Greetings from KIPP Austin

Preparing underserved students for college success

Fall 2007

Greetings!

Happy Fall from KIPP Austin. We have a lot of great news to share about our students and our vision for the future!

This school year marks the beginning of our sixth year of operation, and we are serving 360 students in grades 5 to 8. We've welcomed 100 fifth graders as new KIPPsters, and our second group of eighth grade graduates are now attending high school in competitive private and public schools across Austin.

In order to accommodate more students this year, we completed a renovation project over the summer which has added more classroom and office space, as well as a new band room and library. In addition, we have begun to prepare our high school building for the arrival of 90 ninth grade students in August 2008! This year we are glad to have use of the gym facility in that building.

For a complete update on KIPP Austin, please view our 2006-07 Annual Report. Thanks to Sherry Matthews Advocacy Marketing, designer Mike Hicks and photographer Kirk Tuck for producing our report again this year!

In This Issue

Stanford 10 Results

Library Update

Upcoming Events

We're Expanding!

Student Spotlight

KIPP Student Leadership Summit

The fourth annual KIPP Student Leadership Summit was held in Occidental, CA at the end of September, and 86 sixth graders and their chaperones from KIPP schools around the nation came together for a weekend of leadership development and teamwork activities, such as completing a ropes course and finding their way through a maze. Austin's representatives were sixth grade students Jamileth Ortega and Romario Quijano.

Jamileth and Romario were selected to represent KIPP Austin because of their thoughtful and well-presented plan to help keep more students off the "Bench." They attended with Mr. Newman and Mr. Gonzalez, and worked with other KIPPsters from across the nation to develop their plan, which includes more incentives for students who stay in good standing. One of their ideas was to give deserving students the privilege to eat lunch outside on picnic benches. The KIPP Foundation selected 10 proposals out of the entire group, including Romario and Jamileth's, and will soon narrow the group to four proposals that the foundation will help make possible.

Best of luck, Romario and Jamileth!

SAT-10 Results

KIPP Austin students continue to soar on standardized testing! The Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-10), is a national norm-referenced test that allows us to track student growth over time. Continually, our students make amazing growth from year to year, and scores from September's test administration are no different. For example, the Class of 2012 (our current eighth graders) started in fifth grade performing better than only 24 percent of test-takers nationwide in reading. After only three years, they are performing better than 60 percent of test-takers in reading, a score that indicates their growth is on the right track for success in high school.

View graphs of the most recent SAT-10 scores.

Teacher Spotlight

Chris Sha

The featured teacher this season is Eighth Grade Science teacher, Chris Sha. Mr. Sha graduated from Brown University with a degree in neuroscience in 2006, and this is his second year at KIPP Austin.

The eighth grade science class focuses on aspects of physics, chemistry, earth science and biology. Our eighth graders have been discovering science in new ways this year through Mr. Sha's creative experiments, such as calculating acceleration by pushing his car through the school parking lot, and learning about convection, conduction, radiation and insulation by designing and building a homemade nacho oven. This year Mr. Sha is also teaching our KIPPsters more about graphing and analysis, which are typically high school and college-level skills.

Mr. Sha hopes to inspire our KIPPsters not only to ask questions about the world around them, but also to take those questions and turn them into tangible experiments.

As we expand to 10 schools, we will need many passionate, dedicated educators at all levels who are committed to our students and their educational progress. If you or anyone you know is interested in being a principal or teacher, please learn more here.

Photograph by Kirk R. Tuck Photography

Library Update

Library This fall marks the first anniversary of our school-wide library, which was established in August 2006 through the help of generous donations from the Sooch Foundation and Long Foundation. This year the library moved into our new wing in order to best serve our KIPPsters, and we continue to fill the shelves with more books. Librarian Angela Hall and our teachers have color coded each book so our students know what is appropriate for their particular reading level. In addition, sixth graders recently enjoyed a trip to Book People to learn how to choose titles in a bookstore setting.