Charter school group announces expansion
HOUSTON --A national nonprofit charter school organization once featured on Oprah Winfrey's talk show said Tuesday it had raised $65 million toward a $100 million goal to greatly expand its presence in the Houston area.
Starting this summer, officials with the nonprofit Knowledge is Power Program Foundation said the money will be used to expand the Houston chain from eight schools and 1,700 students to 42 charter schools with 21,000 students over the next decade.
"Someone's got to step up and do it. Frankly, why not KIPP? Why not Houston? Why not now?" Mike Feinberg, co-founder of KIPP, said in a story in Tuesday's online edition of the Houston Chronicle. "Houston is very fertile ground in the country to do this work."
Founded in Houston in 1994, KIPP was created as an alternative to the public school system for students in kindergarten through high school. The system now has 52 schools in 16 states and Washington, D.C., serving 12,000 students -- the majority of them low-income and either black or Hispanic.
Last spring, Winfrey featured KIPP during a special report titled, "American Schools in Crisis." KIPP's schools have been touted nationally for their tough approach on education and discipline; they have classes every other Saturday, plus three weeks of classes each summer.
Several school board members in the Houston Independent School District, which serves 200,000 students, welcomed the expansion.
"The market has become competitive, and we need to shape up," trustee Larry Marshall said.
But school board President Manuel Rodriguez Jr. said he wished the foundation's donors -- which include dozens of private contributors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton family and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation -- would instead invest in the traditional public school system.
"I'm sorry they're not coming to the public school system," he said. "It would be my hope that all the different facets of the community could come together and work to make the public school system better."
Roughly 70,000 students, or 1.6 percent of the state's 4.5 million public school students, attend one of 438 state-approved charter schools, most of them in inner cities.
Steven Seleznow, program director of state and district partnerships in education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said Houston public school officials should not feel left out.
"Our aim is to create more and better public, free options for parents and children who need them the most," he said.
