The part I didn’t believe was that the district or the school paid for the AP exams. As Gator88 said, in Florida the state reimburses the schools for them. At my Ds’ school, if you took an AP class, you HAD to take the exam and the penalty if you didn’t take it was you have to pay the $90 or so to reimburse the school/state.
It sounds like this principal/school wanted all the students to take the AP class but then didn’t want the official scores to be part of their records.