PLANS FOR THE SECOND year of KIPP moved ahead, a tale of two cities. Levin was going to New York. Feinberg was staying in Houston. Feinberg would have preferred to keep their Garcia KIPP class with him as sixth graders, but he had neither the space, the transportation, nor the administrative support to make that happen. Feinberg said he would look for a way to bring the sixth graders back, a promise he eventually kept.
For the seventy-two new KIPP fifth graders, Feinberg planned three teachers besides himself, one for reading, one for science, and one for social studies. Feinberg would teach math for half of each day and do management chores the rest of the time. Patterson said she would provide the modular classrooms, the food, and the payroll services and have an allotment of $2,200 per pupil for everything else—primarily salaries. That was enough for four staff members at standard Houston salaries. Feinberg had made $21,500 his first year and as a third-year teacher had reached $24,500. It was not much, but he was young and had no dependents. He planned to hire people just like himself.
Each of his teachers would be paid what Feinberg was making, plus an extra $5,000 for the longer school days, Saturdays, and summer classes. With the cost of benefits, that left no money to pay himself for his extra time, so from the beginning he was the lowest-paid teacher at his school.
Finding the right teachers turned out to be more difficult than he had expected. His former college girlfriend, Allison Bieber, had a twin sister, Laurie, who was teaching high school in the upscale Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill. She had a master’s degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania and some useful classroom experience in rugged parts of West Philadelphia. She agreed to work for Feinberg in Houston.
He was still two teachers short, with KIPP summer school scheduled to begin in a month, when disaster struck. The modular classrooms Patterson had promised were suddenly unavailable. The two she had ordered had been shipped to someone with more clout. Two more were being built, but they would not be ready until August, too late for the KIPP summer session. If Feinberg was going to have summer school, it would have to wait until just before the regular school year began in August.
Feinberg responded to this crisis by giving himself more things to do. Teach For America officials in Houston asked him to be a faculty director during their summer institute. He agreed, a decision that made no sense but turned out well anyway. At the institute, he found his second teacher, Mike Farabaugh. He had been part of the Texas House crowd at the summer institute in 1992, then taught at a school in the Rio Grande Valley. He had a sense of humor and an energetic classroom style.
Feinberg’s third hire was Jill Kolasinski, who had completed just one year in Teach For America. She thought KIPP was a wonderful idea, but her supervisors at her Houston middle school were not happy with her forsaking them for an untested and unpredictable experiment. If Kolasinski went to KIPP, she would be counted as a Teach For America dropout. She went anyway and would eventually run her own KIPP school. Before long, many TFA corps members were cleared to work at KIPP.
Feinberg was excited. He had his teachers. He had his space. He had what he considered a brilliant new plan for reading instruction. His students would be two or three years below grade level, so he would make the first few months all about reading. Bieber would teach reading along with history. Farabaugh would teach reading along with science. Kolasinski would teach reading along with language arts. Feinberg himself would teach reading along with math. They would talk about college every day. Feinberg decreed that they would each put their college diplomas on their classroom walls.
One afternoon, Feinberg showed Farabaugh the Lee High facilities. During the week, Feinberg said, they would have to stay in their modular classrooms. Their students could not mix with high schoolers. But for Saturday class, they would have the run of the high school building. They could use the computer labs. They could give swimming lessons in the pool. And then that dream died too. Patterson called to say that Lee was overenrolled by more than four hundred students. It would need the new modulars for its own students. “There is no room for us at the high school anymore,” she said.
Feinberg went into denial. “What are you talking about?” he said. “This is completely unacceptable! We had this all arranged.”
“Mike, Mike. I am not leaving you hanging. Slow down, slow down. I am committed to this.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But we are going to figure this out somehow. I am going to find you a place.” She did, three days later, at Askew Elementary School. “They have three extra modular classrooms they don’t need,” she said. “And they have a supply closet full of junk that it looks like nobody has touched in twenty years. If somebody cleaned it up, you could turn it into an office.”
Feinberg asked how far away Askew was from Lee. Thirty minutes, Patterson said. In which direction? The wrong direction. It was in an affluent neighborhood with few immigrant families. That was why it had extra space. It was thirty minutes farther away from Gulfton than Lee High was. It would be a forty-five-minute bus trip for the KIPP students.
Feinberg wondered how he could feel any worse about the turn of events, but then he realized what an embarrassing blow this was to his credibility with the Gulfton parents. He had dismissed their fears about sending their nine- and ten-year-olds to a high school campus. He had told them it would be perfectly safe because their children would be arriving before the high school students and leaving after they left. He had sold the parents on the wonderful facilities, the pool, and the computers.
But with Lee no longer available, he had to go back and tell each family that the high school plan had been scrapped. He developed an entirely different pitch. He told them he had found space in an elementary school far to the west, in one of the best parts of town. There were no drugs, no gangs, no fighting, no distractions. He promised them terrific bus service, which would pick kids up at nearly every Gulfton corner and take them to and from Askew with the ultimate convenience.
He feared this would all sound false to them, but no one objected. He was their neighbor. He had shown them respect and trust by visiting their homes. Yes, Mr. Feinberg, they said. That sounded fine. Thank you very much for telling us.