Cherry Creek High School (commonly Cherry Creek, Creek, or CCHS) is the oldest of seven high schools in the Cherry Creek School District in the Denver metropolitan area. It is located in Greenwood Village, Colorado, and is the largest high school in the Denver metro area,[citation needed] with an 80-acre (320,000 m2) campus and approximately 3,800 students. Cherry Creek High School is ranked 16th in Colorado and 716th nationally, [3] and ranked 2nd in Colorado for public schools behind Stargate Charter School. [4]
The Cherry Creek High School campus is located in the city of Greenwood Village on East Union Avenue between Yosemite Street and Dayton Street. It is directly across the street from Cherry Creek State Park. Also located on the property are the Cherry Creek School District's West Admissions building, West Maintenance building, and Education Service Center.[5] It is adjacent to the buildings and campus of Campus Middle School and Belleview Elementary School, both of which feed into the high school.
The campus contains four buildings (West, Information Center, Fine Arts, and East) with 170 classrooms; 3 gyms North, South and East gyms; eight tennis courts; a baseball diamond; two practice football fields; Stutler Bowl, Creek's stadium; and a challenge course.[6] The West Building, by far the largest of the four, houses two gyms; a swimming pool; a weight room; Shillinglaw Lecture Center; and the West Cafeteria. The Information Center Building has a library and technology center, the Registrar's Office, the Counseling and Post-Grad Center, and another (former) cafeteria. Connected to the IC by the "IC Tunnel", the Fine Arts Building features a large theater, music labs, the debate room, and art labs. The East Building contains a gym and the Attendance and Security offices. The sprawling campus is meant to evoke a large "college-like" feel in order to prepare students for college life.[7]
Cherry Creek High School offers Advanced Placement (AP) exams in 31 subject areas. In 2007, 906 students took 2,374 AP exams, and 87% of the students scored 3 or higher (considered passing). The next year 986 students took 2,240 AP exams, 88% scoring 3 or higher.[8] Creek has been recognized as one of the nation's top high schools for AP participation in math, science, and technology, receiving the 2008 Advanced Placement Siemens Award.[9] Creek is also the only school in Colorado to have offered AP French Literature every year, until the test was discontinued.[10]
Cherry Creek High School offers more than 100 activity organizations, the majority of which are open to all students. Many are nationally recognized, including the Union Street Journal, Fine Print, the Speech and Debate Team, Amnesty International, Key Club, and Future Business Leaders of America.
The school's DECA chapter took 75 students to the national competition in May 2009, the most students any high school has ever brought to the competition in the history of DECA. The Speech and Debate Team is one of the top twenty in the nation and part of “The 400" society, the top one-half of one percent of the National Speech and Debate Association school speech programs. Cherry Creek hosts an annual Model U.N. competition.
Cherry Creek's Wind Ensemble was selected as a featured ensemble at the 2014 Music For All National Concert Band Festival in Indianapolis, Indiana.[11] In 2014 Cherry Creek was selected as a Grammy Signature School for commitment to music education.[12]
The Union Street Journal has received several awards from the Colorado High School Press Association, including four first-place awards in 2007 for ad design, front-page layout, and editorial writing.[13] The magazine received All-Columbian Honors and a Gold Medalist rating from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association for its work during the 2019-20 school year.
This article's list of alumni may not follow Wikipedia's verifiability policy. Please improve this article by removing names that do not have independent reliable sources showing they merit inclusion in this article AND are alumni, or by incorporating the relevant publications into the body of the article through appropriate citations.(January 2016)
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