About SpringBoard

The community is in an uproar over the new SpringBoard curriculum at the Delaware Valley schools. Before this major education policy change was made, the district should have taken more input from its stakeholders: parents, students, teachers. Instead, those stakeholders are now reacting to SpringBoard - and it isn’t pretty. SpringBoard is a curriculum sold by the College Board to prepare students for its Advanced Placement (AP) tests. The College Board is a “non-profit” organization that pushes the agenda of “college for everyone,” which, let’s be honest, really just means tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-in-debt-and-four-years-of-summer-camp-and-frat-parties for everyone - a $160,000 slip of paper that can’t guarantee a graduate a job with a salary that is more than the tuition rate their parents paid for four years. That digression aside, what the College Board doesn’t publicize is where your taxes, which fund SpringBoard, are going: Its CEO’s $830,000 salary and the organization’s half a BILLION dollars in profit every year. Some “non” profit, huh? And if the College Board’s unsatisfactory record with the Better Business Bureau doesn’t make SpringBoard look bad enough - the students, parents and teachers hate it. DV apparently communicated poorly with its stakeholders while planning and implementing SpringBoard. Parents and students are complaining at school board meetings, in the newspapers, even on Facebook. Some of the district’s best teachers say off the record they felt left out of the process - that they weren’t asked to evaluate the curriculum they’re now forced to teach. Springboard is harming the children in our community, they say. Some top teachers say the administration is suppressing their opposition, and they don’t want to put up with the nonsense. The administration and school board need to seriously take their stakeholders’ opinions into consideration - especially its teachers. Hopefully those in power can clean things up before our best teachers get fed up and before our students’ education is put in more jeopardy. To the new decade, Ryan Balton, DV ’07 Syracuse, N.Y.