Although its teaching staff appears to be highly qualified (with avg tenure of 11.9 yrs – much less than CA teachers) I don’t see any indication anywhere on its website that it offers any Advanced Placement classes. The Ferguson teachers make more than state public school teachers overall (57.2% have Masters degrees) undoubtedly because the school lies in an “underserved” area. It appears the Ferguson teachers are doing great things with this (lower-income) population of students!
A few stats on McCluer South-Berkeley High (9-12):
-Dropout rate 7% (state rate 11.5%)
-Black dropout rate .9% (state rate 9.6%)
-Avg composite ACT score: 16.4 (= 1135 SAT score, incl writing). State avg ACT score is 20.6 (= 1496 SAT).
-75.6% students qualified for free/reduced lunch (state avg 47.2%)
-Avg annual teacher salary $51,890 (state avg $39,331)
In spite of these students’ daily hardships (incl the majority no doubt having to be bussed in from other towns), the dropout rate is really, really low for this HS serving a wide (semi-rural?) area. This speaks volumes on how dedicated its staff is.
Here are some links of successful students from the school’s web page:
Made possible by “rich” benefactor Master Card in partnership with local agencies:
There IS money (both federal and private) being thrown at this school and it seems to be working as evidenced by its stats (in relation to state stats, overall).
I personally have a few nephews who went to (rural) HS’s situated on K-12 campuses which served a wide attendance area in “flyover country.” Only two are left in college now (the others graduated). The two that got into “top” colleges did so with ~one year of credits upon their HS graduation by taking a bus to/from a “junior college” in another town in the afternoons of their junior and senior years to obtain college credit, so their parents wouldn’t have to help them with housing expense for four years at university. Why? Because they had 0-2 AP offerings at their schools!
I believe it is fundamentally unfair to penalize a college applicant without AP credits over one who has them when they both have the same or similar GPA, due to the first applicant having little to no AP classes available to him/her.
Apparently, many universities in flyover country agree with me.
We are fortunate here in SD County in that our HS’s are geographically close to one another, almost all have AP offerings and parents/students have “choice” in the form of zone and interdistrict transfers. This is NOT the case in most parts of “flyover country.”
