But several high-school teachers in the state say students are struggling to complete the courses. The courses were produced by Apex Learning, a company that sells A.P. courses to states and school districts. At 26 of those schools, no Advanced Placement courses had ever been offered.
Teachers praise the program for exposing their students to college-level work.
But we need to spend more time on mentoring for the individual students. Two of the four students at Roosevelt who started the program ended up dropping the courses. At Belle Fourche High School, the one student who started a microeconomics course ended up not completing the program, according to Jeff Caldwell, a guidance counselor there. Some of it she just kind of gave up on until she was dropped from the program. It gave her a heads-up in terms of what it is going to be like in college.