Community Lab School Virtual Tour & Teacher Panel

The Community Lab School (CLS) in Charlottesville, Virginia demonstrates how a public charter school can operate as "the opposite of public school" while excelling on traditional academic measures and serving as an innovation lab for Albemarle County Public Schools. This 6-12 institution eliminates traditional grade-level classes, individual subject silos, and letter grades in favor of interdisciplinary project-based learning, multi-age groupings, collaborative work, and mastery-based reporting. Despite—or perhaps because of—these radical departures from conventional schooling, CLS recently received Virginia's highest academic achievement award, with students performing exceptionally well on standardized tests without direct test preparation.

"We joke and it's only half joke that we try to operate as a public school as the opposite of Public School as much as we can under all the same policy criteria any other Public School in Virginia."

"Lab school means that we experiment and if it's not working we stop doing that and it's very nice to have that freedom... we don't usually make changes to our schedules or to our systems if there isn't research that is foundational to that."

"It requires a different way of thinking to create a project that is cross-disciplinary... the science teacher and I spent a while looking at where is the overlap how can these two things be linked together."

• Every CLS innovation must be replicable in comprehensive schools. How does this constraint both limit and strengthen their work? What innovations in your context might meet this test?
• Teachers describe the challenge of linking seemingly unrelated content (like WWII battles and cell organelles). What processes support educators in making authentic interdisciplinary connections rather than forced correlations?
• CLS uses standards-based reporting focused on skill development rather than assignment completion. How might this change student motivation, parent understanding, and college preparation? What systems support this transition?