Woodgrove students are familiar with Advanced Placement and Dual Enrollment courses. The idea of gaining college credit before you even get to college has encouraged many students to take higher difficulty courses. However, there is another college level course in Loudoun County that students might not be familiar with.
International Baccalaureate, or IB, is a new type of program that is only offered at Heritage High School and Loudoun Valley High School so far. Starting next school year, Heritage and Loudoun Valley will be offering IB classes for 11th and 12th graders. They are similar to AP classes in the sense that they will award college credit if you earn a qualifying score on the end of year exam.
Loudoun Valley and Heritage will also offer the IB Diploma Programme, which starts with 9th and 10th graders in Pre-IB. The Diploma Programme is similar to the Advanced Studies Diploma at Woodgrove, where students must take certain classes to achieve it. The Pre-IB program entails taking AP Government as an underclassman to make room for a packed schedule as an upperclassman in the Diploma Programme. In the Diploma Programme, students must enroll in almost exclusively IB courses for their final two years of high school. A drawback of this is that the amount of strenuous courses required leaves very little room for electives or other courses a student may be interested in. However, students are not required to be in the Diploma Programme to take IB classes. IB is offered in core areas such as Math, English, History, and Science, as well as other classes such as IB Theatre, IB Film, and five different World Language courses.
For students not attending Heritage or Valley, they can still apply to join the program. However, if a 9th grader at Woodgrove student was to apply and get in, they would have to transfer to Loudoun Valley full time.
Is bringing IB courses to Woodgrove something that might happen soon? For Woodgrove to offer those courses, the school has to become certified by the International Baccalaureate Organization. “[The process] was a long one that involved [the] training of teachers, numerous discussions with students, parents and teachers, and slowly but surely piecing together all of the parts of the authorization,” said IB Coordinator at Loudoun Valley, Michael Skvarch. He also said that the International Baccalaureate Organization had to evaluate the school multiple times before they received their authorization.
According to Woodgrove’s Director of Counseling Ms. Geri Fiore, Woodgrove does not have plans to pursue the process of IB certification at the moment.
“I could see it eventually, five to ten years from now,” stated Ms. Fiore. “If the program were to grow and there was a need, we would definitely build up to it.”
While the option is there for a Woodgrove underclassman to transfer to Loudoun Valley for the IB program, Ms. Fiore would not recommend it. “We have a rigorous curriculum here, I don’t think our students are missing out on anything.”
IB courses can differ content wise from other college level courses, such as AP and DE. It is based on a more philosophical teaching perspective and focuses on critical thinking. All three styles of class provide students with an adequate challenge and chance to earn some much coveted college credit.
