On a recent Thursday morning, an Advanced Placement and dual-credit English class at William H. Taft High School had broken up into groups of four. The students were asked to pick a topic, reach a consensus, research facts about their take and present it to the rest of the class.
Kalua Lauber is the Northside ISD teacher leading this class of 32 students. This year, she earned her certification to teach college-level courses through the district’s partnership with St. Mary’s University and Alamo Colleges District.
For this project, Lauber gave her students two class periods, a quick-turnaround deadline her class has come to appreciate.
“There’s more urgency with the assignments,” said Nicolas Gibussa, 17. “In a regular class you get like almost a week to just do some small essay. But for this one you get like two days or less.”
The difference between this class and their regular high school class, Gibussa and his teammates said, is more responsibility and higher expectations but also more direction and clarity on the assignments.
“The expectations are definitely higher in an AP [and dual credit] classroom than in a regular classroom,” Bruce Bumbarger, 16, said. “I think that’s really helped a bunch of people here. She definitely sets us up to succeed.”
Dual-credit courses like this one have been fueling the overall enrollment growth across Alamo Colleges District institutions, reaching 30,206 high school students registered by October this year, and helping the colleges surpass their goal to reach 29,000 students by 2029.
These high school students also accounted for about 66% of the overall Alamo Colleges District growth between fall 2025 and fall 2026.
Today Alamo Colleges partners with 48 public school districts, 24 charter schools and 17 private schools to offer these courses.
“We have focused in the last few years [on building] a lot on communication and trust in our partnerships with our ISDs,” said Sara Mann, chief high schools program manager at Alamo Colleges District. “We place a lot of value in true partnership, making sure that we’re able to meet their needs.”
Northside ISD was the district with the largest share of students taking college courses through the Alamo Colleges District network.
The number of high school students in dual credit courses at Northside ISD increased by more than 3,000 students from the 2025-26 academic year, reaching 10,551 students. Over the past three years, the district basically tripled its dual-credit enrollment, said Jill Hackney, Northside ISD’s director of advanced academics.
“I feel like we have kind of found the secret sauce for educating our students, our parents, on the benefits of dual credit, and we’ve expanded in all of our schools,” she said.
Lauber is among the Northside ISD teachers who have contributed to this growth. She earned her dual-credit credential in the spring through a program offered by Alamo Colleges and St. Mary’s University in agreement with her school district.
She prides herself in leading her room with strictness that she balances with a caring touch. If the students are chatting too much, Lauber said, she will simply lean back on her chair and pause. If chatter continues, she takes a sip of her water bottle, and follows the sip by telling students there will be a test since they already seem to know the lesson.
“I only had to do that once with them,” Lauber said laughing at the end of her third-period class. After that one time, the students make sure to shush each other if they see her lean back on her chair, she said.
This balance is needed to ensure that the students understand that the stakes of this class are simply higher, Lauber said. At the end of the semester, the students will earn college credit that can transfer to any public university in the state, and they can also take the test for AP credit that will be accepted in and out of state.
“Right now I have about 183 students and they’re so stoked about being able to do this,” Lauber said.
The students respond to “ having someone like me who’s in the classroom, who deals with teenagers, who knows that, hey, this is a college class,” she added. “But I also have to respect the process because [the students] are still maturing.”
Facilitating growth
Facilitating dual credit enrollment across current and new partnering schools was always a goal, Mann said. She said having 30,000 students enrolled is still only a part of the more than 100,000 high school students across San Antonio.
But reaching more students takes intentional collaboration between partners, as well as introspection to figure out what is working for students and what isn’t.
“It was about us figuring out why we weren’t connecting to them, why they weren’t participating in dual credit,” Mann said, “and then beginning to remove those barriers.”
In June 2025 Alamo Colleges and St. Mary’s University launched the Dual Credit Faculty Expansion Program, a $1.4 million initial investment to certify 100 local teachers in the areas of English, history and political science.
The program aimed to remove the certification barrier for teachers and school districts. Teachers that agree to stay at their district for a specific amount of years can enroll free of tuition and earn a certification in English, history or political science.
To teach college-level courses in Texas, educators must have a master’s degree or higher in the subject area they wish to teach or a master’s degree in a different subject plus 18 graduate-level credit hours in the subject they’ll teach.
Educators with these qualifications are not easy to find, Hackney said, especially educators who are committed to working at a high school full time.
“Northside is also very unique because for dual credit, the way that our program works, we use all of our own teachers,” Hackney said. “We don’t use professors from the college because we feel like, you know, these are high school kids, they’re 14, 15, 16 years old. While they’re taking a college class, they’re not college students.”
Through the expansion program at St. Mary’s, 83 new dual-credit certified teachers will graduate by fall 2027.
“We have a huge group [graduating ] in the spring of 2027,” Hackney said. “We’ll have 30 teachers who are finishing their program. We’ll be able to place all of those teachers on campuses to further expand our dual-credit opportunities.”
The district has now hit a limit on the number of teachers it can certify in the initial subjects offered at St. Mary’s, Hackney said. But they need other subjects, such as math and science, and are in conversations with Alamo Colleges to figure out a path.
With nearly 96,000 students enrolled across Northside ISD, and more than 30,000 of them in high school, Hackney said the goal is to continue expanding dual credit enrollment to reach students who haven’t seen themselves in those classes before.
“We don’t [just] want kids to sign up for dual credit who are already high achievers, who already know they’re headed to a four-year college,” Hackney said. “We really wanted to start educating these other families because we have so many kids that are capable.”
College-level teaching
At Northside ISD, AP and OnRamp courses are still offered to many students, Hackney said, but each covers different needs.
To earn credit for an AP course, students must pass a separate test at the end of the course. These courses are a good option for students who have their sights set on an out-of-state institution or an IVY league school.
OnRamp courses are also a way to earn high school and college credit simultaneously through a partnership with the University of Texas at Austin. Students don’t have to do a separate test but they have the option at the end of the course to accept or decline their college credit based on their grade.
“As new people have come in and as we’ve kind of talked about all the benefits of dual credit, we’ve really seen [schools] pull back on OnRamps and now we’re adding more and more dual credit,” Hackney said.
Dual credit doesn’t require a separate test. To earn the college credit, students must pass the course as they normally would and that particular credit transfers to most in-state public institutions and some private colleges.
The success rate among students taking dual credit courses at Northside ISD is 99.8%, Hackney said, while students taking the AP credit exam have a 61% pass rate. OnRamp success varies based on whether the student wants to accept the grade.
This expansion of dual-credit certified teachers was three to four years in the making, Hackney said, and it was an intentional move to make this a more equitable option for students across the district’s 21 high school campuses.
“We’ve always had a really strong dual credit program in Northside, but I wouldn’t say that it was equitable across the district,” she said. “We had some campuses that had lots of dual credit options with very high enrollment and then we had other campuses that had very little options.”
Northside ISD reached out to Alamo Colleges District officials to see what could be done to certify more teachers. These conversations led to the dual credit expansion program.
Lauber was among the first 40 teachers from Northside ISD to join the program to get certified. She is a veteran teacher with 22 years of experience and a master’s degree in education. All she needed were the 18 hours of graduate-level English courses.
“What Northside ISD has done in partnership with Alamo Colleges and St. Mary’s University is it has given someone like me, who is basically by my own definition a nerd and an overachiever, the opportunity to help students who may come from backgrounds where they don’t have that early college opportunity,” Lauber said.
Today Lauber has about 183 students in six college-level courses. Her students are expected to develop critical thinking skills and collegiate-level writing skills, she said.
The students start by learning how to formulate a defensible thesis statement starting with what they know or think about a topic to then learn to research to formulate a better thesis.
“This is not a class where it’s right or wrong. This is a class where you explain with evidence, you make a claim, and you give evidence and information, and then we follow up from there. And they feel confident about it,” Lauber said.
Lauber also balances the needs of high school age students with the demands of college-level work. There is less hand-holding, but there is buffer time to learn how to follow a syllabus, for example, and hold themselves accountable for keeping track of the course progression.
“I do hold hands for the kids for a certain period of time,” she said. “But I also let them know to check your materials because when you get in college, the professor is not going to send you an email and say ‘Reminder, you got to do this.’”
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
