that we've had to develop really key partnerships in the city. Those include Washington University. So we're so fortunate to have a sponsor. In Missouri, charter schools must be sponsored by a university. And our sponsor is Washington University that's been extraordinarily generous and supportive strategically in our growth and development.

This past year, we, after several months of negotiation, forged a fabulous partnership with St. Louis public schools. And that partnership has brought the largest provider of free public education, St. Louis public schools, in partnership with KIPP. We are now utilizing a once closed public school building. It was closed for eight years. And we helped recommission and open that school and now run a high performing elementary school in a neighborhood that, for eight years, had no school in it. So those partnerships, as well as continuing ongoing business community partnerships, we depend heavily on finding great partners to help make us and provide opportunities for our students to make us all better.

Daniel Davis: How important is data to helping KIPP determine strategy? And has it been used in the process of securing funding to move forward?

Kelly Garrett: I mentioned the KIPP pillars before. Another pillar, in addition to the power to lead, is the focus on outcomes. So at KIPP, we talk a lot about outcomes. Those outcomes include student academic achievement. They include student character development. They include financial metrics to say we want to become a sustainable financial model. We want to make sure that KIPP doesn't go away, that we've created the systems and the financial programs to make sure that we're here for a long time.

So for us, the outcomes are critical. A lot of times, you'll hear educators talk about inputs like how much time a child spends in school, how well trained the teachers are. And those are all inputs into what we think of as the school system. At KIPP, we care a lot about the impact of those inputs. So did our students make two years academic gain this year in each of their core content areas? Are they demonstrating their character development traits? Are we seeing retention across our students? Because we know that the longer a child stays in school, the greater their gains. So outcomes are critical for us. That's what we're asking people to invest in, is the KIPP outcomes and the measure of our performance.

It is also different. Sometimes we think about needing to also tell the stories that will touch the hearts and the minds of our families. I used to work for an investor named Richard Rainwater. And Richard always said we want to use both our hearts and our minds in making investments in high performing organizations. And so at KIPP, we take that very much to heart on a day to day basis. We want to talk about outcomes but also never forget the lives of the families that we're impacting.

Daniel Davis: How important is it to have a plan B in the work that you're doing? Can you speak a little bit about the obstacles and challenges that you've encountered at KIPP and how you overcome those?

Kelly Garrett: Yeah. So planning is key to our success. We have a five year strategic plan, which I would call plan A. But any number of issues-- facilities is the one that is often very challenging to charter schools, finding facilities, financing those facilities, and then maintaining those facilities. Charter schools don't have access to a lot of the funds that traditional schools have access to that might help pay for facilities. So we have to have not just a plan B but a C, D, and E plan as well. So we're always thinking about if, for some reason, this building is no longer available or if a new building comes on the market, how do we go about tactically trying to create that school?

So there's a great story about a North Pole expedition where two expeditions set off to go to the North Pole at the same time period, under the same weather circumstances, under the same conditions. One organization ended up making it and bringing every member of their expedition back home safely. The other expedition made it to the North Pole and, on the way back, lost every single member of the expedition.

When people dissected or experts looked and dissected what happened at those two expeditions, the Amundsen expedition that brought everybody home had done an extraordinary amount of planning and preparation and had planned for 20 different eventualities that could have happened on their expedition. As a result, they ended up better prepared and able to survive what was a very grueling trip.

I want KIPP to be like the Amundsen expedition, where we are doing things that are innovative, that are risky. And at times, our survival is threatened by extenuating circumstances. I think the better we plan, the better we're able to make sure that we have a long term sustainable future in St. Louis. So for us, having those plans B, C, and D gives us the flexibility, the nimbleness, to actualize and operationalize new plans as new opportunities come open for us.

Daniel Davis: Kelly, this has been great. Thanks so much for joining me today. I think we're going to walk away from this with a much better understanding of the work KIPP St. Louis is doing and just how you've come up with the money.

Kelly Garrett: Great. Thanks for having me.