Homewood’s annual course selection process for the 2023-24 school year has begun. Although it isn’t in students’ colorful packets, they have the opportunity to take AP courses HHS doesn’t provide.

HHS offers 25 of the 38 available AP courses in the building but through ACCESS, students can take any AP course that piques their interest.

“We’ve always been sensitive to student interest,” Principal Dr. Joel Henneke said. “If I can’t fit it in based on our numbers, that’s where we take advantage of our ACCESS lab.”

Sophomore Hattie Landry moved to Homewood from San Antonio, Texas, in the middle of last year while halfway through the AP Human Geography course, which explores how humans have understood, used, and changed the surface of Earth, among other things. She completed the remainder of the class via an ACCESS adjacent medium.

“It felt more applicable to other things. Everything we learned applied to what we see in our world today,” said Landry, comparing the course to her current AP United States History class.

Landry says that taking an AP course online is doable, but there isn’t the same level of teacher communication as an in-person class. 

Homewood doesn’t actively promote the ability to take any AP class they like. Juniors Micaela Vega Vazquez and Suzanna Busbee expressed surprise upon finding out that ACCESS AP courses were an option.

Both were interested in AP Human Geography and Vega in languages that HHS doesn’t offer, such as Mandarin. Vega says she wishes she had known this was an option sooner in her high school career.

Henneke says that if enough students and a teacher show interest in taking and teaching a class, HHS could potentially add it as an in-person course in future years.