At Thursday’s BOE meeting, Greenwich High School student body president Gabe Elezaj talked about pros and cons of AP courses in the context of a proposal on the agenda for new courses.
GHS is at the forefront of AP offerings, entering the College Board’s Gold honor roll for expanding access and supporting performance, with seniors participation (68% taking exams) and success (65% scoring 3 or higher).
He said GHS attracts top students to college-level work, and has a reputation as a strong feeder school for competitive universities.
He said proposed new AP courses would bolster the strong GHS AP program, but he shared a cautionary tale. He said when he graduates in the spring he will have taken 14 AP classes, but those came at a cost: insufficient sleep.
“While the choice to take this many was my own, it was heavily influenced by the expectations and culture of the school,” he said. “I believe that if you are to introduce more AP classes to the school and have more honor students make the transition to AP, there should be additional precautions. In Connecticut we lead the nation in many things, but pertinent to this discussion is that we lead in high school students reporting insufficient sleep: 80.1%, per the CDC.”
“With earlier start times amid the budget cuts of last year, this sleep issue will continue to grow,” Gabe warned. “Looking back to the classes before us, we find traditions that have long been lost. I’m sure many people watching online and in this room can attest to some of their best moments at GHS being SRO, the parade down Putnam, and the once grand senior pranks – all done away with today. One main reason for this is less time and less sleep. This can be accredited to the increase in AP participation where students see more homework and a more demanding course load.”
Gabe said while AP classes prepare students for college, according the College Board this advantage tends to level off after students take 5 AP courses.
He added that while students take the rigorous courses to boost their GPAs and increase chances of acceptance to top colleges, with new AP guidelines he anticipated the “cons” will get worse.
“Some students see that AP classes focus too much on memorization and not actually skill building. To attest to this, an entire month at the end of the school year that students refer to as “AP month” is designed for recalling information students ‘learned’ during the school year in order to perform well on high stake exams.”
Gabe noted schools like GCDS and the town of Scarsdale, NY eliminated AP courses completely.
“Some see that AP classes cut critical experiences and freedoms that were once part of GHS through our diverse and independent honors classes and on-level electives. Since most colleges only evaluate students within the context of their high schools, there should be more bounds and perhaps hard caps for students taking AP courses here in Greenwich,” he continued.
“And while we celebrate Greenwich’s commitment to academic excellence, I’m asking we protect the other half of what makes a school excellent: the health, balance and community life of its students,” Gabe added.
Later in the meeting, the board heard about four new courses at Greenwich High School:
• AP Business and Personal Finance
• AP Cyber Security
• Honors Art History
• AP Human Geography
Marc D’Amico, the district’s Chief Officer of K-12 Curriculum and Leadership, said GHS, with a out 2600 students, has 350 courses in the catalogue while, on average, high schools of the roughly the same size have in the range of 230 to 280 course offerings.
He said high schools considered “elite” high school have at least 300 courses.
“Every student is so unique and individualized in their interests, the more we can offer the better.”
AP Business and Personal Finance
David Walko, Clark House administrator who oversees the business department at GHS, presented AP Business and Personal Finance, blends foundational business theories with a personal finance. The course is one that fills the graduation requirement for personal finance.
Walko, who noted business is the number one declared major for students applying to higher education, said the course targets students in grades 10, 11 and 12 and students should previously have completed Algebra 1.
The course is broken up into 5 units. Unit 1 is business, new ideas and competition within the business realm. Unit 2 is marketing. Unit 3 is personal finance – part one is personal savings and borrowing, and part two is business finance of creating businesses. Unit 4 is the management and strategies of business, and unit 5 is personal goals, budgeting and investments.
The course makes use of case studies and is largely project based.
It is a brand new course being piloted this year by the College Board. Next year would be its first year to be offered with an end-of-year test.
AP Human Geography
Lucy Arecco, the GHS Social Studies Program Administrator, said AP Human Geography would be open to juniors and seniors, and is not a new course from the College Board.
Major units cover population and migration patterns, cultural patterns and processes, agricultural and rural land use, cities and urban land use, cultural diffusion, and industrial & economic development.
BOE member Karen Kraus questioned the course pre-requisite of a grade of C or better.
“That’s a really low bar for an AP Class. Our AP classes should be designed for kids who need an extra challenge. In light of what we’re seeing in terms of mental health challenges, kids are struggling with too much homework because they’re in classes where they can’t keep up. And frankly they are overwhelmed because they’ve been put in classes they shouldn’t have put in,” Kraus said.
She talked about reversing reverse “an ill-advised AP-for-all” approach and worried about the percentage of students scoring 3 out of 5 on AP tests, which she said was not a good score.
She suggested teachers determine which students can handle the rigors of these classes.
Dr. Jones explained, “It has been a focus for us for several years to not gatekeep our students. We believe in it strongly as educators. We do have more students taking AP courses – they’re taking more courses than ever and we’ve had the highest results ever just this last year.”
“I know some people don’t see a 3 as okay, but our goal is to prepare young people to go to college,” Jones said.
“For some students a 3 is absolutely celebratory. I’d would rather have a student make a 3 – which many universities count for college credit – I would rather have them make a 3 in a really rigorous course and have a great experience than be in a lower level course because we said no.”
“If you speak two languages and you didn’t move here until 7 years ago, you should have the same opportunities as other kids. It’s going to be harder, and they may not be ready to actually score a 5, but they can do some great work.”
Ms Arecco said a grade of C is a prerequisite for all social studies AP classes.
AP Cyber Security
Andrew Byrne, Folsom House administrator who also oversees the computer science and math department, said AP Cyber Security was a new College Board course being piloted across the country.
“A day doesn’t pass where you don’t pick up a newspaper and see that there has been a cyber attack of some sort,” Byrne said. “This course would give our students the opportunity to plan for, protect for those cyber attacks while also mitigating responses and hopefully ensuring things like this don’t happen.”
“There’s about 50,000 jobs in America right now that are going unfilled because we don’t have kids that have this skill,” Byrne said. “I think this is a timely program and something we should be offering.”
He noted that GHS has many clubs that participate in various “hack-a-thons” and cyber patriot exercises, and there are many students who max out the school’s math and computer science offerings and want another AP math credit.
“It would also allow us to offer another offering for students who max out their math and computer sciences classes and want to get another AP credit.
Byrne said several teachers are already interested in teaching the course and taking advantage of free professional development offered through the College Board.
He explained that students are required to take an entry level computer science course prior to taking AP Computer Science Principles, which is the pre-requisite for AP Cyber Security.
“With AI being what it is, the emphasis on programming is somewhat decreasing, so this may fill a void that might be happening naturally anyway,” he added.
Honors Art History
District Arts Coordinator Leah Stillman said Honors Art History would reflect a change in a course rather than a new course.
“We’re taking what was Art Appreciation, and hasn’t been filled for a number of years, and pivoting based on feedback from the community and the board regarding our AP Art History course, which has seen a ton of growth from 15 students up to 102 across five sections this past year. That’s a reflects a 580% increase.”
“Also, we had so many kids taking the AP but not as many taking the exam and there was some pushback and criticism from the board in the fall,” Stillman said.
The course has five units: introduction to art historical methodology, ancient and medieval worlds, the Renaissance reformation and baroque reactions, revolution and radical break, and global perspectives in contemporary art.
Board member Karen Hirsh said many students at GHS daunted by the AP course.
Ms Stillman agreed, saying AP Art History has one of the hardest AP exams.
At the end of the meeting, Ms Kraus said she didn’t think she was alone in her surprise that the requirement to take a AP social studies courses was a C grade and would like the board to take a “deep dive” into the criteria required for taking different levels of courses and look at trends over time.
“There has been concerns about a watering down of ALP and APs,” Kraus said.
See also:
Greenwich High School Named to Advanced Placement School Honor Roll
Jan 14, 2026