There’s no recess outside for students at the KIPP Inspire Academy, 2647 Ohio Ave.
There’s no outside time at all, from the moment the fifth and sixth graders step in the door at 7 a.m. to the time they leave at 5 p.m.
And if students didn’t finish their homework the night before, they stay until 6 p.m.
Twice a month, students come to school on Saturdays.
Teachers, such as math teacher Martine Louisma, practice tough love and a militant style of teaching. Students get a 30-minute lunch and a 30-minute study hall. The rest is straight instruction.
If students are good, they are allowed to participate in a creative arts class taught four days a week or a basketball game in the indoor gym three days a week.
For some, KIPP may seem like a child’s worst nightmare, but somehow most KIPP students love it. They say they feel part of something important. They are “climbing the mountain to college together,” as one wall in the school reads.
“It’s one of the best schools,” said sixth grader Terence Collins. “This school, it makes you want to try harder and makes you want to go to college.”
Collins came from Tennessee and went straight to KIPP in 2009, which was the year the St. Louis campus first opened.
By state law, charter schools must be sponsored by a higher-education institution or the school board of the local district. KIPP: Inspire Academy’s institutional sponsor is Washington University – one of the most prestigous sponsors of KIPP’s 99 schools in 20 states.
Jeremy Esposito, a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, is the school leader, KIPP’s term for principal.
When Collins came to the newly opened school, his grades were a mix of A’s and B’s. Now he’s one of the top students in the school.
At his previous school, recess was the time when the bullies beat up other students.
“I would always try to stay by the wall because the teachers were by the wall,” Collins said. Other kids would try to get in trouble so they had to stay against the wall as well, he said.
But at KIPP, Collins has never seen a fight. He and his sixth-grade classmate, Heaven Guerin, attribute the lack of violence to the teachers’ no-tolerance policy.
“If you fight, you get expelled,” Guerin said. “And if you don’t go to another school like KIPP, the odds are you probably won’t go to college. You’ll drop out. People are very aware of that, so they try not to fight.”
Guerin said that in her previous city public school, students fought and were not focused on getting to college.
The hardest aspect to get used to – for both Guerin and Collins – was the extended class day, they said. Instead of the standard 7-hour day, KIPP students pull 10-hour days.
“At first, I didn’t like it, but now I’m used to it,” Guerin said.
“I actually find it fun that we get to stay and learn more. When I went to my other school, I got home at 3 p.m., and I would watch TV and do nothing. Now I’m at school doing the extra work.”
Collins said, “Sometimes I used to get really mad at it the first year I was here, but then I realized that it’s going to be much harder in college and high school.”
Guerin used to hate math. But after taking Louisma’s 5th grade math class last year, even with Louisma’s militant teaching, she now loves math. Louisma taught the class chants and acronyms that made math fun, Guerin said.
Second year for KIPP St. Louis
“We had an outstanding first year,” said Gabriel Gore, chairman of the KIPP school board and an attorney at the Dowd Bennett law firm.
“The students at KIPP Inspire are not only outperforming other fifth graders in St. Louis but also making more academic progress than students at other KIPP schools around the nation.”
Gore said KIPP hopes to open another middle school in St. Louis in 2012, and then another three schools as progress allows.
Right now, KIPP is growing into a 5th to 8th grade school. In its second year, it now has fifth and sixth grades. About 98 percent of the school population is African-American and 96 percent reduced lunch.
The building is dimly lit, and some walls could still use some paint. Yet the hallways are covered with photos of Washington, D.C. and Utah, which are field-trip destinations for the students. University flags hang just about everywhere. And every homeroom is labeled by the teacher’s alma mater.
In one of the sixth-grade classes, 32 students crammed into three rows of tables, and only one teacher was in the room. The typical classes have 22 students, said Thomas Walker, executive director of KIPP St. Louis. Nationally, KIPP schools have been praised for their small class sizes.
Another focus for KIPP schools is to grow students by two grade levels each year rather than just one.
Leaders of the KIPP schools measure their students’ academic growth through a national test called the Measures of Academic Progress developed by the Northwest Evaluation Association. The students take the test in the fall, twice throughout the year and at the end of the year.
According to last year’s test results, the fifth-graders succeeded in growing an average of two grade levels in one year, said Gore.
KIPP St. Louis students also made more growth than any other KIPP school nationwide by their test measures, Gore said.
In the statewide test – the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), KIPP students faired better than St. Louis Public Schools students in mathematics and were competitive in both communication arts and science.
College bound
Heavin Guerin has her sights on Princeton to study criminal law.
Guerin did some research on Princeton, with the encouragement of her mother and teachers, and decided that’s the school for her.
For high school, she hopes to go to Deerfield boarding school in Massachusetts, a KIPP partner, or Crossroads College Prep High School at 500 Debaliviere Ave.
When her mother started studying criminal justice at Forest Park Community in 2008, Heavin would sit in on some of her classes.
“I realized that what she was working on was giving people second chances in life and helping kids to be led in the right path,” Guerin said, “so I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”
