The San Diego Unified School Board approved spending roughly $230,000 to continue a district-wide push to offer more Advanced Placement classes to all students.
Advanced Placement courses are college prep classes high schools students take to get a leg-up in the college admissions process.
But for decades AP courses were only offered at certain high schools. That began to change last school year when San Diego Unified launched an initiative to bring more AP classes to six district high schools with large numbers of low-income and minority students.
The school board voted to spend an additional $230,000 yesterday to expand the effort to all district high schools. The money will also go towards paying AP testing fees for low-income and minority students.
Anthony Fumegali, a junior at Crawford High School, an inner-city campus which now has more AP courses than ever before, urged the school board to approve the additional funding.
“Over 70 students are taking AP Calculus, and that's just one of our many AP courses that we're offering at Crawford,” Fumegali said. “I would love to see every single student who is taking an AP class this year to pass their AP test but its not going to happen without the necessary funding.”
The school board agreed and unanimously approved the extra funding. District officials say since the AP initiative was launched at six schools, there's been a 53 percent jump in the number of low-income and minority students taking AP exams. There are now more than 130 AP classes offered at those campuses. Before there were only 63 courses offered.
