Science department teacher Claude Gonzalez instructs his Biology 1 class on doing their starter based on their standards. Gonzalez had hoped to teach AP Environmental Science in the upcoming school year.”It’s my favorite class. Environmental Science is great,” Gonzalez said. “There’s very practical applications for it no matter what you do in your life. You’re still going to have the flipping light switches and lights coming on.”
By CHRISTINA KURIAN – Staff Writer
Clarke Central High School offers 20 different Advanced Placement courses and each year, more AP classes continue to be added. One new AP class will be offered next year.
For the 2015-16 school year, Advanced Placement Environmental Science will be a new class offered in the Clarke Central High School science department which includes three other AP classes as well as 20 other AP classes offered in the whole school.
“We were looking for (a class) kids would be successful in who weren’t necessarily top science students, but they would still have access to an AP class in the science department,” Instructional Coach Dr. Linda Boza said.
Science department teacher Claude Gonzalez will teach AP Environmental Science, and he says it will be a rigorous course.
“There is going to be a lot more pre reading where I’ll say ‘Okay, for tomorrow, read this,’ and we’ll hit the questions instead of going and introducing the subject first, then having to read,” Gonzalez said. “It’s going to be a lot of case studies… a lot of reading.”
There are only four AP science course currently available to take at CCHS including Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Environmental Science. To fulfil the AP Science course availability, there has been a push to add AP Environmental Science.
“There are so many courses that you can offer that are AP. Not everything has an AP course that goes with it,” Boza said. “In language arts, for example there are only two courses that you can even offer at all and we offer both of them. In social studies, there’s a ton of them and we offer five. But in science, we were only offering three: Physics 1, Chemistry, and Biology.”
The district will send Gonzalez to a college board seminar in which he’ll have to submit an AP Environmental Science syllabus and fill out an audit. Then, the class will be eligible to be funded by the state.
“We apply each year to the state of Georgia. It’s an AP grant and they usually grant us two trainings a year,” Boza said.
Though Boza says the social studies classes are the most popular, AP Environmental Science has the potential to be so as well.
“The most popular class, I would have to say, (are) the social studies classes (because they) get the most sign-ups, if you look at the sessions that we offer,” Boza said. “But (Gonzalez has) been out there promoting it and he’s had some interest. I think at least in the first year, we’ll have (one) section of it and then maybe it’ll grow from there.”
Some AP classes, like AP Psychology and Environmental Science, have been slated multiple times to be added on to the CCSD Program of Study but were cancelled due to various reasons, such as not having a teacher to instruct the class or not having enough students sign-up.
“Almost every social studies teacher teaches AP, and when you teach two different APs, the workload is crazy, just the planning and the grading. It’s hard.” Boza said. “We’ve been wanting to offer AP Environmental Science for a while now but needed someone willing to teach it.”
