On Wednesday, May 6, 82 Oyster Bay High School students sat for the college level Advanced Placement (AP) Physics 1 exam. That represents about 10 percent of the entire student body of Oyster Bay High School (OBHS), which includes the middle level grades seven and eight.
In 2014, 426 AP exams were given to OBHS students. In 2004, just 158 AP exams were administered.
There are many factors that contribute to this rise in students challenging themselves and taking advantage of the excellent education available to them in Oyster Bay–East Norwich, not the least of which is the tone of “rigor, relevance and relationships” established by the administration.
“We here in Oyster Bay have adopted a growth mindset. We believe that intelligence can be developed through hard work, effort, grit, passion, determination and expert instruction,” said Superintendent of Schools Dr. Laura Seinfeld. “A growth mindset may sound like this: We believe in your potential and we are committed to helping everyone get smarter. We value and praise taking on challenge, exerting effort and surmounting obstacles more than we value and praise natural talent and easy success. Working hard to learn new things makes you smarter. It makes your brain grow new connections. School is not a place that judges you. It is a place where people help your brain grow new connections. I ask for your support in making sure our students and all learners hear similar messages so that they can continue to grow and become smarter through hard work and determination.”
Another contributing factor is the correlation between the implementation of the College Awareness Program and the jump in the number of students taking more rigorous course loads. The first eighth-grade college tour was taken in 2009 and the first 10th-grade college tour was taken in 2010. Students returned from those trips inspired to build transcripts worthy of the colleges and universities that they saw first-hand. Since those annual trips implemented by OBHS Principal Dr. Dennis O’Hara were started, the number of AP exams given has almost doubled.
This increase in rigor at OBHS has not gone unnoticed.
Recently the Washington Post rated all the high schools in the United States to find “America’s Most Challenging High Schools.” Out of more than 22,000 high schools in the country, OBHS was ranked at number 397 or in the top 2 percent of all the high schools in the country. OBHS came in at number 31 in New York State and at number 13 on Long Island.
The Washington Post considered several factors to arrive at their ranking. The index score is the number of college-level tests given at a school in the previous calendar year divided by the number of graduates that year. Also noted are the percentage of students who come from families that qualify for lunch subsidies and the percentage of graduates who passed at least one college-level test during their high school career, called equity and excellence.
Oyster Bay High School’s “equity and excellence” percentage was 51.2, which means that more than half of all students graduating from OBHS do so having taken at least one college level course.
