KIPP Gaston — a public charter school founded in 2001 with 80 students, and the second oldest KIPP region in the country — has grown into a statewide network of schools serving about 3,000 students in 2024-25, now known as KIPP North Carolina.

KIPP stands for the “Knowledge is Power Program,” and the program is designed to prepare students for success in college and life, grounded in the realities and experiences of the students and families.

EdNC has been reporting on KIPP’s presence in North Carolina since our founding in 2015, following its own journey of self-determination.

KIPP North Carolina is part of a national network of 278 K-12 schools serving 125,000 students.

Tim Saintsing is the executive director of KIPP North Carolina. He started in July 2020 as COVID-19 raged.

Though Saintsing’s public education career had been in New York, he wasn’t new to North Carolina. He attended Davidson College, where as part of his senior capstone, he studied data about who was on North Carolina’s death row — data that has “guided him since.”

He graduated from Duke University with a masters in public policy before working in the NYC Public Schools, founding a charter school, and leading the Relay Graduate School of Education.

A blueprint for school turnaround

Citing challenges with turnover in school leadership, enrollment fluctuations, and continuous low performance, Saintsing recruited David Tell from Texas to lead a “re-founding” of KIPP Durham College Prep Middle, which included hiring a new team of educators with salaries supplemented by the national KIPP Foundation.

This partnership “will be a ‘first of its kind’ blueprint for other turnaround efforts across all of KIPP,” according to the website.

A newly recruited team of 18 educators are earning salaries between $69,000-$100,000, but those salaries, the website notes, are “commensurate with the difficult work at hand: delivering exceptional Tier 1 lessons daily, creating individualized learning plans for every student in their care, deeply internalizing lessons with colleagues until 5:00 PM daily, creating lasting relationships with students and their families, running Saturday school (select weekends), hosting summer school (select weeks of each summer), and engaging in the transformative work of school turnaround.”

Where Zearn is a verb

In the elementary school classrooms of KIPP North Carolina, “Zearn” is a verb. A sign on the bulletin board says, “I Zearned it.”

Zearn is a nonprofit and a math platform co-founded and led by Shalinee Sharma, author of “Math Mind: The Simple Path To Loving Math.” Here is all the research about why it works.

Zearn is now used by one in four elementary students to learn math across the country, and it is being adopted by states, including Colorado, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and Louisiana.

Saintsing adopted Zearn as the math curriculum for elementary students in KIPP North Carolina.

“Zearning it is not a race,” says the teacher to her students. “Slow down. See what the lessons are all about.”

Building its own educator prep program

In April 2024, the N.C. State Board of Education approved KIPP North Carolina to be an educator prep program (EPP), which means it can train and certify teachers. Here is the application, the result of a self study through the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP).

KIPP North Carolina is the first charter school or charter network in North Carolina to be approved to serve as an EPP.

Saintsing anticipates that the EPP will launch ahead of the 2025-26 school year.

The pursuit of a more just world

Meet fifth grader Brooklyn Smith, who was selected to be a speaker at the 2024 KIPP School Summit in Orlando, FL, this summer.

Smith starts by asking the audience to say the word kujichagulia with her.

Kujichagulia is “the right and responsibility to define, name, create for oneself, and speak for oneself.”

“I learned different ways to express myself, contribute to my community, and grow my brain,” Smith says in her address of her experience in KIPP North Carolina.

“Each day, you are going to teach students just like me, and you have the chance to make your communities better and stronger,” she says.

Smith talks about self-determination, and “KIPPsters just like me building a more just world.”

You can see that same spirit in the peanut field where KIPP Gaston started, in Saintsing’s quest since college, in the ongoing iteration and innovation in turnaround and math and educator prep, and in the evolution of KIPP North Carolina itself.