KIPP in Touch

Sole Sessions is a program piloted last year by Mr. Romero Ross through the School & Classroom Investment Grant at Promise Academy and continues to thrive as a unique outlet for KIPPsters to express their creativity by creating custom sneaker designs. As a graduate of Morehouse College and Columbia University, as well as a teacher in New York for more than five years before joining KIPP DC, the idea to start a program like Sole Sessions was one held for a long time. Coming to Promise Academy and seeing the creative approaches teachers there were taking to educating students was the catalyst he needed to push the idea forward. Read more about Sole Sessions!

Principals, vice principals, and the instructional leadership team spent time at this year’s School Leaders Retreat preparing to kick off our 2025 strategic planning. In order to chart where we’re going, it’s important to look back at how far we’ve come since launching our last five-year strategic plan in 2015 with the priorities of Improve Outcomes, Expand Impact, and Stay Strong.

Tomorrow, you will receive an email that outlines how you can lend your voice, perspective, and guidance to our next strategic plan and shape what KIPP DC will look like by 2025. Take a look at the outline below of some of the progress we’ve made in key areas across the organization as part of the last strategic plan.

KIPP DC’s 2020 Strategic Priorities & Accomplishments:

Improve Outcomes: 

• We built out an extensive instructional leadership, student support, and coaching teams, and aligned curriculum and assessment models to ensure our teachers and staff have the support they need.
• Through professional development and partnerships, we have implemented a trauma-informed approach to caring for our students and significantly increased our mental health supports.
• Restorative practices and changes to student policies have dramatically reduced the use of discipline in our schools.
• We’ve reimagined our approach to post-secondary programming to support career pathways for students. 
• The Learning Center opened in 2015 to provide intensive, individualized learning support for students with the highest IEP needs.
• For our youngest learners, we implemented the play-based curriculum Tools of the Mind to help strengthen their executive functioning as they build a foundation for academic success.

Expand Impact: 

• Since launching our last five-year strategic plan in 2015, more than 2,000 students attend KIPP DC schools each year. 
• After years in temporary space, we opened a state-of-the-art high school facility for KIPP DC College Preparatory and more than doubled the size of the student body.
• We opened three new schools for the 2019-20 school year, KIPP DC Honor Academy and KIPP DC Somerset College Preparatory, with immediate plans in place to open two more. 
• The KIPP Through College & Career program has grown from supporting 300 alumni to more than 2,000.
• We’ve also built out a robust family and community engagement function to ensure that as we grow, we continue to be responsive to the needs of the students and families of our community.
• To build instructional capacity, we launched our Fellowship in Special Education and an important partnership with the Relay Graduate School of Education to increase the number of master educators in our buildings.

Stay Strong: 

• Since 2015, we’ve made increased investments in sustainability, including a new parental leave policy, OneMedical memberships, and more Development and Wellness Days for staff. 
• Responding to feedback about the demands of our rigorous schedule, we reconfigured the school calendar and shortened the school day to optimize time for more work-life balance.
• We‘ve prioritized our work around diversity, equity, and inclusion as a cornerstone of who we are as an organization. 
• We remain committed to providing robust professional development opportunities to staff and making KIPP DC the destination for extraordinary educators to develop into exceptional leaders.