On Monday, more than 60 students, teachers and parents packed a small board room for a special district meeting on some big curriculum changes coming to students.
Starting next school year students who attend high school in Hanford may have to work a little harder to get a GPA bump in an advanced placement class. Honors classes will no longer offer a .2 GPA increase.
To save money and make classes more accessible to all students, District Curriculum Coordinator Bobby Peters says the district is doing away with general GPA increases for students, just for getting a grade C or higher in honors or AP classes.
Bobby Peters said, "We don't have money to just go and it'd be great if we could go hire teachers for whatever we needed but we don't so we try to make every class as accessible to all students as we can."
Peters says the district is paying $90.00 for each student to take their AP exam. Instead, this year the district is providing its own final exam for students.
"Students have scored proficient or advanced on our ap exam will receive or not receive the bump," explained Peters.
Students can still take the AP exam if they want to, they would just have to pay for it themselves.
Hanford is also eliminating its AVID program, which stands for advanced via individual determination because the state is going to stop funding it. Peters says the district does not have the money to pay for the AVID name and train teachers for the program.
Peters said, "They are students who typically may not have all the tools or support to go to college so they provide a 9 10 11 12th grade curriculum that supports students so they have the best chance possible to get into universities."
The changes are going to affect roughly 6-700 of Hanford's 4,000 high school students. They'll go into effect in the 2013-14 school year.
