Impactful Women of Kansas City: Christine Kemper and Kansas City Girls Preparatory Academy
KCTV 5 featured Christine Kemper, founder of Kansas City Girls Preparatory Academy (KCGPA), for its Impactful Women of Kansas City series. KCGPA is an affiliate school of the Young Women’s Preparatory Network.
By Zoë Shriner, Jillian Carroll and Beth Peak
Originally broadcast on KCTV5 on March 8, 2024
Christine Kemper is the founder and chair of the Kansas City Girls Preparatory Academy, an all-girls charter school that opened in 2019.
Careful to keep the spotlight away from herself, she prefers to be seen as simply the “catalyst” in what has truly been a “team effort” to bring an empowering, college-based education model to Kansas City’s young women.
“When we were starting the school, we heard a lot of listening sessions with families and others in the community,” Christine said. “One thing we kept hearing over and over is ‘I want my kid to go to school with a teacher who looks like her,’ because many times, Black and Brown kids end up in schools with all white teachers.”
“That does not mean that those teachers can’t teach,” she continued, “but it does have a very quiet message that is sent to those kids that ‘Black girls don’t teach,’ or maybe that means there are other things Black girls don’t do. We all know that not to be the case, so we just have to be super intentional about hiring faculty and staff and our board of directors who look like our kids.”
With a foundation of love, representation, and support from KCGPA’s staff, students are better prepared to push themselves higher than they may have ever thought possible.
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