Every five years, Park’s IB (International Baccalaureate) program is evaluated to ensure the school is allowing students to reach their full potential within IB classes. This especially affects students taking or interested in the IB diploma, as they will be spending a majority of their time at Park in IB classes.
Park’s enrichment coordinator Faduma Adeed said the school is planning on adding more IB course options.
“Right now we have some questions about the IB courses that we offer,” Adeed said. “For those students that want to do the diploma, they have to choose one course from each group, and if we have a couple courses for each group, they have multiple options to choose from.”
According to junior Ian Bautista-Reuland, the IB diploma path doesn’t give students a lot of freedom in classes they can take.
“Currently, you’re highly restricted in what you can and can’t do, there’s only 10 classes and you basically have to do every single one,” Bautista-Reuland said. “When there’s more, you have slightly more flexibility with your schedule and you don’t have to be as stressed on ‘if I want to do something but I’m doing the diploma, I might not be able to.’”
Senior Chiara Collinet said having more students interested in the IB courses offered will allow Park to take full advantage of the title of being an IB school.
“(More classes) will definitely make IB more accessible to more people,” Collinet said. “I think that’s important, especially as we are an IB school, the school is putting money towards this so I think it’s really important that more people actually want to take the diploma because they would be interested in taking the classes.”
Bautista-Reuland said the addition of more IB classes came too late to help his path to the diploma, but he’s excited for how it can help more people in the future.
“For me personally, it’s not really going to affect anything because I’ve already chosen which classes I’m going to take, but for other people it’ll be more important, especially if they want to start doing it because they’re not going to be as restricted,” Bautista-Reuland said. “It would make it feel more important than the AP courses currently, and just generally gives people more choices.”
According to Collinet, the school should be advocating much more for the IB diploma and giving more support to students who are interested.
“There’s a lot of issues with a general lack of awareness,” Collinet said. “It was really difficult for me to find out how to get put into the right Park Connections, how to write the extended essay and what classes I actually did need to take. The school could really improve on communication.”
Adeed said she has high hopes for the future and the growth of the IB program.
“Moving forward, because we went through this evaluation and they gave us some suggestions and things that we need to show some improvement on, I think we’ll see more students taking advantage of the diploma,” Adeed said. “If not, they can take a couple of IB classes and can earn that college credit as well.”
