I asked several teachers and students the question, “Is Hayward High School offering enough Advanced Placement classes?” The answers were diverse, but overwhelmingly supportive of adding more.
One teacher said there wasn’t enough room for more Advanced Placement classes because they’re all designed to be year-long. She says that she would like to offer an Advanced Placement class but she’s okay with not having it because the semester classes give her more opportunities to reach a wide variety of students. An additional thought she added was that it would be good to expand the amount offered so that kids have more options to choose from depending on their interests, but put limits on how many you can take at a time so it doesn’t become too overwhelming or take away from other elective classes.
While HHS offers six different AP classes, there are many that we could add to give students more opportunities. Classes that could be an option (and are options at many nearby schools) are: AP Biology, AP Psychology, AP Physics, and more. Adding additional AP classes would make our school more competitive and well rounded as a whole.
Continuing with our responses another teacher thought it would be wonderful to have more Advanced Placement classes and that he would love to teach AP Psychology himself. A teacher in the science department agreed that it would be nice to have more options but it could be unrealistic considering scheduling. They said, “To elaborate on that, it’s hard for our school to offer more Advanced Placement classes because the students who would take those classes are so few.” One teacher noted that there are kids that can handle a hard class load and if more AP classes were offered we could get students through their freshman year of college for cheaper.
From the student standpoint of things, one recounted that she could’ve gained a better education and been more prepared for college if she had more options available to her. Opposing that, another said that there’s not a lot of students at HHS that would like to challenge themselves in that way so it might be a waste of teachers’ time and resources to teach Advanced Placement classes for two semesters of the year. All in all, you can look at the situation either way. From what I surveyed, most think it would be beneficial to offer at least a couple of more options for Advanced Placement classes.
