The final scores are in, and Jacksonville High School’s first students to complete the Advanced Placement Capstone Program were recognized this week.
The AP Capstone program is a two-year diploma program designed to teach college-level research techniques to high school students. JHS was labeled as an AP Capstone school in 2020, and its first group of students with qualifying scores was announced Tuesday.
Luke Alvidrez, 17, of Jacksonville, and Natalie Patterson, 18, of Jacksonville, both graduated from the program with a full AP Capstone Diploma, while another student, Kendyl Fletcher, 18, of Anniston, was awarded a certificate.
“At Jacksonville, we’ve always valued what an AP course brings or teaches students, so this just takes it on a whole other level,” JHS Assistant Principal Autumn Wilson said.
The school faced particular hurdles fostering enough interest in the program in the beginning. Promoting the program at the height of the pandemic while students were pushed to remote learning was difficult.
“I think the hurdle was just really showing what this program can really be, and it’s a hurdle that we still have faced, because, you’re asking the students to do a lot,” Wilson said. “These are elective courses. So it’s not an easy thing to take on.”
According to the College Board website, Jacksonville High School is the only school in the area that is labeled as an AP Capstone school, with only 17 schools in the state that claim that label.
The program allows students to choose the topics and teaches the students, and the teachers instructing the program, valuable techniques and skills that can be useful even beyond higher learning, according to Wilson.
During the first year of the program, the students work together in a group to build a research project. During their senior year, the work is all their own and the student must choose a topic that has “gaps” in the research or hasn’t been widely studied, according to Fletcher.
Fletcher said that the final project is a self-paced assignment where “the teachers are very hands off.”
“It's pretty much all you. They give you little nudges every once in a while,” Fletcher said.
All three students agreed that to take the course requires a strong level of self discipline and motivation. The program requires a 2,000-word research paper and a presentation of the research, according to Patterson.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot, and it’s really not a whole lot. The problem with it is that it’s really easy to say, ‘Oh I have plenty of time,’” Patterson said. “As long as you stay on top of it and don’t allow yourself to think about how much time you have, then it’s not an issue.”
Alvidrez, who is leaving for the California Institute of Technology Sunday, said that while the workload was laborious at times, he highly recommends the program to other students.
“It's definitely a class where you have to have some self discipline to be able to succeed, but because you can kind of pick what you're interested in, it’s a very freeing class, and it's definitely worth taking,” Alvidrez said.
Alvidrez said the course taught him a lot about himself and his own limitations, while Fletcher said the course taught her time management and how to be a better writer in general.
Fletcher said she enjoyed that the course forced her to think outside the box and explore forward-thinking ideas.
Fletcher intends to attend Tennessee State, in Nashville, Tenn., in a political science curriculum with the goal to become a lawyer. Alvidrez plans on attending Cal-Tech for mechanical engineering. Patterson intends to attend Jacksonville State University with forensic pathology as her degree plan.
