Sisters schools push for college-level classes

Sisters High School added its first Advanced Placement (AP) class this year. It’s an English class for seniors.

Middle School Principal Lora Nordquist, who is the district’s curriculum coordinator, is pleased…but not satisfied. She’d like to see the school offer three or four such classes, covering as many major subjects.

“I’ve been — I don’t know what word you want to use — the nag, I guess, about us moving to AP classes. Because I believe they are really a good addition to the curriculum,” Nordquist told The Nugget.

“Even though we are not a very large high school we have a number of high-performing students and I believe we could justify three, possibly four AP classes.”

Advanced Placement classes offer college-level work. Students who take a class and pass the exam at the end receive free undergraduate credit for the equivalent course at most U.S. colleges and universities. The 50-year-old program is run by the College Board, the same organization that runs the SAT testing program for college admission.

An Associated Press survey in January showed increasing numbers of students taking these courses in the more than 14,000 public high schools that offer them. Across the country, 20.9 percent of students in the public school graduating class of 2004 took at least one AP exam, compared with 15.9 percent four years before. And 13.2 percent passed at least one exam, compared with 10.2 percent four years earlier.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings greeted the news favorably: “This new report provides further proof that our children respond when we challenge them academically.”

Back in Sisters, Nordquist said she hopes to see the district add an AP class in either social studies or calculus next year. She would like to see the high school have one AP class in each of four major content areas — science, math, social studies and English — “not necessarily all the same year. For example, I’d love to see us do U.S. history,” a subject scheduled for the junior year.

How about the cost? “It’s really no additional cost, because what we do is offer an AP class instead of a section of a regular class in the subject. As long as you can fill the classes there’s no additional burden.”

That’s an important qualification, because if enrollment for an AP class is lower than average, that means additional students are being pushed into already crowded regular classes. But Nodquist is confident that “we could fill those (AP) classes.”