Our local newspaper man, fighting the neverending battle for truth, justice, and the Lancaster Way, confirms an interesting tidbit over on his personal blog (scroll down to comments...)


The (Lancaster) ISD did, in the past, run honor rolls in our paper. They quit 2? years ago, said they were going to do something different. Haven't yet, at least not for public consumption. Per student capita, the honor roll was about half as long as most districts.

Something different might simply include a list of students attempting Advanced Placement (AP) Courses.

One of the claims made for the district's need of additional classrooms is that AP --and now, International Baccalaureate ( IB ) -- classes don't draw the 18-22 students-per-classroom that a more traditional or basic course does. So if, say, grade 10 comprises some 400 students. We might suppore ordinarily they'd need about 20 classrooms. But if half that number are in AP/IB classes with average class size of 10 then we'd need 10 classroom for the "ordinary students" and 20 classrooms for the AP/IB students. That's a total of 30 classrooms -- and a nominal grade ten seating for 400 now requires a "capacity" of 600 seats.

But if only 10% of that 400 students is in AP/IB then we'd have 380 ordinary students in 19 classrooms and 40 students in 4 classroom and the "seat cost" of AP/IB programs would be 3 classrooms or only 60 seats.

D-Magazine reported in April (vol 33, # 4) for school year 2005-06 Lancaster High had 1669 students of which 230 attempted the AP/IB programs and only 15 students passed the required exams. Assuming those figures are exact we would have needed 72 classrooms (1440) seats for the ordinary kids and 23 classrooms (460 seat CAPACITY, not enrollment) for the AP/IB kids for a total seating of 1900 seats.

Also, expanding the number of kids in AP/IB will, over the foreseeable future, merely "take up the slack" in the underused capacity of those classrooms. The 10-student classes held in 20 seat classrooms could double in usage before one extra classroom needed to be built.

The new high school is 2200 seats. Even the AP/IB courses do NOT, at present add up to support claims we are "bursting at the seams."

That is, the claims don't add up to anybody who actually does the math. Journalists in general are not very interested in math.

On the other hand, the Lancaster ISD not only does not report the honor roll, it hasn't reported how many kids are in AP/IB courses, either. (And they certainly aren't publicizing to local newspapers that D-Mag statistic --15 passing out of 230 testing. ) So, journalists might possibly be enticed away from writing haiku and criticizing distant federal polititions to, instead, attempting arithmetic on local issues, but they face serious challenges in finding the basic numbers to get started.