BBCHS boasts AP participation, scores

In the past five years, Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School has almost tripled the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses and the number of AP exams administered.

AP courses are designed to prepare students for college-level work and potentially earn them college credit.

From 2021 to 2025, the numbers at BBCHS jumped from 211 to 627 students enrolled, and from 318 to 1,015 exams given.

At the same time, the students taking those courses also have been performing better overall.

The number of AP students with exam scores of 3 out of 5 or higher, earning them college credit, increased from 98 students (46%) in 2021 to 358 students (57%) in 2025.

Students are allowed to take the exam up to three times.

In 2022, BBCHS started requiring all students enrolled in AP courses to take the exam. It had been optional before.

“We’ve done some other things, too,” Superintendent Matt Vosberg said. “When you have these kinds of results, there’s a lot of pieces at play.

“I would say one, we’ve got a really strong staff now that’s committed to AP, and I’ll give [curriculum director] Tiffany [Kohl] credit. She had a vision with this, probably a 10-year vision, really, to move this forward and expand offerings.”

BBCHS also places all freshmen and sophomores in pre-AP courses.

“We stayed data-driven, and we looked at our data, and kids were doing the work,” Vosberg said. “They met our expectations.

“We’re the first school district in the state to do that, pre-AP for freshmen and sophomores,” he added. “Not many [other districts] have jumped on just yet.”

Through Equal Opportunity Schools, BBCHS has a process of training staff members on how to create a welcoming environment for students who may be new to the expectations in AP courses.

Staff identified as trusted adults will reach out to kids who potentially aren’t getting encouragement from other places.

BBCHS also is enrolling some students through administrative assignment.

Typically, there are 60 to 80 students who have academic results indicating that they could do the work in AP courses, but they didn’t take the initiative to sign up.

There is an opt-out process, but most don’t take it. Most go through with taking the AP course after an administrator has signed them up.

“Parents are happy that we do this,” Vosberg said.

Kohl said that these processes help with getting more underrepresented students involved in AP, which in turn starts to “shift the culture of the building.”

“What you get is like this natural element of peer pressure, which is really kind of beautiful to see, because it’s really kids pressuring each other to do the right thing,” Kohl said.

BBCHS offers 19 different AP courses: African American studies, art, biology, calculus, chemistry, computer science, environmental science, government, human geography, language and composition, literature and composition, macroeconomics, music theory, precalculus, psychology, Spanish language and culture, statistics, U.S. history, and world history.

Vosberg said the AP data from 2023 placed BBCHS in the top 20% of schools in the state. The school will learn in the fall where it landed from last year’s scores, but he expects it will be ranked even higher.

Total AP students

2021: 211

2022: 354

2023: 523

2024: 531

2025: 627

Number of exams

2021: 318

2022: 573

2023: 865

2024: 821

2025: 1,015