County Students Again Outpace State Average

Ventura County’s high school students continue to outperform their peers statewide on rigorous Advanced Placement tests, according to results released Wednesday.

The pass rate for every 100 high school juniors and seniors in the county rose to 13.9 in 1995, slightly above the previous year. And the rate of county students qualifying for college credit remained above the state average of 11.1.

But scores in the wealthy Oak Park Unified School District dipped precipitously, almost a 17-point drop that school officials attributed to the larger pool of students taking the exam.

Scores also declined slightly at high schools in the Ojai Unified, Oxnard Union High and Simi Valley Unified districts. However, students at Santa Paula High School nearly doubled their pass rate while Fillmore High also scored impressive gains.

“The real secret has been better preparation of students,” said Aldo Calcagno, an assistant principal at Fillmore High. “Last year, we started tracking kids into career paths and that seems to have helped.”

Advanced Placement exams are administered in 16 subjects each spring to 11th- and 12th-graders. The tests are open to any student, but typically are taken by college-bound students intent on getting some college-level courses out of the way while still in high school.

Most colleges and universities give credit to a student who receives a score of at least 3 out of a possible 5 points. That can amount to significant savings on tuition in some cases, said Oak Park High Principal Jeff Chancer.

“We’ve had kids who go into the university system as sophomores,” he said. “If you pass three or four AP classes, that’s almost a year of tuition saved.”

Chancer said he is not disturbed by his high school’s big drop, because teachers promote the test even if they know some students won’t be successful. By contrast, he said, most high schools encourage only their brightest students to tackle each grueling, three-hour exam.

In 1995, 105 Oak Park students took the test, a sharp increase over the 70 who sat for the exam the previous year.

“We say ‘go for it, give it your best shot,’ ” Chancer said. “At least they will get some data back on where they need to improve.”

Even with the lower pass rate, Oak Park remained the highest-scoring district in Ventura County, with passing scores on 35 out of every 100 tests taken. That’s down from 51.8 out of every 100 tests in 1994. Chancer said the scores reflect the top priority that affluent Oak Park residents place on education.

“Those top-level kids are pretty serious about it and so are their parents,” he said. “We are a college-prep school because that’s what the community demands of us.”

Following close behind Oak Park is the Conejo Valley Unified School District, with an overall pass rate of 29.6 for its three high schools. That is an increase of 2.4 points over the 1994 qualifying rate.

Fillmore High employed a number of strategies in an effort to boost its Advanced Placement scores last year, Calcagno said. Besides steering students into classes that prepare them for college, the school also sent its teachers to special conferences and asked the faculty to help rewrite the curriculum to make it more rigorous, he said.

The school also offered an advanced calculus class for the first time in the 1994-95 school year, he said. All of those changes seemed to help lift qualifying rates from 4.8 in 1994 to 8.5 last year, he said.

“I can’t hone it down to one thing in particular,” he said. “We are just better prepared and students are better prepared.”

At Santa Paula High, Principal Sandra Barbier said she credits the hard work of key teachers for boosting the school’s pass rate from 3.5 in 1994 to 6.9 in 1995.

Dora Madrigal, a Spanish teacher, spends extra hours after school tutoring her most advanced students so they can take the Advanced Placement Spanish test, Barbier said. And history teacher Ed Arguelles and government instructor Paul Tonello have also made sure their course work is college-level to aid their students with the annual exams, she said.

“The curriculum is very rigorous for all three of those exams,” Barbier said.

Despite their increases, however, Santa Paula and Fillmore highs had a pass rate that remains below the state average of 11.1. The latest results show those districts are overcoming the hurdles of teaching a student body that is among the county’s poorest with many who speak English as a second language, Barbier said.

“There are a lot of people who think Santa Paula students cannot perform well academically,” she said. “But this shows they are wrong.”

* DISTRICT-BY-DISTRICT CHART: B4