This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, May 17, 2013 - Among the first education stories published by the Beacon when it began back in 2008 was a four-part series by staff writer Robert Joiner on the KIPP charter schools.
Even before KIPP Inspire began accepting students in the fall of 2009 in south St. Louis, Joiner wrote about Trina Clark James, who pushed to have the innovative school establish a site here, and about KIPP Endeavor Academy in Kansas City.
A quote from one of the students there, 10-year-old Tyler Eddington, is eerily similar to what students at KIPP Inspire told me when I asked how classes there were different from those at the school he used to attend.
"At my old school, there was lots of trouble, lots of fistfights, lots of people getting suspended,” Tyler said five years ago. “But people don’t do that here. That’s good because it helps me concentrate more on my studies.”
The Beacon has kept track of KIPP Inspire as its initial class of fifth-graders moved up and the school added a grade each year. At the end of its first year, members of the Fisher family, who founded the Gap and have been major supporters of KIPP, came to town to see how things were progressing.
So when it was time for the first class to be promoted out of KIPP and on to various high schools in the area, checking with the original students one more time was the natural thing to do.
Too often, journalism reports on what a school or a business or a government program plans to do, but no one follows up to see how things worked out. As you will see by our story, so far things seem to have worked out just fine.