By Abby Cambiano
Northeast News

Hogan Preparatory Academy’s elementary school will be in a new Historic Northeast location starting in August, when its 400 students will move into the newly remodeled facility at 5000 E. 17th Street. Superintendent Dr. Danny Tipton surveyed the progress on July 22, and shared his vision for the renewed space.

The building, originally the Kensington School, was Imagine Renaissance Academy of Environmental Science and Math, which closed in 2012. The facility then sat unused until Hogan Prep bought it in the spring of 2017. A $700,000 New Market Tax Credit Loan from Central Bank (2301 Independence Ave.) paved the way for updates and repairs, including re-networking for facility-wide Wi-Fi, that were completed this summer.

“The bones are really good,” Amber White, elementary school principal, said. “It’s just a thing here, a thing there, 10 things here and there.”

Tipton said Central Bank was “tremendous to work with” and opened the door to many new opportunities for the school. The tax incentive grant allows Hogan Prep to provide flexible seating for classrooms instead of traditional desks and chairs.

“That’s the most exciting thing for me, the opportunity to have collaborative work spaces, more developmentally appropriate seating like wobble stools that allow kids to move throughout the day or standing height tables for kids who don’t sit and work well, but stand and work better,” White said. “Just the physical space is going to be a bit more conducive to what kids need for teaching and learning.”

White, a resident of the Historic Northeast, has been with Hogan Prep since 2013. White said they are working to add a lot of people to the elementary school staff for the upcoming year.

“A lot of people are really excited about what we’re doing here,” White said. “For me, being here for four years and now into year five, we’re finally into what we’re doing. We serve kids who come from a lot of challenging situations, you know, lots of trauma or they’ve really been underserved by the schools they were in previous to us.”

White said in doing screenings of new students, she is not surprised to find some two or three years below grade level.

“We’re finally at a point where we feel like we know what we have to do to serve kids like that,” White said. “We are going to be adding a lot of them, obviously adding roughly 200 to 250 brand new students, and so it feels like we’re at a point that we can serve them. We’re not going to be doing a lot different, just on a larger scale.”

Teachers and staff at Hogan Prep work to help children develop socially and emotionally, learn how to productively handle being frustrated or upset, and get students engaged in physical ways.

“I feel like we’re a family, and we don’t just educate the child, we educate the entire family,” Tipton said. “We really buy into that it takes a village to raise a child, we really buy into that.”

Last year, the elementary school had 100 percent face-to-face parent teacher conferences.

“What really takes that to the next level is we believe that you as a parent have to be in complete and total partnership with the school, otherwise it’s not a 100% package, and so we’re really trying to move that throughout our entire system,” Tipton said.

As a college preparatory school, Tipton said they expect students to further their education after graduation.

“We talk about college and what does that mean to kindergarten kids, and they may or may not know about it at that point, but by the time they get through the entire system at Hogan they’re going to know, ‘Hey, college is really an option for me,’ when a lot of kids we serve may not think college is an option,” Tipton said. “We try to show them that it is.”

Last year, 32 of 64 Hogan Prep High School graduates started at Hogan Middle School in 7th grade as the first class in 2011.

“It’s not very common in Kansas City for a kid to start kindergarten in one place and graduate, it’s just not very common and we want to change that culture and that dynamic,” Tipton said.

Tipton and White agree that Hogan Prep leaders expect alumni to come back to support the community.

“Whether it’s parents who went to Hogan who now have their kids here, or teachers or staff who went to Hogan and then come back, we do really believe that it’s important that kids are a part of their community, and ideally what we want them to do is go away to college and then come back and be a part of what we’re doing here,” White said.

Hogan Preparatory High School originally opened as Bishop Hogan High School in 1941, then transitioned to a charter in 1999. The middle school was added in 2011, followed by the elementary school in 2013. The elementary school was formerly located at 5809 Michigan Avenue. While the primary motivation behind the move was more space, Tipton is looking forward to opportunities to grow in other ways, as well.

“We’re excited about being in a new neighborhood; we really are,” Tipton said. “It used to be in our mission statement… to have a diversified student body, and we just never could do it where we were located.”

Tipton said at the former campus, 98 percent of students were African American, and with the transition to a new neighborhood, he thinks the Hispanic and other ethnic populations will grow, “which is a good thing because we want to be more diverse.”

Since the school provides busses for students, Tipton said the transition will not be hard for current students.

“The Northeast has so much to offer us,” Tipton said.