“We looked and then asked.”

At Thursday’s Board meeting, we shared three updates: the Graduation Pathways Report for the Class of 2026, this year’s National Merit honors, and five years of Advanced Placement results. All three are in the meeting materials. Here’s what we learned.

In June, 438 students graduated. Twenty members of the Class of 2027 are National Merit Commended Scholars, the top three to four percent nationwide, and one is a Semifinalist. Four years ago we had eight Commended Scholars. Class sizes have not grown. Expectations have.

There is an old argument that opening the door wider lowers the standard. We do not believe it. Here is what our results show.

In 2022, 283 students took AP exams. This May, 404 did, 79 more than last year. If the old argument were true, the pass rate would have dropped. Instead, it rose from 84 percent in 2022 to 95 percent this year. Nineteen of every twenty students who walked through a wider door cleared the bar. That is not luck. Our leadership team reviews every student’s PSAT scores to find those with the potential to do well in an AP course, and we invite them. Many accept. Teachers treat them as if they belong, because the results show they do. Principals and supervisors build the schedules and the support that make it work. Those 79 students were always here. We looked and then asked.

Progress isn’t a straight line upward. Not every number will rise every year. But the question is never how many students we kept out to protect a statistic. It is how many we invited in, and how many discovered they were capable of more than they knew. This year, more of them found out.

Read the entire Corner Column here.