Addressing the Galesburg District 205 board of education at Monday’s regular meeting, Dr. John Edwards said his daughter is concerned that AP Physics 2 might not be offered at Galesburg High School next school year.
Edwards, an anesthesiologist at OSF Saint Mary Medical Center in Galesburg, said a school district the size of Galesburg has an obligation to provide a core AP curriculum in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
“You talk about equity. I know that's part of your mission. You have to be equitable to all people,” Edwards said. “You’ve got people in the middle. That's where most people are. You’ve got people on either end. If you have eight or ten exceptional students that want the opportunity to take AP Physics 1 and 2, I think they should have the opportunity to do it.”
Edwards said it can be difficult to recruit physicians and their families to come to Galesburg, especially without a “fervent" AP curriculum at the high school. He said many physicians live in Dunlap or Peoria and commute to Galesburg.
“I think it's a shame. It's bad for the community. You want your doctors… your professional people living here,” Edwards said. “They're not going to want to live here, if you have a school that doesn't provide some stable baseline level of opportunity for their kids.”
Edwards said his son had the same issue as his daughter.
“He got accepted to Stanford in the fall and he fell into the same trap. He took AP Physics 1 and then they canceled AP Physics 2. He's going to go study math and computer science and he hasn't had the opportunity to take an entire course of physics in high school,” Edwards said. “And it's not a small high school.”
Board member Jamie Harter said she shares the concern.
“I think that we have such a bubble in the middle that the higher-end students sometimes get overlooked,” Harter said. “I think it's really important that we probably should keep focusing on how to keep those classes for them.”
Superintendent John Asplund said the district does not offer every AP course that is requested if there isn’t sufficient enrollment.
Six students have requested to take AP Physics 2 next year. Asplund said normally the cutoff for offering a class is 15 students, and for AP classes the district has gone well below that.
But he noted it’s not as easy as simply adding a section, because every teacher has a full course load.
“If the board says that we absolutely need, and I know you're not saying this, but I'm just putting this out for illustration. If the board says we are absolutely going to offer all AP classes, then we're going to either hire more teachers if we can, or two, we're just not going to offer some other classes. It's just, it's a math problem,” Asplund said.
Parent Nick Dilley also addressed the board. He, too, has heard AP Physics 2 may not be offered next year. That would be the third AP class his son has wanted to take, but couldn't because it wasn't offered.
Dilley said his son is not alone in struggling to fill his schedule with classes that challenge him.
“What I'd like to encourage the board to do is to help high school administrators and the district at large find solutions to this issue. Without addressing it, we are tacitly encouraging systemic preferences that exclude students that are putting everything they have into their academics," Dilley said.
He said without AP Physics 2 his son will have exhausted the STEM-related AP options at the high school.
Asplund said the schedule for next year has not been released.
Tri States Public Radio produced this story. TSPR relies on financial support from readers and listeners in order to provide coverage of the issues that matter to west central Illinois, southeast Iowa, and northeast Missouri. As someone who values the content created by TSPR's news department please consider making a financial contribution.
