Rhonda “Nikki” Barnes is executive director of KIPP Massachusetts, where she leads charter schools in the cities of Boston and Lynn serving mostly Black and Latino students. She also serves as president of the Massachusetts Charter Public Schools Association, providing statewide leadership on behalf of charter public schools. Under Nikki’s leadership, KIPP Massachusetts has produced post-secondary outcomes that significantly outperform national benchmarks for students from marginalized communities. Between 2024 and 2025, approximately seventy-eight percent of graduating students enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program, reflecting sustained access to four-year college pathways.

Nikki joined KIPP Massachusetts in 2013 as a sixth-grade humanities teacher at KIPP Academy Boston. By 2015, she was named principal of the school, and by 2019, she served as chief schools officer for the KIPP Massachusetts region. In 2020, Nikki became the organization’s first Black woman to serve as executive director. Known as a warm demander with both students and adults, she builds systems that support strong instruction and teacher and leader development in service of student outcomes from kindergarten through post-secondary enrollment.

Teaching and public education are Nikki’s life’s work. She brings over eighteen years of K–12 classroom experience across varied contexts, including rural Gaston, North Carolina, suburban Chesapeake, Virginia, and the cities of Boston and Lynn. Because being a powerful and accomplished classroom teacher has always mattered deeply to her, Nikki pursued and earned National Board Certification in 2000, becoming the first Black practicing classroom teacher in the state of Virginia to achieve this distinction. She holds degrees from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Virginia Commonwealth University. Nikki is the proud mother of two adult children: a daughter, Adrianna, a mathematics learning specialist, and a son, Jordan, who is pursuing his MFA in poetry.