Palo Alto school district approves advanced math courses for 2026-27 school year

The Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) board approved two new advanced math courses for the 2026-2027 school year.

In a Dec. 15 meeting, the board approved Introduction to Proofs: Honors and Multivariable Calculus/Linear Algebra Honors. The two courses, for which Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus is a prerequisite, will allow PAUSD students to take advanced math during the school day without leaving campus.

During the meeting, board president Shounak Dharap said that “the implementation and offering of courses is not within the scope of our vote.” Associate Superintendent Guillermo López added that individual schools can decide whether to offer advanced math courses. “This process, at the end of the day, is decided by the school sites,” he said. López also said that whether students can earn college credit for the math courses is “a whole different process” that will be determined later. 

The Daily has reached out to the PAUSD for comment.

PAUSD students previously could only take post-calculus courses at local community colleges. Alternatively, community college instructors would come to Palo Alto High School and teach the class at 7 p.m. 

The late class hour impacted students’ ability to participate in extracurricular activities, said Arun Tamura ’29, a graduate of Palo Alto High School. 

Tamura said that his classmates who skipped ahead in math were “pretty annoyed” that they needed to stay late, as the school day ended at 4 p.m. A member of the robotics team while in high school, Tamura added that some students left team meetings early to attend advanced math classes. 

Tamura said he supports offering advanced math classes during the school day because it was “unfair” for students to have to choose between fully participating in extracurriculars and taking advanced math.

Students taking the advanced courses had “already made it up in their head” that they would need to leave campus or stay late for advanced math, said Esme Zeineh ’29, who attended Gunn High School.

Both Zeineh and Tamura estimated that around 10% of the approximately 450 students in their class years took advanced courses.

Given Gunn’s “academically stressful” environment, more convenient access to advanced courses could create pressure for students to try and skip ahead, Zeineh said. “If these classes had been offered in school, I would have definitely felt more pressure to try and skip,” she said. Zeineh said that the standard math tracks at Gunn were already rigorous, describing her junior year Analytics Honors class as “the hardest” she had ever taken. 

Among current Gunn students, it has become “accepted to have skipped a grade,” said Mei Knutson ’29, a Gunn graduate who is a graphics artist and staff writer for The Daily. While she took Analytics Honors as a junior and found the course challenging, more students have been taking the course as sophomores.

Knutson said that the availability of advanced courses during the school year could “make people more stressed about math,” noting that some of her classmates also experienced pressure from their parents to skip ahead. At the same time, she said that expanding access to advanced courses would be a good opportunity for students who are “really passionate about math … to explore it deeper.”

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