In 1971, Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) tried something new.
Under the leadership of Dr. Bruce McPherson, the district’s newly-minted superintendent, a team of teachers at Pioneer High School dreamed up a radical idea. The group, which called itself “Teachers for Change,” proposed the establishment of Ann Arbor’s first alternative high school: Pioneer II, later renamed Earthworks.
On Oct. 11, 1971 — only seven weeks after the school’s initial conception — Earthworks opened its doors.
The students, 108 strong, selected gray and clear as the school’s colors. The building, formerly Fritz Elementary School, consisted of three main rooms. Inside, narrow lockers were covered in artwork and scribbled handwriting, a sofa sat against the wall and tires hung from the rafters, serving as repurposed chairs. The school’s bathroom was coed and covered in graffiti — including a gargoyle next to the urinal sneering “He’s back.” And the two adults in the building, Tom Dodd and Allan Schreiber, designed a curriculum that included “Creative Assholism,” “Imagination Marathon” and the innovative Community Resource (CR) program.
Only a year later, in 1972, Community High School (CHS) followed in Earthworks’s footsteps.
That September, roughly 300 students ventured to the old Jones Elementary School on Division Street in Kerrytown — a historic district in Ann Arbor. Given its name and proximity to downtown and the University of Michigan’s campus, the school was uniquely positioned to pursue McPherson's “school without borders” philosophy.
In the nursery, school-aged parents dropped off their children, who were cared for throughout the day. In the classroom, Preston Slosson, an 81-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, taught history. In the parking lot, Greg Clark, a junior at CHS, taught a CR on motorcycle maintenance. In the fire escapes, students listened to Earth, Wind and Fire, smoked weed and played Euchre. And, although it was originally left undetermined, the school’s mascot eventually became the rainbow zebra.
Throughout the 1970s, these two schools ran parallel to one another — with Earthworks taking the more radical route — until their paths eventually converged.
A Safe Haven
In 1974, David Mosher — a self-described hippie who had sharp features and wore his hair down to his shoulders — moved from New York to Michigan. His parents had recently divorced, his mother needed to make money and his grandfather taught at the University of Michigan, so Ann Arbor was naturally a safe haven for him.
In New York, Mosher had attended the semi-alternative Briarcliff High School (BHS) for his freshman and sophomore years. There, he would go to class once, “charm the teacher and then not show up [again].”
After Mosher’s grandmother learned that he was coming to Ann Arbor, she quickly suggested CHS. Shortly thereafter, he enrolled and became a member of the high school’s very first, full graduating class.
“I joke about this, but [at BHS] I smoked a lot of pot and played basketball,” Mosher said. “When I got to Community, I pretty much got credit for doing that.”
On a more serious note, however, Mosher believes that he was lucky to attend CHS. In fact, he credits the school with giving him the support and the freedom he needed to graduate.
“Community, for all its goofiness and unrealized focus, saved my life,” Mosher said. “For a certain kind of person, it was a watershed moment, a boon to whatever [we] were trying to do.”
Mosher’s watershed moment manifested in music. He played in the jazz band with Bart Polot, sang in the vocal studio with Betsy King, took a CR on fingerstyle guitar and acted. All four experiences taught him skills that he still uses as a roots musician today.
“I’m not a jazz guy,” Mosher said. “I read like shit. But I can play mandolin, fiddle, guitar, banjo, bass, whatever … It was the kind of thing that Community did really well. [The school] helped you find what you liked and said, ‘Here's some options. Go do it.’”
However, learning the guitar, smoking weed and playing basketball weren’t the only things Mosher did at CHS.
He also took a course called “Human Relations,” taught by Tom Johns. According to Mosher, the class was essentially a therapy session, supplemented with drugs and weekend camping trips. Notably, Johns had no formal psychology training.
“I watched other people go through some major shit, for sure,” Mosher said. “I eventually found it to be a little unwieldy. Now, from this perspective, it wasn’t as professionally run as it could have been. They wanted to do the right thing. I just think that sometimes they might have been in over their head … We were all a little bit in over our heads.”
For Mosher, one camping trip to a park in Jackson, Mich. was more memorable than the others. To him, the weekend felt especially out of control.
“There was a woman who got taken too far out,” Mosher said. “I remember her sobbing, and thinking, 'This didn't need to happen this way.' They took her apart and didn't put her back together. It just seemed to me like we were playing with fire, with people's feelings, both unrealized and realized.”
Today, camping trips are only reserved for forum overnights, a fundamental part of one’s experience at CHS.
After graduation, Mosher left Ann Arbor and didn’t come back until 1986. In fact, just last summer, Mosher married his high school sweetheart, Lisa Davis. They met during his first year at CHS.
“I never fit in with the mainstream, and I don't wear that as a badge of honor,” Mosher said. “I know that because Community was not normal, I wasn't normal, and we got along well. I'm just not a four-classes-in-the-morning, three-in-the-afternoon, turn-in-your-paper kind of student. [Community] was my little hippie heyday. It was the way life should be, a buffet.”
The End of the Beginning
In the spring of 1975, one semester after Mosher became a student at CHS, Mike Mouradian graduated from Eastern Michigan University.
That fall, with degrees in Biology, Chemistry and Counseling, a “revolutionary,” “outside-the-box” approach to education and uncertainty about his future, Mouradian found his way to Ann Arbor. More specifically, he found his way to CHS as a student-teacher and Earthworks as a substitute.
“[I was] young, and I wanted to change the world … I was looking to do things outside the normal, traditional route,” Mouradian said.
Despite Mouradian’s optimistic worldview — and a coworker saying that he’d “be okay” at Earthworks because of his background in social work — his first day at the school was understandably eye-opening.
“There [were] couches and bean bags and stuff everywhere,” Mouradian said. “There [were] kids all over the place just laying around, playing checkers. And there was this little guy who immediately grabbed me and said, 'Hey, I'll show you around.' As he was [doing so], I wondered, 'What am I supposed to do?’”
Expecting to work alongside other teachers, Mouradian was even more surprised to learn that he was the only adult in the building that day; the school’s two full-time teachers, Tom Dodd and Allan Schreiber, weren’t there. Nevertheless, Mouradian slowly embraced Earthworks’s unique, camplike culture.
“Students came in and learned whatever [they] wanted to do,” Mouradian said. “Tom and Allan just oversaw the mayhem.”
Although the mayhem was supervised — and sometimes supported — by Dodd and Schreiber, the students were also key contributors to Earthworks’s creative chaos.
“Pioneer was very happy to clean the jails out and send students to Earthworks and Community because they were so overcrowded,” Mouradian said. “Nobody in the district really wanted Community and Earthworks, but they realized they could dump 300 troublemakers somewhere else.”
However, this approach of simply sending rebellious students to CHS and Earthworks was not sustainable forever. Like many of its fellow alternative schools from across the nation, Earthworks’s enrollment sank in the latter half of the 1970s. According to Schreiber, by the fall of 1977, its enrollment had declined to roughly 60 students, four of whom had been patients at the University of Michigan’s Children’s Psychiatric Hospital since that summer.
Finally, in 1978, there were no options left. The remaining 50 students and two teachers merged with their sister school, CHS. According to Mouradian, doing so might just have saved CHS from suffering a similar fate.
“Tom [Dodd] was a great ideas guy, but not a great implementer,” Mouradian said. “A lot of people who went to Earthworks were going there just because they didn't really want to be in school in the first place.”
To absorb the immediate influx of students, CHS restructured an integral part of its identity: Forum.
Originally, the class was an unorthodox homeroom. Forums would meet for two hours a day, every day of the week, and forum leaders would teach the subjects that they were most familiar with. In turn, students would use their elective hours to study the topics overlooked in the forum.
Upon merging with Earthworks, two forums of opposite expertise joined together to create a “component.”
“It was a way to combine the two schools without them losing their identity right away,” Mouradian said. “But after a couple of years, it didn't matter.”
In Mouradian’s case, his forum, with a focus on science, joined forces with Elaine Headly’s forum, who focused on art. Together, they became the Da Vinci Component. On the other side of the school, Earthworks became the New Educational Opportunities (NEO) component. 11 years later, in 1989, Mouradian and Headly got married.
A Neverending Show
In the spring of 1975 — both Mosher and Mouradian’s first year at CHS — “The Midnight Sun” published its third yearbook. Inside is a fictional movie script that describes a typical CHS school day. Its message still resonates today:
“Camera makes full frontal picture — shooting out of window, looking over at farmers’ market. Soundtrack is heard: Anyone for Euchres? … Rundown school. Rundown school board. Traditional dislike of authority. Heard over school PA system: Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.”