At the November 22 School Board meeting parents voiced their concerns that our school administration has considered removing or greatly limiting a parent’s right to override a student’s admission into an AP or Honors class. First I want to thank the Board for formally looking into a process, which, with roughly 2,000 parental overrides occurring, is clearly broken. Let’s face it. There are two sides to this situation. While the vast majority of overrides are successful, some students also flounder or fail to make the grade. Either situation is problematic. So I firmly understand the Administration’s goal to get more objective data to do a better job of recommending students in the first place. However, this is where the problem runs much deeper than the override process.
We need to really look at what we are trying to accomplish. Our goal for schools is to give all of our students the finest education achievable to enable them to go out into the world and succeed in their future endeavors.
When it comes to AP classes, the goal here is for students to pass the AP exams. This leads to earned college credits, better scholarships, and admission into better schools. Unfortunately, the opportunity to attend these classes falls into the laps of an elite few. The fact is we all reside in a very high-achieving school district.
This means that the vast majority of students should be in Honors and AP level courses. The courses must be set up with a curriculum that is geared for students to pass these AP exams — not cater to a few extremely gifted students that should be in a more advanced class.
The current lack of availability of enough AP-level classes across all subject levels is doing the vast majority of our students a disservice. My challenge to the School Board and School District is to look at the goal before embarking on a course to fix a broken override process that may be the wrong process all together.
Let’s get the data and figure out a program how we can get more of our children getting AP credit that are fully capable. Let’s match the curriculum to what is needed to pass these standardized AP exams, not an artificial bar that caters to only a few students. We have a superb population of students who deserve to get the AP recognition they deserve. Let’s increase their opportunities, not focus on how we can limit them.
Anthony Zeoli
8 Ellsworth Drive, West Windsor
