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School envisions a program for the best, brightest
By ROBERT KING © St. Petersburg Times, published April 1, 2001 SPRING HILL -- They are pegged as future doctors, lawyers, professors and inventors. They are the top minds, the brightest 5 or 10 percent of the high school student body. And to a certain degree, some say, they have been overlooked. Now, Springstead High School wants to carve out a haven for them with the equivalent of a school-within-a-school that it intends to call its Advanced Placement Academy. Since the 1980s, Springstead has been offering advanced placement classes, tough courses roughly equivalent to college-level work. But the AP academy, which would open next fall, would go beyond anything the school has done before. It would be open to only about 150 of the 1,700 students at Springstead. To get in, students would take an entrance exam. That score, along with a student's previous grades and personal references, would be weighed by a council of teachers and administrators who would make the ultimate admissions decisions. Once in, students would have to pass every class and maintain a C average or risk losing their seats. Such a feat is no gimme in classes so tough they are used to prep kids for national exams where a passing grade can get you college credits. During their high school careers, students would have to perform community service and find time during summers to read 22 pieces of classic literature, not to mention the books they would read during the school year. As seniors, they would have to put together a senior project and survive a prep school equivalent of a master's thesis defense. If it sounds like tough sledding, it's supposed to be. "Our job in this academy is to show students that a challenge, while it is scary, is to be welcomed," said Sean Sexton, an English teacher at Springstead. Sexton, a poet and citizen of Ireland who has taught at Springstead since 1987, is perhaps the school's most passionate advocate of the AP academy, which backers say would require no additional money in the school budget. But he is far from alone. A sizable chunk of Springstead's teaching faculty has come together to promote the cause. It has the full support of principal Dot Dodge. But the idea for the AP academy germinated among teachers, more than 20 of whom have the training needed to teach AP courses. Momentum for it seems to come from their common feeling that there's more Springstead can do to challenge its brightest students, some of whom have not yet found the motivation to work at their highest level. "We see a number of students who are cognitively able to succeed in AP, but they are never challenged. They don't take the classes," Sexton said. "We want to show them new challenges." Kathleen Long, a teacher of English and the humanities who has been at Springstead for 19 years, said a small percentage of Springstead alumni come back from college and say they feel like they were cheated, that they weren't fully prepared. "It's a small percentage, but it's an important percentage -- leaders and entrepreneurs," Long said. "The sharpest kids you would ever want have gone through this school. We haven't always served them as effectively as we could." While advanced placement classes have been around for years, sometimes Springstead students have been shut out of some of the classes because of scheduling conflicts. John Korecki, a senior at Springstead, ran into that problem this year when his AP physics and literature classes were scheduled at the same time. He says an AP academy, which would help alleviate those conflicts, makes sense. Scheduling aside, educators say tuning in more closely to the needs of top-flight students is long overdue. In a state where schools get annual report cards, principals have been in a frantic rush to shape up the students at the bottom -- the low-performing kids who can weigh heavily on a school's grade. It requires a great deal of effort, time and money. But the reward is clear: Raising the scores of low-performing students, even by fractions, can pay big dividends for the school's overall grade. Sometimes, educators say, that means the high-performing students, who require less hand-holding, are left to fend for themselves. "One of the things we have talked to our instructional department about is that we've been working on bringing up the lower (25 percent). But we've not given as much thought to the best students," said Superintendent John Sanders. "We've been pleased with their success and ability. But our job is to challenge them to be even better. I'm not sure we've done that." Dodge, who worked with elementary school children before becoming an administrator at Springstead, said there is a tendency for teachers, from kindergarten to high school, to "teach to the middle" of a class' ability level. Often, that means the geniuses don't get pushed. "This is an untapped level," Dodge said. That would not be the case in Springstead's AP academy. If Springstead can get the School Board and the state to agree, the school would allow academy students to bypass physical education, health and vocational classes in favor of additional college-level courses. Korecki says competition among the students clustered in an AP academy would push them to greater heights. And that field of competition would be enriched if Springstead's faculty gets its wish to turn the academy into a magnet school within two years. That would mean top students normally bound for Hernando or Central high schools could choose to go to Springstead's AP academy. A move to magnet status for Springstead in 2003 would coincide with the opening of the county's fourth high school, a magnet school open to all-comers that will emphasize vocational and technology programs. In a sense, Springstead's AP academy, with its broad liberal arts focus, would stand in stark contrast to the new school's mission of focusing laser-like on career preparation. Beyond that, Dodge and her faculty dream of the day when their school might evolve into an international baccalaureate school, a liberal arts school with an international focus that would be even more rigorous than an AP academy. Still, Springstead's hopes even for an AP academy may hinge on an April 17 meeting with the School Board, which already has expressed some skepticism about the program. Foremost in their minds is the lack of success Springstead students showed last year on the national advanced placement exams. Students who score well can be granted college credits. Last year, only 26 percent of Springstead's students earned a 3 or better on the exams, which are graded on a scale of 1 to 5. Nationally, 64 percent of the test takers scored a 3 or better. School Board Chairman Jim Malcolm called the performance "abysmal." Several board members questioned how Springstead could have the gall to seek an expansion of the AP program given such a poor showing. Board member Gail Coleman says Springstead students must post a respectable passing rate on the national AP exams if the school wants to justify having an AP academy. Springstead faculty members weren't pleased with the performance either. But they say there is more to the story than simply a low score. For one thing, students who take AP courses at Springstead are required to take the national AP exam. Springstead's defenders say that is not the case across the country. Some schools, they contend, even screen students with pre-tests. Those that do poorly, they say, are discouraged from taking the actual exam. Also, some students at Springstead take the national exams even though they haven't taken the corresponding AP course in that subject. Some students simply try to squeak through with what they learned in honors or general education courses, with perhaps some tutoring on the side. More than that, Springstead's faculty says, one AP course by itself isn't enough to prepare a student for the AP exam. AP courses are given now only to juniors and seniors. Dodge and the teachers at Springstead say students need AP prep courses as freshmen and sophomores to build a foundation for later. Indeed, they even contend that middle schools have a role to play by developing a middle school AP-prep program. "These are only high school kids," Sexton said. "You can't just say this is the deep end of the pool." Long, who taught an AP literature class where only five of the 21 students passed the test, said she knew several of the students were up against the wall before they ever took the exam. They were failing her course. The problem: AP literature exams presume that students have read upward of 50 novels and plays, including works from all the big guys such as Dickens, Melville and Shakespeare. Long said most of her students had read few, if any, of those books before they took her class. And that's too much ground to cover in one year, she said. Still, Long feels responsible. "I have failed when they fail," she said.
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