Many high school teachers and administrators think that reading instruction belongs in the lower grades. But according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 31% of eighth graders read at or above the proficient level, which means that many are entering high school unprepared for its advanced textbook reading and language requirements. When Chapin High School in El Paso, Texas, opened in 2000, about 25% of its students were nonreaders, and most of them came to the school after years of failure, completely unmotivated to become readers. Some of the freshmen were already parents, and because the school sits on the border between the United States and Mexico, it also had a large population of non-English speakers. In this article, the authors describe how a two-year reading lab program became a way to reach those nonreaders and bring them up to grade level.