Parkway North administration introduced new “Leadership Labs” during the 16-17 school year. Since then, the lab has been used to focus on implementing the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens, along with having important meetings on upcoming events and gearing up for grade transitions. However, the time dedicated to having the labs has begun to frustrate students. Consistent reduction in lab times has started making students question its purpose. What students don’t know is that although the program does take up time, the time spent is beneficial to students and should continue as implemented.

Initially teachers wanted to create a class for freshmen transitioning. The idea is to strengthen some of their skills they may or may not have developed in middle school.

“Leadership labs were really helpful in the beginning, like freshman year, helping us transition to the high school world. They were pretty beneficial,” said junior Danna Pham.

Considering all students are grouped without strategy, each Ac Lab is full of a variety of students at different learning levels. This makes some students feel like they are wasting time learning about something they already know.

“While leadership labs are with good intention, they provide very basic knowledge and strategies that should be already clear,” said sophomore Connor Bryan.

Others students see the benefit of leadership labs freshmen year but feel not everything relates to them.

“They are pretty good if I’m being honest. I just don’t like some of the discussions we have,” said freshman Grayson Hedden.

After seeing the success of freshmen labs, the administration decided to continue leadership labs and have monthly labs for sophomores and juniors. These labs help build and retain student and leadership skills for students.

“We focus around executive functioning skills and organization,” said Goetz.

Although most staff and administration feel that these leadership labs are helpful to students, it is very difficult to tell the impact in which they have.

“We want to make sure that lessons are being implemented with fidelity. I think that this is a new program so until you are really four to five years into a program you don’t fully know the impact that it is going to have,” said progress monitoring coach Michelle Goetz.

Some students find these labs to be time consuming and bothering to students who need to travel or are not required to do the labs.

“I think they are good for the people that actually care for them, but useless for the people that need to travel,” said junior Nathan Radomyslsky.

However, North has looked at other freshmen transition classes and leadership classes used by many other schools in the St. Louis region to get a feel for their success.

Although all staff, students, and administrators feel differently about leadership labs, with time and altercations, leadership labs can become an important tool that is crucial to the success of students.

“What we were trying to do was get to some of the things that were important, good skills, to help you all do better in school,” said Goetz.