By John P. Kelly
Boerne ISD 

Just to give you an idea of the breadth and scope of our high school’s Advance Placement program, here is a list of the AP courses we offered in 2006/07:  Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Environmental Science, Computer Science, Calculus, Statistics, English Language, English Literature, US History, European History, Government, Macro Economics, Human Geography, World History, Psychology, Spanish Language, German Language, Art Portfolio, and Music Theory. 

At our December board meeting, we’ll recognize the many AP teachers whose classes exceeded state and national passing averages for these difficult tests.

Although we offer most of the AP subjects available, we also adapt to a changing clientele and offer any other subjects in which we have significant student interest.  I was approached the other night about offering Mandarin Chinese – and my response is that we could offer it in the future if we have enough students willing to participate and if we can find a teacher or site.  This is made easier by our burgeoning capability to offer distance learning via teleconferencing/satellite. 

There are three primary advantages to an AP program: First and foremost, high school students can learn demanding college material. Second, parents benefit from extensive college savings when the students are successful on the AP exams. And, third, many students may choose to repeat the same kind of course in college and (regardless of how well they did on the AP test) are much better prepared. 

Our AP enrollment figures land us in the U.S. News and World Report compilation of the 1,000 best high schools in the United States each year.  This is because we test twice the percentage of students on AP tests than the Texas average. We also test twice the percentage of Hispanic students. But the magazine evaluation records only the percent of students enrolled – and does not factor in actual test results – which would further boost our rankings. 

During the 2006/07 school year, our high school students took over 850 AP exams and 58 percent of the results achieve college credit at most universities. Obviously, both participation rates and test results are considerably above state averages. Our 2007 results translate to approximately 1500 credit hours of college earned – not including additional hours earned in our UTSA and Tech Prep programs. 

I must not neglect to mention the rigorous open enrollment Pre-AP program in place for grades 7-11 in Boerne ISD.  Our teachers offer such courses in the core academic areas of English, Math, Science, and Social Studies. Each year we evaluate the effectiveness of those programs and tweak course offerings accordingly.  For example, we determined this year that a Pre-AP math course was needed in sixth grade for able students – so that they can advance to even higher levels of math achievement by 12th grade. 

Our teachers should be praised. According to our personnel department, we had 3,100 applications for approximately 100 open positions this summer. As a result, we can continue to recruit and retain from among the finest educators in this area of Texas.