A new Advanced Placement (AP) course on African American studies at DeKalb High School is bridging the gaps left by many U.S. history courses.

Introduced at the beginning of the 2025-26 school year, AP African American Studies invites all students to take a deep dive into the history, culture and traditions lived and experienced by African Americans.

Michael Petrov, who teaches the course and is white, said he is excited to lead the course’s instruction.

“I wanted to teach AP African American Studies because it gives students a chance to engage deeply with history, culture, and ideas that have shaped not just African American life, but American society,” Petrov said. “It’s an academically rigorous course that also invites students to think critically about identity, power, creativity, and resistance. I saw it as an opportunity to expand whose stories are centered in an AP classroom – and to do so with scholarship, nuance, and care.”

The process of establishing an AP African American Studies course started about three years ago. Around that time, the district noted that CollegeBoard, the platform behind AP courses and exams, provided some structure and support for it.

Betsy Zimmerman, the district’s secondary humanities manager, acknowledged some of the early controversy surrounding the course nationally.

Some districts across the country have not been responsive to the AP course. School boards in multiple districts in Florida, Arkansas and South Carolina moved to ban courses on AP African American Studies from their curriculum in 2023, The Associated Press reported. Since then, some individual school districts elsewhere have elected to teach it anyway, while others have canceled their plans.

“We had a lot of conversations about that, about if something so controversial was the right thing to do,” Zimmerman said. “Ultimately, what it came down to was because this was born out of community interest. We felt like not only was it a good move, but it was definitely the right move because it reflects our population.”

The AP African American Studies course was originally considered by the DeKalb School District 428 school board in fall 2024. The course is set up as a year-long elective for students this year and is expected to be offered annually.

“You can’t go through history without talking about Black history.”

—  Me’She Eubanks

Zimmerman said she considers the course a success.

In its first year, the course has five students enrolled – two of them have prior experience in honors or AP-level courses, while the other three do not.

DeKalb High School senior Ayanna Kelly, who is Black, was among those sitting in on the class on a recent Tuesday afternoon.

“It means a lot to me just because of the fact that we don’t get recognized as much, even throughout history,” Kelly said. “We get to celebrate all the accomplishments we’ve achieved throughout the years.”

The course, by design, strives to be inclusive of key themes and questions rather than memorizing isolated facts as students engage with historical documents, scholarly texts, creative works and research projects.

History courses in high schools often do not tell the whole story of the nation’s history.

Petrov said schools have been failing students in that regard.

This is where courses, such as AP African American Studies, hope to fill a need.

“Much of our national story has been shaped within systems of white supremacy, which has too often led to incomplete or distorted representations of the past,” Petrov said. “Teaching this course is an opportunity to provide students with accurate, rigorous, and inclusive historical perspectives, and to equip the next generation with a deeper understanding of how culture, power, resistance, and contributions of African Americans have shaped the nation we live in today.”

Petrov said he wants to give students an opportunity to learn the whole story.

“What drew me to teaching AP African American Studies is culture and truth,” Petrov said. “African American history is not a separate or optional narrative – it is central to understanding U.S. history as a whole."

DeKalb High School senior Me’She Eubanks praised the course and what it aims to achieve.

“They don’t really teach the history in our school,” Eubanks said. “But this time, they get deeper into it.”

Kelly said taking this course matters to her.

“A lot of stuff in this class, I literally never knew it,” Kelly said.

The course is taught in such a way that students have the space necessary to make connections to current events and other happenings in the real world when appropriate.

Petrov said it helps to make the course timely and relevant to students.

“We’re always grounding conversations in evidence and historical context, but students are encouraged to make connections between the past and the present,” he said. “That responsiveness helps them see history as something living and ongoing, not frozen in time.”

In recent days, the course has touched on racist tropes of the past and recent presidential posts and how they relate and the context behind them.

President Donald Trump and his administration came under fire this month for sharing a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates. The social media post, published at the beginning of Black History Month, drew ire from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The video has since been deleted. The White House blamed the post on a staffer, claiming it was posted “erroneously,” The AP reported.

Other topics addressed in the course include learning about Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the Great Migration, and the Red Summer.

Petrov pointed to what he thinks leaders can do to better promote and defend Black history.

“Model respect instead of bigotry,” he said. “I think diversifying politics. If there were more minorities present in positions of power, there would be more minority issues brought up in discussions with power. And then maybe more solutions would trickle down. But if nobody in positions of power looks different than white people, then I don’t think some issues ... reach the top. I think they get ignored.”

Growing up in the Soviet Union, Petrov said that in retrospect, he sees some parallels between his upbringing and the African American experience.

“They were kind of anti-semitic,″ Petrov said of Soviet Union leaders. “But I was 10. I didn’t even realize that people saw me as Jewish.”

Eubanks said she’s glad she decided to enroll in the course.

“I just found it interesting,” Eubanks said. “It was the first time that I’ve ever seen this class as an option.”

There aren’t any other African American-centric courses currently offered at the high school, which came as a surprise to Eubanks.

“I was kind of caught off guard,” Eubanks said.

Zimmerman said the next big indicator for the district will be how many students are interested in taking the AP exam and how they perform. It’s not yet clear how many in the current cohort will take the exam.

“This is a course that, generally speaking, across the nation, students are about 50/50 on enrolling for the AP test because the scores are not always accepted,” she said. “Since it’s more of an elective and an interdisciplinary course, they’re not always accepted by all colleges. Students sometimes elect to take the course and learn the material, but then decide not to take the test.”

Both Eubanks and Kelly said they’d recommend the course to classmates.

Eubanks said the course offers a great lesson for everyone.

“You can’t go through history without talking about Black history,” Eubanks said.