From the time she was a teenager, Jennifer Norrell understood that other kids had educational opportunities her own school didn’t provide.
Though both of her parents were professionals, Norrell, now the superintendent of the East Aurora school district in Aurora, Ill., grew up attending what she called a “rough” high school outside of Chicago.
Rigorous courses weren’t the norm—the school offered fewer Advanced Placement classes than neighboring districts, and only a small group of students took them.
And though Norrell was among them, she still remembers kids from her church who went to different schools openly doubting her academic abilities.
“Your high school AP is like our regular,” she recalls them saying.
Fighting these persistent low expectations—the assumption that those kids, in those neighborhoods, could never do college-level work—is what has driven Norrell to vastly expand East Aurora’s AP program, more than doubling the percentage of high schoolers taking these courses over the past six years.
Now, in one of the six districts that draw from Illinois’ second-largest city, where 70 percent of students come from low-income families and just over half are English learners, nearly 1 in 3 high school students takes at least one AP course.
Even as East Aurora has opened up access, the passing rate on AP tests has held steady. During the 2023-24 school year, about 38 percent of students in the district who took AP exams received a 3 or higher on at least one. (This is still much lower than the Illinois average; about 72 percent of students statewide who take AP tests score a 3 on at least one.) At the same time, graduation rates in the district have increased.
The results are proof, Norrell, a 2025 EdWeek Leaders To Learn From honoree, said, that “kids will rise to the challenge.”
“They rise to the occasion over, and over, and over, and over again, if you have people who believe in them and people who remove barriers and put opportunities in front of them,” she said.
AP courses, along with similar programs such as the International Baccalaureate and the Cambridge Curriculum can be a powerful tool for expanding postsecondary options, as they can grant college credit and signify to universities that students are ready for rigorous work, said Kristen Hengtgen, the policy lead for college and career readiness at EdTrust, a research and advocacy organization.
Still, large inequities exist in which students benefit the most from the program.
Nationally, AP course-taking rates are increasing for students of color and English learners, in part due to a campaign by the College Board, the organization that creates the program and sells the tests. But Black and Latino students are than their white and Asian peers and .
Enabling students in East Aurora to take AP classes—and pushing them to succeed—has meant changing school schedules and course progressions. And it’s required changing mindsets.
Educators often think that AP classes are only “for a certain type of student,” said Asa Gordon, the director of middle and secondary college and career readiness in the district. When a district broadens that definition, he said, “you change the dynamic of who students are and what they can become.”
Focusing on academics ‘100 percent’
Transforming mindsets around rigorous coursework meant undoing years of entrenched prejudice about which of Aurora’s schools are “good”—and why.
The other five school systems within city limits have fewer students of color, much lower percentages of English learners, and draw from higher-income neighborhoods. That makes some in East Aurora feel that neighboring communities see their schools as lesser.
East Aurora’s one high school, serving nearly 4,000 students, sits among Mexican grocery stores and bakeries and car repair shops advertising services in Spanish.
A billboard five minutes from the school broadcasts a district slogan: “Respect guides us. Our why drives us. El respeto nos guía. Nuestro por que nos dirige.”
“We believe in our students. We know they can succeed,” said Jalitza Martinez, East Aurora’s associate superintendent for school leadership. But Martinez, who herself graduated from East Aurora’s schools, said that people outside the community don’t always hold those same expectations. “We were the black eye of the city through the perception of others,” she said.
When Norrell arrived in the district in 2018, she wanted to prove that East Aurora’s kids could handle college-level work, just as those from other parts of the city are expected to. “For me, that’s what it’s always been about,” she said. “It’s been about forcing educators in certain systems where they would not normally push kids to push kids.”
The daughter of a Chicago public school teacher, Norrell, now 50, didn’t originally plan to be in the classroom. She wanted to be a podiatrist. But after witnessing a foot surgery turned her stomach, she started subbing in a high school chemistry class while she figured out her next move. She ended up staying.
“I would totally geek out over being able to get kids who were super disinterested to actually engage,” Norrell said.
After stints in other districts as a middle and high school director and assistant superintendent, Norrell still sees students’ academic engagement as her primary goal.
“I’m over my [chief financial officer], and I’m over human resources, and I’m over community engagement. But for me, I am clear: The rubber meets the road in the classroom,” she said. “That is the only reason that all the other departments exist.”
In East Aurora, Norrell has spearheaded several big academic projects in addition to the AP expansion—switching the high school to a block schedule to prepare students for the length of college seminars and labs, for example, and implementing a districtwide elementary dual-language program.
The response hasn’t been all positive. Teachers, parents, even students spoke against policy changes at board meetings—arguing that newly proposed course requirements designed to prepare students for AP would or that a planned shift to block scheduling , according to board documents.
Annette Johnson, the school board president, said Norrell has been there to listen and respond to her critics—something not every superintendent in East Aurora has done. (“That’s how I win all the battles,” Norrell said. “You’ve got to let them scream at your face.”)
At times, Norrell said, she has worried that teachers would petition the board for her dismissal.
“But I figure, I’ve got to make change, or the board should get rid of me anyway,” she said. “And so I’m going to go with this thing at 100 percent.”
Fostering teacher buy-in for big curriculum changes
Going at it 100 percent meant making sure that students had the tools to be successful in AP—because simply expanding access doesn’t necessarily mean students will do well.
A highlighted how many Black, Latino, and low-income students score too low on the tests to obtain college credit, even as the College Board brings in tens of millions of dollars in test fees paid by state and local education funding.
Norrell didn’t want to set up kids to “face plant,” she said. (In 2022, after Norrell had prioritized AP expansion in the district, she was elected to the College Board’s board of trustees. The trustees are volunteers, and their schools don’t receive compensation or special access to programs, Sara Sympson, a spokeswoman for the College Board, said in an email.)
Norrell turned 9th grade core-academic courses, and some 10th grade courses, into pre-AP classes—a shift in curriculum designed to align with the content students would later encounter in AP subjects.
To ensure that kids could handle the heavy literacy demands that AP courses pose, she mandated that all students take a reading class, in addition to their English/language arts block.
There were some early successes: The district started to more actively promote AP Spanish Language and Culture, and more than 90 percent of students who took the test in the 2018-19 school year received a 3 or above, Norrell said.
But East Aurora also had some early setbacks. Leadership pushed AP Computer Science, but teachers without a strong science, technology, engineering, and mathematics background didn’t feel prepared to lead the course, said Gordon. The experience demonstrated that teacher buy-in was crucial, he said.
It’s a lesson Norrell internalized when she made the biggest shift to the program: putting an AP twist on the English courses almost all sophomores take.
For the first time this year, the district offered AP Seminar as its default English option for 10th graders—a move that the College Board . The class—which is built around developing research questions and arguments, analyzing sources, writing, and presenting—is portfolio-based. There’s no standardized test at the end, making it a manageable entry point for kids who hadn’t taken AP classes before, Norrell said.
Tenth grade teachers, though, were nervous.
Because many students’ essays and presentations throughout the year are part of a scored portfolio, teachers can’t offer students—many of whom are taking their first college-level course—much “hands-on” support, said Melanie Kleimola, a 10th grade English teacher at East Aurora High School.
“It’s a long time of balancing the student autonomy while supporting them as learners. That was one of the scariest things for us,” she said.
To address these concerns, Norrell brought in coaches from the College Board to work with teachers. She sat in on 10th grade English professional learning community meetings to talk with teachers about their questions.
“I know people are like, ‘Oh my God, she’s out of her lane.’ And I’m out of my lane a lot,” Norrell said. “But I really believe I can’t sit here, in this three-story district office, and make rules and say yes or no, and I don’t really know what’s happening.”
‘All of us are starting somewhere’
On a gray Wednesday afternoon in early December, two dozen students in this year’s first AP Seminar cohort were putting the finishing touches on their end-of-semester presentation.
69ý in Kleimola’s 4th block English class had developed a broad range of research projects related to wealth and the economy—for instance, investigating the question, does urbanization reduce inequality?
The first group of presenters would be up on Monday. Kleimola, sensing tension in the room, tried to allay students’ fears.
“We’re going to get up and we’re going to do our best, OK? I’m not expecting perfection. I’m expecting the best you can do on Monday,” she said. Experiences like this one build your confidence, she said. “Your voice and your contribution is important.”
At desks clustered in groups of four and five, students scrolled journal articles on laptops, jotting down points that would support their argument in a graphic organizer. At the front of the room, Kleimola met one-on-one with students who had questions.
“I had my second source, but I didn’t really understand it,” said one boy. Kleimola opened up a new browser on her own laptop, and they started to look for another, more comprehensible source together.
“In an ideal world, all of the students are using academic, scholarly articles for their research. If you want to get a 5, that’s the route you should go,” Kleimola said, in an interview later in December. She teaches students how to find these articles, what parts to focus on, and how to summarize.
“But for some students, even with the support and the strategies that we show them, those articles are outside of their reading level or language abilities,” she said. “For those students, and really as a class, we will teach them how to use other credible sources that are still trustworthy but maybe a little bit more accessible.”
This approach to sources is just one way that Kleimola differentiates for her students.
“All of us are starting somewhere, and what we want for all of our students is to grow,” she said. “If they are willing and they are present, within a supportive community, exposing them to this high level of content is almost always a win.”
Still, some teachers say encouraging all students to take AP Seminar isn’t the right call.
Some students would be better served in the district’s other option for 10th grade English, a pre-AP course for students who teachers decide need more support before taking on an AP class, said Jamey Bouwmeester, another AP Seminar teacher at East Aurora High School.
“Sometimes, you get halfway through a class and you realize, ‘Oh, maybe we’ve made a mistake here,’” he said. 69ý who refuse to engage with the topics or talk to Bouwmeester at all might be overwhelmed by the challenging material, he added. But kids who are motivated—even if they haven’t done similarly rigorous work before—can do well.
“I think there are some kids who this is not the right class for,” Bouwmeester said. “But that’s not to say that your ordinary, average kid couldn’t succeed in this class.”
Measuring change—in test scores and attitudes
Back in Kleimola’s classroom, two girls compared notes on their organizers. The class is a lot more work than 9th grade English, they said. There are tons of deadlines. Still, they will probably take more AP classes. Maybe AP Literature or AP Psychology, they said.
As of this year, East Aurora offers 28 AP courses total. But another change is on the horizon.
Next school year, Norrell will leave East Aurora to assume the superintendency in the Homewood-Flossmoor Community High School District. She has strong personal ties to the community, which is close to where she grew up in suburban Chicago. The high school district is smaller than East Aurora, with about 2,800 students enrolled at its one school, and serves a higher-income population.
Norrell is confident that the college-ready coursework in East Aurora will still be available to students after she leaves. “We’ve put them in place so that they can’t be stripped away,” Norrell said.
And she’s quick to say that there’s still work to do. There are still lots of kids getting 1s and 2s on the AP tests they take.
But the district is seeing the number of students passing the tests tick up year after year. And there’s been a more intangible—but just as powerful—shift in attitudes.
“I think the work is in when we say, ‘All. Every kid. We don’t care—you’ve had three fights this year, but you know what? I need to know how you’re going to pass AP Sem.’”
“We are far from hitting a plateau,” Norrell said. “We are still on the climb.”
