As you all know from previous articles of mine, the College Board has threatened to cancel the AP Placement Exam, unless it receives significant external funding. The College Board is the non-profit entity that administers college entrance exams – the SATs and the Advanced Placement, or AP, exams.
Why are AP exams important? Students who pass AP Italian get college credit for their high school work, which can save their parents thousands of dollars in tuition fees! Over the years, many students have passed enough AP exams, allowing them to complete college in three years, saving an entire year's tuition, room, and board! Furthermore, AP exams on a high school transcript show college admissions directors that the student loves to work hard and is highly motivated.
Simply, AP courses attract and encourage students to take Italian, which is already a popular subject. It is the fourth most popular foreign language among American students! In addition, over 50% of all students would take Italian if it were offered by their school! Further still, in the first two
years of the AP Italian program, enrollment has increased 23%!
But without AP Italian programs, Italian language study programs will decline or end. We need more Italian classes in the U.S. – not fewer.
The way to make this happen is to support the Italian Language Foundation, which is raising money not just to keep it alive, but to keep it going – forever! Part of its mission is to support the AP Italian program; another part is to lobby local school districts to make Italian a permanent part of their curricula.
You shouldn't be surprised to learn that 50% of the students in Italian programs in Easton, New York are of Italian descent – half the community is of Italian ancestry. But in one school district in Albuquerque, New Mexico,only 15% of the students have Italian heritage. The rest just simply love
the language! And someday, they'll travel to Italy and come back with a deeper love of that great country of our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, and with a greater appreciation of Italian culture's impact on American society.
Italian language studies need all of us in order to survive and prosper! We all need to visit the Italian Language Foundation's website,
www.italianlanguagefoundation.org [2], and donate whatever we can, whether it's $25, $50, $100, or much, much more – just like the man who wanted to remain anonymous and gave the ILF $25,000 the day it received its qualification from the IRS, qualifying all donations FULLY TAX DEDUCTIBLE.
