H.N.

Hugo Nelson

“I took an Intro to Drawing class with Steve my junior year. The class gave me a reason to draw. I could draw without the pressure of knowing that I was not doing any work. It was one of the first classes where I fully felt like I could learn to love art. I’ve respected art my entire life. Ever since, I’ve kept an art class in my schedule. Community taught me that art is really fun. I enjoy art because it’s one of the purest forms of expression. Visual arts gives me a way to convey information. Next year I’m going to take a gap year, I really want to get into 2D animation and practice drawing. I’ll miss my teachers, because they’ve been really supportive of me all the time. It’s nice to have somebody who supports you unconditionally. The school is small enough that the teachers can look out for students. Community is a very collaborative environment. Community [gives] students freedom. Free blocks have given me a lot of opportunities where I can just work on assignments that I wasn’t able to complete in the time frame allotted. It’s given me time to catch up and take a breather. There’s a choice given at Community to not abuse that freedom. The fact that Community trusts its students to do the right thing instead of making sure students can only do the right thing is very important to the culture of Community.”

Cricket Wreford

“I think I was a lot more anxious as a freshman, and I was also a lot more sad. I think that I’m a bit more content in general, with myself and with my friends, and just my environment and the space I take up in general. And I’m less nervous around other people. Online school sucked really bad. But now, I think a highlight was just the cool classes that I got to take. I think that the flexibility of what classes you get to take was definitely a highlight for me, especially ceramics and computer science. I like the art classes at Community especially, because I feel like there’s a lot of flexibility with the projects. With art classes in particular, you get to do what you want and represent what you want to represent in your project. You get a lot of freedom. So I really liked that. Becky Brent is also one of my favorite teachers. I took her Speech and Communications class, and I thought that it was really cool because it was very much tailored to what you as an individual wanted, like whether you want to work in a group or on your own for all the projects. It also just kind of helped me because I get nervous with public speaking. And so it was cool to have a class where that was the main focus.”