Dear Lab Families,
I am delighted to share news about Charlotte Lab Upper School. As you might already know, we received a federal grant last year that gave us $1.25 million to help create Charlotte’s first high school in Center City.
Since then, we’ve been busy visiting a variety of potential school sites throughout Uptown, Southend, Elizabeth and NoDa. It is truly exciting to see the many possible locations that can host the next phase of our organization’s growth.
As you might have seen over social media, we began our event series in March around our guiding question:
What would be the ideal high school for students in Center City Charlotte?
We’ve had a great turnout so far, hosting 150+ parents, educators and nonprofit leaders at several events. Some of the stand-out comments that were shared were around “empathy” and having students engage in “authentic experiences” prior to college. Hearing from all of you has been truly informative and has pushed us to further develop areas that we wanted to build. Watch for more of these events to come in October and November!
A large part of developing our high school is connecting with community partners and learning about the remarkable things they are doing. So far, we have visited a slew of schools, including Tacoma Public Schools: Industrial Design, Engineering and Art (iDEA), School School of the Arts (SOTA), and Science and Math Institute (SAMI).
We also visited Detroit Prep to better inform some of the decisions we want to make around Lab’s Upper School experience.
Many of these visits have been supported by our growing partnership with Northeastern University’s
Network for Experiential Teaching and Learning (NExT) based in Northeastern’s Graduate School of Education. Our NExT partnership connects kindergarten-12th grade (K-12), higher education, industry, and community partners around the shared goal of making experiential, challenge-based learning accessible to all students at every level.
A team of us recently traveled to Boston in mid-July to participate in and present at their annual conference. Read more about the conference
here
.
We look forward to sharing more details in the coming months as we continue to work on our growing partnership with Northeastern University.
So what’s next?
As we prepare to launch our task forces and committees in the month of October, please feel free to fill out our Upper School Volunteer Survey so we know which areas of our upper school you are most interested in helping to support.
We are also kicking off our official admissions season with several Information Sessions already scheduled. We hope that you will join us for one of these to learn more about why Lab's Upper School might be the right fit for your high school student. Please sign up
here
and share the opportunity within your networks!
I hope to see you this fall at one of our events!
