Editors note: This article was previously published in volume 92, issue 1 of the Clarion hardcopy.
The College Board’s new AP School Honor Roll Progress Report awarded Riverside Brookfield High School with “Gold” recognition for the class of 2023. RB was additionally recognized with the AP Access Award.
The AP School Honor Roll assessment is broken down into three categories, all looking at different aspects of the AP experience. The categories are College Credit, College Culture, and College Optimization. “Bronze,” “Silver,” “Gold,” and “Platinum” are the various levels of AP achievement based on different criteria met. RB met Platinum criteria for College Credit and College Optimization.
“Where we are ‘Platinum’ already is in the students that are earning college credit and are in the students that are showing that college readiness by taking multiple AP courses,” Assistant Principal of Curriculum and Instruction Kylie Lindquist said.
The category of College Credit is the total percentage of students in the graduating class who scored higher than a three on any of their AP Exams. The College Optimization component is in reference to the amount of students in the graduating class who took at least one AP course during ninth or 10th grade and took five or more AP Exams in total.
“What that says to me is that our AP teachers are doing an excellent job of creating an experience for students that makes them feel like they want to continue on with other Advanced Placement courses,” Lindquist said. “They feel like they have the support. They feel like they’re enjoying the experiences, the experiences enriching their academics, and their experiences as a student in general. So that to me is fantastic because once kids get in, they’re not being scared off.”
RB’s STEM division head, Lindsay Mynaugh, has taught AP Statistics since 2011 and has also scored AP Exams since 2015.
“The number of students that have taken at least five APs is wild to me because we’re more than double what the expected distinction is for platinum,” Mynaugh said. “We want to make sure that our students are not burning themselves out, but also I love that our students are willing to challenge themselves and kind of dive in prior to college.”
The third category is College Culture which refers to the total percentage of students in the graduating class that took an AP Exam at some point in their high school career. Data indicated that RB was in the “Gold” range for College Culture. The “Platinum” marker for College Culture is 80%.
“We have 72% of our students at RB in our graduating class of 2023 who experienced one AP course before they graduated,” Lindquist said. “And while we’re always going to work to achieve more, I feel good about the fact that 72% of our graduating seniors last year felt like they could accept that challenge.”
It is a matter of an additional 8% of the graduating seniors to take an AP class in order to reach that “Platinum” level.
“I think a lot of it is building confidence in students and helping students to know that RB really is a school that values the experience. We are not a school necessarily that believes that every student that goes into an AP class has to get a five,” Lindquist said. “We want them to have the experience, and that’s really what that College Culture part speaks to.”
Senior Khrysler Jimenez will have taken five AP courses by the time he graduates this upcoming spring.
“To my peers who may be hesitant to take an AP course: it’s perfectly normal to feel that way, with the idea that it may provide more work and difficulty than the rest of your classes,” Jimenez said. “I recommend it since it can offer you a classroom environment that challenges you. Plus, if you score a three or higher on the AP test at the end of the year, it can provide you with benefits in the form of credits in college since it’ll save you money with tuition and you don’t have to take certain courses, depending on the college.”
Junior Heaven Perry is currently enrolled in AP U.S. History, and AP English Language and Composition. She believes that taking these courses helps her connect with like-minded peers. Perry also values the accessibility of AP courses at RB.
“I feel like this award shows that RB practically puts so much faith into their students to the point where they think that all of us can succeed and go beyond, which is really cool,” Perry said.
Administration plans to continue to market the variety of AP courses already available, but, in an effort to obtain more students’ attention, new additions to the AP menu of courses may soon become available.
“AP and the College Board are expanding opportunities. We are looking at what other courses that we can bring to RB. They’re doing an Advanced Placement African American History, they’re doing, you know, an Advanced Placement AP Research and AP Seminar course,” Lindquist said.
At RB, AP classes are only available after freshman year. While allowing ninth graders to take AP classes would increase the school’s percentage in College Culture, it might affect a student’s adaptation to the high school learning environment.
“We have talked about opening things up to freshman, and while we know this would help numbers, we think that freshman year is a year where students should have the chance to acclimate to high school and adjust to the rigor of a high school academic program. At the freshman level at RB, we have carefully selected teachers and programming meant to intentionally strengthen students’ skills, executive functions, and help them learn what it means to perform and grow at a higher level than they are used to. At this time, we still believe students should enter into AP only after their freshman year,” Lindquist said
Perry attended Noble Academy for ninth grade, before coming to RB. This was where she took her first AP course, AP Human Geography.
“Freshman year, I hated that class. All my other classes were average, but I only had one class where I was different from every other freshman. That class we took was the first time they put freshmen in an AP class, and it was the last year,” Perry said. “It was terrible. It was a bunch of hard work and all the pressure having to take this AP test.”
Another aspect of the AP Honor Roll was the AP Access Award. This award highlights RB’s dedication to “equitable access to advanced coursework,” as stated by College Board.
“The AP Access Award means everything to me. The reason for that is because I know there are schools that have closed AP programs, where not every student can get into an AP class. That pathway is blocked for them,” Lindquist said. “That’s amazing to me especially for underrepresented populations that have traditionally been kind of kept out because of the achievement gap.”
RB teachers enjoy offering the challenge of an AP course to anyone willing to take it.
“[In AP Stats] we’ll have students that started in our Extended Algebra class all the way up to students who are currently in AP Calculus BC sitting in the same class, so I think it’s pretty cool to have those students being on a level playing field and kind of jumping into that challenge together,” Mynaugh said.
Preparing a diverse range of academically versed students for an AP Exam can be challenging, and takes immense amounts of time, planning, and professional development.
“You don’t often get to celebrate the teachers that are really really elevating the educational landscape for students, and so what I say is that all of this data is not possible without the hours and hours and hours of work and dedication that our teachers put in and the challenges that our students rise to to really meet those teachers expectations. So I just think that this continues to speak to the amazing students in the amazing teachers that we have in our building,” Lindquist said.
