While freshman Paris Lim discussed the effects of Building Assets, Reducing Risks program, Lim said the policy potentially may have improved his education thus far.

“I think it’s a good thing that the school is trying to make it easier and better for students to learn,” Lim said. “If they didn’t have it, I think I personally might struggle more.”

According to Park Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) freshman and sophomore coordinator Kelly Brown, BARR contains policies that are typically behind the scenes, including block meetings with various teachers regarding students in order to see where help is needed. According to BARR, I-Time is also a part of BARR.

Brown said a portion of the BARR National Conference will take place April 11 at Park, while the remainder of the conference will be held April 11-12 at the DoubleTree Hotel.

“When people come here they will be watching a mock block meeting. We don’t want to use exact student stories, so it will have fake students but run through our process for them on the stage in the Auditorium,” Brown said. “Then we’ll do a mock risk review meeting, and then with again fake names, fake stories. Then we will have some of the visitors, not all, go to classrooms to watch an I-time.”

According to Brown, Park will be hosting around 500 people.

Junior William Schoenecker said depending on how the crowd is handled, the event should not greatly affect the school day for students.

“It might be a little bit chaotic,” Schoenecker said. “If it is mostly contained to the Auditorium, I don’t think it will be that bad.”

Lim said the conference itself may interfere with the school day.

“I think it may be disruptive to some classes, but for the most part I think it’s pretty cool that something that started here is coming back,” Lim said.

According to Brown, a former member of the Obama administration will be in attendance.

“The keynote speaker for this conference is Arne Duncan, former Secretary of Education to President Obama, so that’s kind of a big pull, and I think that may be part of the reason that we’re getting so many people coming to visit and see,” Brown said.

Brown said in order to reduce the amount of substitute teachers, around seven teachers from Park will not be in class.

“(The conference) happened in Minneapolis about four years ago and some of our teachers went to St. Anthony Village High School at that time, so if teachers have already been to one, for the most part they are going to stay back in the classroom that day,” Brown said. “There is a fee to attend, but since we are hosting, we were able to get scholarships for our teachers to attend.”

Brown said one of the purposes of the conference is celebrating BARR’s achievements, which also can inspire schools to adopt the system in the future.

“I think the ultimate goal is to bring people back together nationally. It started pretty small about 20 years ago when BARR started here. There were two other schools in the whole nation who were doing it, and so it was a small group of 20 of us, so I think the idea is to keep bringing people back together to kind of rekindle our energy around that,” Brown said.