Welcome to Gaston College Preparatory, a high-energy public charter school that is trying to prove that poor and African-American students in rural eastern North Carolina can accomplish the same things as white kids from the middle class suburbs.

This school promises kids and their parents that if the students work hard, stay in school until at least 5 p.m. every day, come to school two Saturdays every month and for three weeks during the summer, they’ll be able to attend the college of their choice.

Built on a peanut field just outside town with money the school itself raised, Gaston Prep is part of KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), a nonprofit organization founded in 1994 in Houston by two teachers – Michael Feinberg and David Levin.

KIPP now has 47 schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia with seven more schools opening this fall. It is looking to expand in the South.

“There is no other education model today that can take kids and bring them a minimum of six academic years in four years of education,” said Cheri Yecke, Florida’s chancellor of K-12 education who said she wants KIPP to establish schools in the state.

KIPP also wants to start schools in Durham and Charlotte.

The key to a KIPP school is its leader, Feinberg said.

“We bet the ranch on finding great educators who, with some leadership training, will become great school founders and great school leaders,” he said.

KIPP had no plans to start a school in rural eastern North Carolina, he said. But then Caleb Dolan and Tammi Sutton applied to be leaders.

Dolan, 30, is a native of Maine and graduated from Colby College. Sutton, 31, grew up in Fayetteville, N.C., and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Both came to Gaston – population 900 – as part of the Teach for America program that places recent college graduates in urban and rural schools with high-risk students.

After three or four years teaching at the local middle school, both were frustrated.

“We saw kids blossom in our classes and then they were pregnant by ninth grade and not going to college,” Dolan said.

After their training at KIPP, the two returned to Gaston in 2001 to build the school and recruit students.

Of the first group of 80 fifth graders, fewer than half were working on grade level, Dolan said. By the end of the first Kipp year, 93 percent were. Last year, every eighth grader was doing math and reading at or above grade level.

“But the bigger thing was we had kids who went from being the problem kid, the one who was being put out of class, to become the I’m-working-hard kid, the one staying after school for more help,” Dolan said.

In hiring teachers, Dolan says he is not interested in an applicant’s resume and test scores. He watches how someone teaches.

In Keith Burnam’s sixth grade math class, kids were bouncing on the balls of their feet, both hands stretched in the air, their faces eager with anticipation as they vied to answer during a rapid action math quiz game.

The school works with a combination of tight discipline and high energy. As an incentive, students earn “KIPP dollars” for participating in class, turning in assignments, scoring well on tests and behaving. Students then spend those “dollars” for school-sponsored trips – everything from ice skating in Raleigh to touring Washington, D.C.

The purpose, Dolan said, is not only to give the kids reasons to work and behave but to give them a chance to see places and have experiences that usually are not open to poor children.

“They had to earn it,” he said after seventh graders left for the ice skating trip.

By the time they finish the eighth grade, students visit about 15 colleges from Harvard to Morehouse.

Not only do students stay in school until 5 p.m., but teachers stay to work with them later, sometimes driving them home at 8:30.

Teachers are paid 20 percent more than their counterparts in other public schools to make up for the extra time. But Gaston College Prep gets by on the same $5,150 per pupil that goes to other North Carolina public schools because almost everyone on staff teaches. No guidance counselors, no resource teachers, no special education teachers.

The school accepts all applicants, first come, first served. No one is screened for academic performance or learning disabilities. Three-quarters of the students are on free and reduced lunch and 90 percent are African American. With nearly 300 students in the middle school, about 70 kids now are on the waiting list for next year’s fifth grade.

As the first class approached eighth grade, Dolan and Sutton realized that they had to start a high school. Other KIPP middle schools are in urban areas where students can transfer to high-performing high schools or private schools. Not in Northampton County.

Sutton was named principal of KIPP Pride High School, only the second high school the organization has started, which opened to ninth graders last fall.

A $4 million high school is under construction next to the middle school with $500,000 donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a $600,000 matching grant from the Julian Roberts Foundation.

For ninth grader Chris Escalante, who lives in a nearby trailer, the school has been transformational. He plays the trumpet in the school band and has his sights set on a music degree from Ohio State University, which he has visited.

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