On August 17th, twenty students from Reynolds High School visited OHSU's Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) in Beaverton. They began the morning learning about the ONPRC and the importance of animal research from Diana Gordon, the Center's Education Outreach Coordinator. The tour consisted of a brief presentation focusing on monkey behavior and observation techniques, followed by a visit to the sheltered housing units of the rhesus macaques where students conducted informal observations and collected behavioral data using an ethogram. The icing on the cake was a visit to view the ONPRC's snow monkeys (Japanese macaques) in their open-air corral.
This was one of three summer visits by ninth grade students to OHSU and the ONPRC as a part of Mayor Adams' Ninth Grade Counts program, which aims to prepare students for their first critical year of high school and beyond. Ninth Grade Counts is the first year program of Summer Youth Connect (SYC). SYC is a four-year series of interventions for targeted high school students during the summer months.
