Over the summer, CollegeBoard, the organization responsible for setting rules and administering tests for Advanced Placement curriculum, as well as for the SAT test, changed the way the AP program is organized along with some of the curriculum. 

With these changes comes a greater emphasis on online support. According to Cathy Andrus, the teacher responsible for the Advanced Placement program at Central, this emphasis necessitated the creation of online sections that students had to join. 

“First we had to create AP sections for each section, so if a teacher only teaches one period, they have one section, if they teach the same course four times, they have four sections.” 

This comes with additional teacher and student supports, Andrus said, along with the changing of registration date for the AP exams from the spring to the fall. According to AP Chemistry teacher Sharon Elliott, these changes include the creation of a bank of exam questions that have been used over the past years for help guiding teaching strategies. 

“They can use this bank to create benchmarks for kids, quizzes for kids; if everybody but one person understands, I’m doing okay, if nobody but one person understands, I probably need to change my strategy,” Andrus said in explaining ways this question list could be useful. 

A greater emphasis is also being put on the AP tests, with a requirement that all students take an AP or an AP-like test. The latter option will be designed by teachers of each Advanced Placement subject from across Omaha Public Schools to ensure they hit all AP curriculum in the test. 

“The expectation to take the AP exam has always been there, but not always as emphasized as the district would like,” Andrus said. 

Besides changes to the overall structure, some big changes were made to the curriculum, especially that of the World History course, according to AP World History teachers Victoria Deniston-Reed and Joseph Mickeliunas. 

This was also amongst the most controversial of the changes. The initial plan would shift the start of AP World History away from 10,000 years ago to 1450 C.E., which many expressed would result in the teaching of an overly Euro-centric curriculum that would all but ignore regions like Africa and the middle east.  

However, according to Deniston-Reed, CollegeBoard ultimately shifted the beginning of the curriculum from 1450 C.E. to 1200 C.E. due to backlash from AP teachers. 

Despite this, some teachers like Mickeliunas and Deniston-Reed, are still concerned about the changes. Mickeliunas, who specializes in the ancient Mediterranean, a period falling well before the beginning date of 1200, is worried the changes will leech much needed context to the historical events being taught in the curriculum. 

In the way of AP Chemistry, Elliott said that the curriculum did not undergo any changes in content as World History underwent; for Chemistry, it was mainly organizational change away from “big ideas” organized by discovery, to a unit or chapter-based structure of organization with each idea organized by what topic it matches with. 

Despite the changes, the AP tests will still be administered on the same date as before, so college admissions will be mostly unaffected, according to college counselor Angela Meyer.