Expanding minds

EV plans to increase advanced placement offerings

Sat., Jan. 23, 2010

By Lisa Leinberger lisal@spokesman.com (509) 459-5449

East Valley High School is looking to expand its advanced placement program.

The school has several classes for students who want the challenge of advanced courses and can get college credit for them. Steve Pointer, assessment coordinator at the school, said East Valley offers AP U.S. history for juniors, government and politics for seniors, biology, calculus, European history, English language and English literature classes. Next year, the school also will offer AP physics and statistics.

“We want to ramp up the academic culture in our school,” Pointer said.

He said the school is looking at potential AP students to raise that number. They have already identified around 430 students who are eligible to take the advanced classes. The school sent letters to the families of those students and will offer an informational meeting to discuss the benefits of taking the courses.

There are around 235 students at East Valley enrolled in AP classes. “Our goal is to increase that to 700 kids,” he said, adding that he hopes that will be the number enrolled in classes in the next couple of years.

“It’s a university class,” said Julie Seipp, teacher of the European history and humanities combined AP class which meets for two hours a day. She said the students in her class, all sophomores, must jump through hoops to get in – she assigns them homework to complete over the summer in order to be eligible.

The students in her class write a term paper in the fall – this year’s topics ranged from Napoleon and French opera to the Industrial Revolution in Paris, to women’s rights in Europe, and even fashion.

“I have smart, wonderful kids,” Seipp said. The students will cap off what they learned in her class this year during a trip to France this fall.

Although these two classes won’t be available next year, there are other classes to challenge the students at East Valley next year.

“It’s more challenging than other, normal classes,” said Nolan Xiong, a senior taking AP American government.

“For a lot of students, it would be great to have them here,” Pointer said.

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