traditional high schools faced mounting problems with overcrowding. The conservative education group Citizens for Better Education (CBE), which had held a 6–3 majority on the Ann Arbor school board since 1991, favored the city's traditional high schools and a "back-to-basics" educational approach. With student populations increasing dramatically in size at the traditional high schools, CBE board members questioned both the small size and higher per-pupil spending at CHS. They proposed expanding the school by 100-200 students, and equalizing its per-pupil expenditures with those at the city's larger schools. Proponents of alternative education countered that expanding the student body so drastically would destroy the school's intimate ethos, and that the higher per-pupil spending resulted from CHS offering many classroom places, uncompensated, to students from other high schools who commuted for one or two classes. However, their proposal for a new alternative school to take pressure off the existing high schools was quashed by the board's conservative majority. The June 1994 school-board election thus hinged, in large measure, on the alternative-schools issue. A liberal slate of candidates known as New Challenge took on the three CBE incumbents up for re-election, mobilizing heavy support from Community High parents and students. Two of New Challenge's three candidates—Diane Hockett, Nicholas Roumel, and Ann Lyzenga—were current or recent CHS parents. Meanwhile, students at the school formed a political action committee called Ann Arbor Students for Political Action (AASPA) that contributed $1,313 and many hours of volunteer time to New Challenge efforts. The student PAC, according to state officials, was the first in Michigan formed by teenagers to influence a local race, and it garnered regional press coverage in the process. Though AASPA began as a class project at CHS, it grew to include 150 high school students, representing all three public Ann Arbor high schools of the time. CBE incumbents criticized the CHS student group – one decrying it in the Detroit Free Press as "narrow-minded, with a narrow focus," another claiming that "Community High is not going to be the moving force in this town." The race was one of the most heated and expensive in the city's history, with the two slates running cable TV ads (a first for Ann Arbor school elections); the New Challenge ad was produced by another CHS parent volunteer, film/video professional Dave Anderson. The two opposing campaigns spent a combined $32,000, more than in any previous campaign. In the