Next year, students with trouble writing essays and papers for their classes will be able to receive help during study halls and the new resource period. Mrs. Elana Arens, Librarian, started a new writing lab for students to use to their advantage.

“I’ve wanted to establish a student-run writing lab, but there’s always been inadequate space. Now we have a perfect space for it, [and] it’s going to be in J107.  It doesn’t have to be an English paper, it can be something you have to write for a health class,” Mrs Arens said.

The up and coming writing lab will not have students dealing with teachers, but rather other students instead.

“It’ll be mostly upperclassmen, 11th-graders and 12th-graders, who will be available to help kids who have writing assignments for any class. Hopefully, it’s a low risk environment for kids to ask for help not from a teacher or an adult, but a kid. The kids will be able to help them at any point in the writing process. It could be you’re trying to come up with a topic and you need help narrowing down on a topic, you need help writing a thesis, you need help organizing your paper, you need help with grammatical stuff, whatever. I have a whole list of students who were recommended by their teachers who would be good tutors or strong writers,” Mrs. Arens said.

Even if students don’t have room for a study hall in their schedules, they would be able to attend the lab during the resource period.

“Right now it’s going to be during the day so it’ll mostly be geared toward people with study hall, but with next year’s schedule there’s the resource period built in, which is ideal. It would be a perfect time to come to the writing lab. We just need customers,” Mrs. Arens said.