Lead Higher Initiative gives access to high-level courses

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Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses help prepare high school students for the rigors of college academics. But some students are not confident enough to take the courses, or may not even know they exist.

Westerville City Schools, in cooperation with the Lead Higher Initiative, is working to alleviate these issues.

“The goal of the program is to have enrollment patterns in AP and IB classes that reflect the demographics of a school district as a whole,” says Superintendent John Kellogg. “We want to close the gaps in our low-income and minority student population and their enrollment in AP and IB classes compared to the overall enrollment, and identify those underrepresented students who we believe can be successful but have not enrolled in those classes.”

To accomplish this goal by the start of the 2017-18 academic year, the district applied for a grant last spring for the Lead Higher Initiative. The application included district demographics and how they compared with the course enrollment patterns of AP and IB courses, as well as resources in place and organizational goals.

Westerville was one of 117 districts nationwide selected to participate in the program administered by the nonprofit Equal Opportunity Schools. Each of the district’s three high schools received a $25,000 grant to cover the costs of working with a consultant to collect data and research that is used in creating a plan to identify and open opportunities for low-income and minority students in AP and IB courses.

“Last August, a Lead Higher consultant began meeting with us once a month to outline the plan and process,” says Scott Reeves, the district's director of secondary academic affairs. “We’ve collected grades and test data as well as district-wide surveys from our ninth-, 10th- and 11th-grade students and staff to help us understand perceived barriers, why some students don’t take AP or IB classes, and the support students need to be successful.”

Lead Higher created a data warehouse for the district once all of the information was compiled.

“All of the academic, student and staff data was put it into charts, graphs and reports that our principals have shared with their staffs,” says Reeves. “Lead Higher also has a profile for each student, and that’s where we identified the target group of students we wanted to reach out to in order to give them the confidence to take AP and IB courses.”

The Lead Higher consultant meets with staff from the district and each high school to help with implementation. The consultant also helps the district work toward its goal of increasing AP and IB course enrollment by 100 to 120 low-income or minority students per school. Each high school created an equity team consisting of administrators, counselors and teachers to help facilitate the work. In addition, the district put together a group of teachers to begin an outreach plan for the target group.

“The first part of the outreach plan is to bring our targeted students together in a group and let them know that we believe in them and to give them the confidence that they can do the work,” says Reeves. “We also want to assure them that they’re not alone and we will always be there to support them. A trusted adult will meet with each student to discuss their aspirations and goals, and we’ll also meet in small groups with students and parents. Lead Higher has laid the blueprint to guide us and show what has worked in other school districts. They are helping us replicate this process each year to attract and retain future students.”

Bill Heinmiller, the district’s IB diploma program coordinator, says most of the district’s AP and IB courses simply require a desire to learn and a commitment to persevere through new challenges.

“These challenges are supported by a teaching staff that is committed to helping students be successful,” says Heinmiller. “While our teachers are very knowledgeable and provide a lot of information, much of the onus for learning is shared by the students. Through group work, independent research, small group and class presentations, students are given considerable opportunities to present and acquire their knowledge in a variety of ways. This shared responsibility for course material builds a mindset of responsibility and ownership that is both challenging and rewarding.”

AP and IB courses are content-driven, Heinmiller says, and the material is on par with college course work. But most importantly, students develop habits and mindsets that prepare them to be successful in college.

“AP and IB courses are absolutely critical,” says Kellogg. “They add value to a student’s transcript and help college admissions people understand the types of high school experiences for each student. Research has also shown that high school students who take AP and IB coursework are much more successful in college than students who do not take those courses.”

The Lead Higher Initiative is a national effort by the Equal Opportunity Schools with support from My Brother's Keeper Alliance, the U. S. Department of Education, IB and the College Board. It is backed by contributions from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, Tableau and Google.

According to the Equal Opportunity Schools website, the Lead Higher Initiative plans to add 100,000 low-income and minority students per year to AP and IB courses by 2018 and enable more than 600 schools to fully reflect their population’s diversity in those courses.

Chris Woodley is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.

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