Learning Labs

Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School (OHCHS) has many tools at their disposal  to prevent a student from failing. One of the most used tools in the school is called Learning Labs. The creation of Learning Labs stemmed from 6-8 years of different programs in the school. It officially started 2 years ago when the principal Mr.Moccia and the leadership team asked this question: "What are the consequences if students are not learning?"
There are currently 140 students  in these learning labs. Seventy-five  of them are in for English. The second biggest lab is the science lab with 60 kids, followed by a tie of 48 kids in Math and Social Studies. (Note: some kids are counted twice if they are in more then one learning lab.)

Says Moccia, "You put students in a learning lab that their forced to go to and have them do the work, instead of giving them a detention." This allows kids to do their work inside of school instead of hoping that they do their work outside of school.

The process for being assigned to a lab is when a student is failing a class a teacher signs him or her up for a learning lab. Guidance then takes the referral from there and removes one of the student's study halls and replaces it with a learning lab. A student gets to leave the learning lab when all past work is completed and all current work is up to date.

If you ask some of the teachers at OHCHS about learning labs you get  mixed responses. However most are positive. Mr.Kilfolye says, "Some students just do not bother doing the work in their classes so they get more work in here.They do the work in here so it's a never ending cycle."

This cycle is very uncommon for students only a select few do this and its by their own accord.One of the names that always seem to pop up when talking about learning labs is Mr. Burns after asking him what he thought of learning labs.

"Learning labs start to address the cultural problem we have with students who have issues around getting motivated to work hard.  The bottom line is that when students leave high school, they will be competing for jobs.  The national unemployment rate is around 10%, but drops to 4% for those with 4-year college degrees and professional degrees. Getting a college degree requires knowing how to work hard. Learning labs are a small step to help students do so.  Simply failing a class does not motivate students; by putting them in learning labs, we hope to put them in contact with adults who will help them understand that they can, in fact, do the work needed to succeed."
After asking a number of students in learning labs most of them dislike and like it at the same time. They dislike the fact that there removed out of their study halls, but like the fact that they can get caught up with all the work and pass. So from a general consensus learning labs seem to be working.