College Board highlights 11 LI districts

Eleven Long Island school districts are among those the College Board is recognizing nationally for increasing access to Advanced Placement courses and maintaining or improving the rate at which students score well on demanding AP tests.

The school districts are Copiague, Eastport-South Manor, Great Neck, Harborfields, Herricks, Hicksville, Malverne, Massapequa, Sayville, Syosset and West Islip. They were among 388 districts singled out Wednesday on the College Board's National AP Achievement List.

School officials say they've enrolled a much wider swath of students into these college-level classes, expanding their view of who should undertake such rigorous coursework.

Geraldine Sullivan Keck, deputy superintendent of the Sayville district, said her schools have added a number of AP courses in the past five years, including AP statistics, studio in art and music theory.

She said 234 Sayville High School students took AP tests in 2010, up from 171 in 2008. She said AP courses help students become more competitive during the college application process.

"They really need to show they took the most rigorous courses their high school had to offer," she said, adding that by allowing more students to participate, some have been able to "reframe a picture of themselves as capable of achieving."

Jennifer Topiel, spokeswoman for the College Board, said research shows AP courses "can contribute powerfully to a student's readiness for college" and likelihood of success at the university level.

Students who score well on AP tests -- typically a 3, 4, or 5, which is the top score -- can get college credit and take fewer college courses, in some cases shaving thousands off tuition bills.

"Those are benefits that all college-bound students deserve," Topiel said. She said the College Board doesn't encourage unprepared or unmotivated students to enroll, but data show there are "hundreds of thousands" of students who are not in AP courses "who have the same academic potential and statistical probability of success" as those who are taking these classes.

Mark Nocero, superintendent for Eastport-South Manor, said his district had fewer than 200 enrollments in AP classes five years ago, compared with nearly 1,000 now. Some students take more than one AP class.

"We believe all of our kids can achieve at high levels," he said. "It really shouldn't be an elitist kind of thing."

Malverne Superintendent James Hunderfund said high school students there took 187 AP tests in 2010 compared with 165 in 2008.

The district added extra class time for some AP courses starting last year, he said, so that students could have more time to absorb the material.