Board mulls expanding Advanced Placement offerings

SOUTH COVENTRY » The Owen J. Roberts School District offers high school students Advanced Placement courses and International Baccalaureate courses, but do they need a more intensive option?

At a recent committee-of-the-whole meeting, the board discussed adding an Advanced Placement (AP) Capstone or International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma program to the curriculum. Both programs would allow high school students to dive deeper into courses through seminars, research and longterm projects.

William Richardson, the district’s supervisor of IB,

Assessments and Activities, presented the board with information on both programs. He said administrators have recommended against adding the AP Capstone program, which would come with an initial startup cost of about $19,000.

Most of that cost was related to an estimated $15,500 for training four teachers and an administrator. Another $3,000 would be needed to write curriculum for two new courses that include a seminar and a research option and additional funds would be needed to pay for substitutes during the training.

There is no annual fee to the district for AP classes. By contrast, the IB program the district currently offers comes with an $8,000 yearly fee.

Both IB and AP courses allow students to earn college credits if they receive a high enough grade on a final exam — that grade varies by college. Right now, OJR High School offers 26 AP courses that about 529 students are enrolled in this semester.

According to Richardson’s presentation, not all colleges offer credit for the seminar or research capstone courses, although about 18 in Pennsylvania and 330 nationwide do have a credit policy for those courses.

Administrators are recommending against implementing the AP Capstone program in part because of cost, but also because “all of the opportunities offered by the AP Capstone Program are already offered by the IB Program at OJR and the IB Program is open to a wider range of students.”

The IB program was instituted in OJR in 2017. At that time, the district opted against pursuing the more intensive IB diploma program and chose instead to implement the career-related program known as IBCP.

“It lets us reach more of our college prep students,” Richardson explained. “It allows them to stretch.”

What’s more, the IBCP classes dovetail well with the districts STEAM series of courses “which in 201718 consisted of seven engineering courses and four life science electives,” according to Richardson’s presentation.

While the district offers several IB diploma courses, it does not offer the IB Diploma Program, which Richardson said would be “a more direct competition with the AP classes.”

Currently, the high school offers six diploma courses and 16 career courses. A total of 127 students are enrolled in those classes.

The IB courses are offered as two-year classes. An IB diploma program requires students to take six of those two-year courses, and complete a language and community service component.

Richardson said the district never intended to offer the diploma program but rather wanted to provide additional career-related courses available through the IBCP program.

“We want to give students the opportunity to explore career areas. We want to try to open that up to as many career areas as possible, so we can open it up to as many students as possible,” Richardson said.

Three students attended the meeting and spoke to the board, giving positive feedback about their experiences with the IB courses.

While the board reviewed adding either the AP Capstone or the IB Diploma Program, Richardson said the district would not likely offer both.

“Most districts I’ve looked into have one or the other,” he said.