The Communicator

The Communicator

The Communicator

About Us

Thanks for stopping by to check out our website!  Our school is a pretty amazing place, and we hope that you learn about it through our journalism. We are one of the only original “alternative schools” from the 1970s.  Community High School is a small, public, alternative high school located in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Our mascot is a rainbow zebra.  

Our school blocks Instagram, which is where we do a ton of our reporting. As a result,  we bring our posts and reporting over to our website so people inside of our school walls can see it.  We see Instagram as a place to be a journalist: to report and share information. Our community asked us to bring posts over to the site so they could see them; we responded by giving them what they wanted because it made sense.

We don’t have bells, students call teachers by their first names and we have an open campus. We don’t have any AP classes, so students take classes at local universities. Classes are multi-level, so we have freshman sitting next to seniors who are going to an Ivy League in the fall.

Students are encouraged to develop and teach their own courses through our unique CR (Community Resource) program. We don’t have any sports, but we do have two swing sets out front, a field where students play frisbee and a half-court with games of 3v3. We have no homecoming dance, no queen and no king.

Our website looks and feels different because we are not a traditional high school, and our high school doesn’t have the traditional rituals common to schools across the country.

We don’t have an “Intro to Journalism” course and there is no application process to join; anyone who wants to be in the class can sign up at registration. Some students join for a semester, and others stay for their entire high school career. 

We’ve had 77,000 unique readers from January 2023-January 2024. Our readers are students, teachers, parents, CHS alums and community members, along with a whole bunch of people that come across our site and follow our stories.

We want our website to be full of student life, but we do not try to cover only things that are happening in our building. Since Ann Arbor’s local paper has diminished, we have taken on a larger role and responsibility in covering events that matter to our community. The Communicator strives to give students space to explore the topics deeply and beyond the school walls. 

Want to get in touch?  We can be reached at chscommunicator@gmail.com.

Want to send us snail mail?

Community High School

c/o The Communicator

401 N. Division St.

Ann Arbor, MI  48104

 

 

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