Located along the light rail in Historic South End in Charlotte, our brand new upper school campus (grades 6-12) is bursting with lif as a blank slate! This location gives our students walking access to a variety of community resources, plus the light rail, and allows us to truly meet our vision of using the community as our classroom.
Our students are creative, energetic, out-of-the-box thinkers who are eager to develop solutions to real problems facing their community.
They are inventors, artists, engineers, authors, scientists, and more. Many of our students struggled to find success in more traditional public school environments, so it's especially exciting to see our students' unique talents and passions emerge as they build confidence through real-world, hands-on learning experiences. Put simply, our students are amazing.
My Project
The Quest model has become ubiquitous with what it means to be a student at Lab. Each year a group of Upper School students has the opportunity to work in an internship-style Quest where we learn the process of graphic design in marketing and advertising.
We take a full course in graphic design through Canva, hear from multiple guest speakers ranging from marketing gurus with Coca-Cola, Subaru, and firms specializing in small business advertising - but we don't yet have our printer to bring the project to it's final stage.
After the course, and multiple rounds of practice, students then enter into The Lab Press Shop - a full-functioning design agency made up entirely of Lab students! Community organizations and businesses submit work orders to our Shop and students bid on the projects to work on. Through continuous partnership they take the work order through the design process and arrive at a final outcome to deliver the product to the customer!
To outfit The Lab Press Shop design lab we need a large format printer. We need to capability to print banners, posters, and everything in between. We've even had a project for a billboard in the past! Being able to print our designs makes the process real for our students AND provides a more professional experience for our customers. Can you help?
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Capps and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.