Sisters High School adds more advanced classes

Where Advanced Placement classes are concerned, Sisters High School has gone from zero to three in less than two years. That may not make the school an academic Corvette, but it’s certainly not dawdling in this area of curriculum expansion.

Both High School Principal Bob Macauley and Middle School Principal Lora Nordquist, who is the district’s curriculum coordinator, are happy about this development. Macauley says it is partly the result of two years of work by the school site council, which undertook intensive research to determine “ what are the best indicators (of student ability) for colleges…”

What kept coming back from their inquiries, Macauley said, was that “every college in the nation understands AP. So we have decided to really move forward with our AP offerings.”

The school began with its first AP class, in language arts, last year. This year it has added two more, one in calculus and one in U.S. history.

Advanced Placement classes offer college-level work to high school juniors and seniors. Students who complete 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, which also runs the SAT testing program for college admission.

More than 14,000 public high schools in the country offer AP classes. An Associated Press Survey indicated that 21 percent of public high school students who graduated in 2004 took at least one AP exam, a proportion that has been rising in recent years.

Macauley says, “The AP test is so standard that colleges completely understand the scores…so that gives them a much better indication than rank in class or GPA (grade-point average), which varies from school to school and whether it is weighted or unweighted and that sort of thing.

“We believe that from Stanford to Harvard to OSU these are the indicators that best serve our kids as they head to college.”

Nordquist has campaigned for AP offerings for several years, last year describing herself as “the nag” on the subject. “I’m very excited that we have added both AP calculus and history,” she said recently.

She acknowledged that it may be more difficult to add a fourth AP class, however. The logical step would make the next class one in science. But AP science classes require a weekly lab session, a three-hour bloc of time that would not fit the current high school schedule. It might be possible to extend the time after school, Nordquist said. But “we face some real barriers because so many of our students participate in co-curricular programs and have after-school practices.”

In any case, both administrators agreed that the immediate task is to maintain the three classes that have been launched, which means, among other things, ensuring that they have adequate enrollment to justify their existence. This year, the calculus class is particularly low with only 10 students. But Macauley is confident that it will grow.

Macauley said he, too, “would like to expand our offerings with AP” but is not sure which subjects would be next on the list.