This spring, students at Appomattox County High School will get some help on fees for AP tests.
The division will pay half of the $89 per-student cost of each exam. If a student scores a 3, 4 or 5, the board will reimburse them the rest of the money as a reward for their achievement.
“We want to have students take these classes,” said school board member Amy Martin. “We want them to pass. We want them to excel. I think it’s money well spent.”
The board OK’d the plan during its meeting last week.
Annette Bennett, the division’s director of curriculum and instruction, told board members the plan would cost at most about $5,000, but more likely less. The expense depends on both the number of students who take the test and the scores they receive.
Appomattox County Schools are not part of the Virginia Advanced Study Strategies grant, and thus do not receive the outside support offered to divisions in Amherst, Campbell and Bedford counties for AP classes.
Nonetheless, Bennett said, the division is in the midst of a self-supported expansion of its small AP program. Last year, it offered three AP courses and this year it is offering five, plus four pre-AP classes to prepare students for what they will encounter.
She told school board members that one of the benefits of increasing the number of AP classes at Appomattox County High School is the type of critical thinking taught in AP classes also helps students when they take the SAT college admissions exam.
The money to fund the AP test fee subsidies comes from a cutback in subsidies for Appomattox High School students taking college courses at Central Virginia Community College’s Appomattox location.
Taking classes with CVCC is a popular option; this year, Appomattox students are taking approximately 166 classes there. That includes students who take a set sequence of courses in the division’s early college program, as well as students who sign up for classes “a la carte.”
In the past, the school division paid a third of the cost of each class a student took at CVCC. In an effort to cut costs, school board members decided this past spring to stop subsidizing students taking college classes that do not count for high school credit — like political science, for example.
Bennett said after the meeting that while the division wants to provide options for students, it also can be a logistical headache to have students who go out to the college in the middle of their school day for a single class.
Dual-enrollment classes may be the best option for some students, but if a student makes an excellent score on the AP test, she said, that transfers to a wider range of colleges than community college class credit.
