Students warm up for fall classes

Workshop a preview for advanced placement courses

Dominique Wilson, 16, (right), a student at Maumelle High School, listens to instruction during a calculus prep course Thursday with Denesha Wilburn, 16, (left), a student at J.A. Fair High School, and Justin Harper, 16, a student at Hall High School. The students attended Arkansas AIMS’ first Summer PREP (PreAP Readiness for Eager People) workshop at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Dominique Wilson, 16, (right), a student at Maumelle High School, listens to instruction during a calculus prep course Thursday with Denesha Wilburn, 16, (left), a student at J.A. Fair High School, and Justin Harper, 16, a student at Hall High School. The students attended Arkansas AIMS’ first Summer PREP (PreAP Readiness for Eager People) workshop at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Sixty-three Arkansas high school students gave up five days of their summer vacation last week to take part in activities to help them prepare for advanced placement courses they will take in the fall.

Offered through the Arkansas Advanced Initiative for Math and Science, the workshop was the first for the Summer PREP (PreAP Readiness for Eager People) program. It was offered for free to central Arkansas high school students taking their first advanced placement classes in one of four core areas: biology, chemistry, calculus or language and composition.

The program aims to help "underserved" students in the Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts, said S. Lynn Harrison-Bullard, the initiative's program manager.

"We assume that bright kids have access to opportunities," Harrison-Bullard said. "But just being a gifted student isn't always enough. When there are other factors -- say poverty -- these future leaders might go unnoticed."

The mission of the Advanced Initiative for Math and Science is to increase enrollment and achievement in advanced placement mathematics, science and English courses.

In talking with advanced placement teachers over the past few years, one of the repeated comments was that students weren't prepared for the rigor and the expectations of the college-level curricula taught in their classes, Harrison-Bullard said.

The week-long Summer PREP workshop at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock was funded through a $90,000 grant from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. The Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts both provided busing, and students were given lunch and snacks.

The initiative also partnered with City Year, an education-focused nonprofit that works with public school districts to get AmeriCorps members into schools, where they mentor and tutor students for a year.

The City Year members who took part in the workshop will be placed in many of the attending students' schools and will be able to continue mentoring them during the school year up to the advanced placement exams.

In Arkansas, every high school is required to offer at least one advanced placement course in each of the core areas, and the advanced placement exam at the end of each course is offered for free to students. Though this is beneficial, it can make students feel compelled to take the exam even if they are unprepared, Harrison-Bullard said.

According to the College Board, the organization that administers advanced placement tests, 46.1 percent -- or 12,670 out of 27,492 graduates in Arkansas in 2013 -- left high school having completed at least one such exam. More than 11,300 of those students -- or 32.9 percent -- came from a low-income background.

Of those that passed the exam with a 3 or higher on a 1-to-5 scale, fewer than one-fourth were considered low-income students.

Though the percentage of low-income students passing the exam has gone up from just 7.7 percent in the decade from 2003 to 2013, Harrison-Bullard said there's still a lot of work to do to reach out to those students.

The Summer PREP course was one way to do so, she said, and she hopes it becomes an annual program that can expand to other areas of the state.

"These students certainly aren't unprepared," she said. "It's just that this is a way we can give them a leg up and an understanding of what to expect in the class they'll be taking."

Kelcie Ford, a student at Joe T. Robinson High School in the Pulaski County Special School District, said that after the week, she feels ready to take on advanced placement language and composition in the fall.

"I'm way more confident now," she said Friday. "I learned a lot but, wow, the teachers made it a lot of fun, too."

In Ford's class, students wrote poems while lounging on pillows in the hallway. Upstairs, in the calculus classroom, students played a matching game to learn about functions. The biology classroom worked with mealworms to learn about different animal behaviors. The chemistry class made ice cream with liquid nitrogen that sent fog billowing out of the bowl as students took videos of it with their cellphones.

"The students are extremely engaged," said Kenneth James, president of the Advanced Initiative for Math and Science and former commissioner of the state Department of Education. "How could they not be? They are having fun under some of the best teachers in the state. It's the best kind of learning."

While the chemistry students finished eating their ice cream and giggled about smoke that came out of their noses and mouths when they ate Cheetos dipped in liquid nitrogen, Nancy Ward, the initiative's English content director, paged through student surveys.

She smiled and held up one of the surveys.

"The kids want this to be two weeks long next year, and they want shorter breaks," she said. "What kid asks to be in class more? I guess we must have had done something right."

Metro on 08/03/2015

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