KATY MAGAZINE NEWS
July 3, 2019
By Anne Lee
Katy ISD's pre-AP program will be making a noticeable change. Due to a trademark of the current program, the district will rename the program the "Katy Advanced Program" (KAP).
Katy ISD is preparing to change the name of its pre-AP program to “KAP,” which stands for Katy Advanced Program. Officials said the instructional material will not change, only the name. Students taking pre-AP classes will now be in KAP classes.
The name change is in response to the College Board owning the trademark for the term “pre-AP.” The College Board develops the curriculum for AP courses and administers standardized tests such as the AP, PSAT, and SAT exams.
Last fall, the College Board announced that it would launch an official pre-AP program. In the fall of 2022, the College Board will require that all classes in a school district that are labeled as “pre-AP” must be submitted to the College Board to have their curriculum approved in order to be called pre-AP.
Pre-AP subjects were used to designate honors classes or other rigorous classes designed to prepare students for AP classes. However, the College Board now wants pre-AP classes available to all students in a grade, not just honors or advanced students.
A spokesperson for the College Board says, “Classes are open-access, which means students of all abilities must be allowed to take the class. Instead of being honors classes, official pre-AP classes are meant to be the standard class in a school to teach a subject.”
Alene Lindley, head of Katy ISD’s gifted and talented and advanced academic content says, “They redefined the term pre-AP and they created courses that concentrate on grade-level content rather than advanced academic content.”
Lindley told Katy ISD school board members that the College Board always struggled with finding the right definition for pre-AP.
“They never saw it as set of courses but rather a series of strategies to support academic content. However, Texas was the outlier in that regard,” says Lindley.
“Of the districts that call courses ‘pre-AP,’ 85 percent of them are in Texas. The rest of the country doesn’t do that,” Lindley says. “They (College Board) just pretty much left us alone until they got a handle on what they wanted to do with the program.”
In 2017, Katy ISD officials began researching and discussing the new name for the pre-AP program so that by 2020, the transition and implementation to KAP will be completed.