Roseville High School continues to maintain its AVID program and added another AVID 9 section this year, despite other schools in the Roseville Joint Union High School District dropping the AVID program entirely.

When Antelope High School and Oakmont High School dropped their AVID programs last spring, they joined Woodcreek High School on the list of schools within RJUHSD who have dropped AVID. Granite Bay remains never having implemented AVID.

According to assistant principal Anna Marie Clark, RHS has a strong presence of AVID on campus valued by staff, students, parents, administrators and counselors.

“We have excellent data that demonstrates that the program is meeting a need and closing a gap with students that volunteer to be in the program,” Clark said. “It’s a volunteer program. Students aren’t placed in it. They choose it.”

According to AHS principal John Becker, AHS had difficulty finding teachers interested in teaching AVID, enrollment for AVID struggled and the program ran into issues with AHS’ master schedule. As a result, the program was dropped, allowing the school to focus their resources elsewhere.

“We had a revolving door of interested teachers, struggling enrollment by students and master schedule issues,” Becker said. “The vast majority of students at Antelope would qualify as true AVID students and we thought it would be better to pool our resources and focus on all students [versus] one AVID class at each grade level … Since we have a school-wide college-going culture, AVID simply wasn’t need[ed] and allowed us to support our students using different strategies, but with the same goal as AVID.”

WHS also struggled with finding staff to teach AVID. WHS principal Jess Borjon said the teacher who started the AVID program at WHS left and they found it difficult to find a replacement. Around 2009-2010, Borjon decided to drop the program.

“After a few years of trying various people at the lead position I decided to stop doing AVID,” Borjon said. “ I wasn’t getting buy-in at the school and we were still getting a very high percentage of our students to UC, A-G, AP and college going success.”

According to AVID district director Melissa Jones, OHS’ AVID program was dispelled because its sections ran into conflict with their master schedule.

“As I recall, [OHS] had challenges fitting IB, Health Academies and AVID in their master schedule,” Jones said. “They have a smaller student population and number of teachers than RHS.”

Contrary to other schools, RHS has added an additional section of AVID 9 and has three year-long AVID 10 sections for the first time in the school’s history. A part of this growth is attributed to an increased efforts in RHS AVID teachers outreaching to feeder schools who don’t have the AVID program.

According to AVID coordinator Kelly Capell, they’ve increased efforts in recruiting potential AVID students at Cooley Middle School in the past two years because Cooley dropped their AVID program as a result of students feeding into schools without an AVID program.

“Those students no longer knew what it was because [former Cooley AVID students] cycled and graduated,” Capell said.

They’ve also increased their focus on other feeder schools for RHS such as Silverado Middle School and Antelope Crossing Middle School.

Unlike other schools in the district, Granite Bay High School never pushed for AVID on their campus. Principal Jennifer Leighton said that the school was not and is currently not interested in adding the AVID program. According to Leighton, adding AVID would put their master schedule into a “gridlock.”

“GBHS has ninety six percent of its senior class attending college,” Leighton said via email. “We have very active and full IB (overall 90 percent passing rate), AP (overall 82 percent passing rate), PLTW, Performing Arts and Speech and Debate curricular programs, to just name a few.”

Even without an official AVID program, Leighton sees AVID-like strategies on GBHS’ campus.

“AVID strategies are great instructional tools and utilized by many of the teachers on this campus,” Leighton said. “I have personally witnessed several teachers using Cornell Notes and the tutorial method during my teacher observations. Additionally, our English Language Learner instructor is a former AVID teacher and uses many AVID strategies within her EL and SDAIE courses.”

According to Jones, about 35% of students at RHS met the A-G requirements for college and fewer AP classes were offered when she began teaching in 2000.

“It’s wonderful to see so many of our students are now taking advantage of their educational opportunities and following through with important processes related to college admission and financial aid to make their plans happen,” Jones said.