KIPP Public Schools Northern California

Since the founding of KIPP Public Schools Northern California’s (KIPP NorCal) first school in West Oakland in 2002, the organization has transformed significantly from having a middle school focus to now serving over 7000 students across grades TK-12. Most of these students will be the first in their family to attend college. Of its diverse student body, 83% qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, 33% are multilingual learners, and 13% have Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). KIPP NorCal, with a $170M annual budget, has 23 schools across Northern California in seven cities, five counties, and ten school districts in the Bay Area and Central Valley.

KIPP NorCal significantly outperforms state averages in Mathematics and English/Language Arts. Utilizing a $110M capital campaign, its expansion plans are complete with the recent opening of a Stockton high school. The organization also supports over 900 alumni at over 90 different college campuses through KIPP Forward and is committed to tracking the post-secondary progress of its other 4000 alumni. KIPP NorCal employs over 1,000 full-time employees (120 at the Regional Support Office) to serve its vast student and alumni populations. 120 of these employees are at the RSO across ~~20 departments, providing a full array of backend services to our its schools such as Finance, Data, Talent Recruitment, and Academics.  

Issue

How should KIPP Northern California evolve the compensation philosophy structure for its Regional Support Office (RSO) to retain and recruit employees while maintaining financial stability to deliver on its mission of preparing its 7000 students across grades TK-12 with the skills and confidence to pursue their chosen post-secondary paths?

Situation

The TK-12 employment landscape is rapidly evolving, and human-centered capital is the crux of the education sector’s success. Naturally, KIPP NorCal’s top strategic priority for delivering quality education to its students is developing and retaining top talent. Like many of its peers, KIPP NorCal faces inflation pressures, a shrinking talent pool in the Bay Area, and slowing public funding growth in addition to a fundraising transition (moving from a multi-year $110M capital campaign to an annual fundraising of $8M plan). The organization’s critical challenge is ensuring its compensation model remains a powerful tool for achieving its mission. The organization has a different compensation approach for school staff (tenure-based) and for regional employees (tenure and performance-based). The reason for the different approaches is that This is because while schools contain have many of the same roles (e.g. Teachers) and compete for talent primarily with other schools, whereas the RSO contain has many distinct roles and competes with a broader set of employers such as the non-profit and private sectors. As KIPP NorCal has reached full- scale RSO size, and faces multiple organizational headwinds, they are seeking to evolve its the RSO compensation model to continue retaining and attracting staff , while ensuring a clear, fair, and strategic compensation structure for all its employees.

Project

KIPP NorCal seeks a strategic partner in ACT to assess and restructure its compensation model to ensure it continues to attract, retain, and motivate the key talent that drives student outcomes. This engagement’s focus will be KIPP NorCal’s Regional Service Office (RSO ) employees whose annual salary adjustments take place in the spring. (The KIPP NorCal leadership team will apply some of the project learnings to the school site employees’ model, whose salary adjustments occur in the winter.) KIPP NorCal aims to better understand how organizations that that they compete with for talent structure their compensation. The project team would design an actionable RSO compensation structure that balances Bay Area market competitiveness, affordability, role differences, performance and tenure differences, equity, and impact on student outcomes while ensuring long-term financial sustainability.