The Rafters

The quickest way to explain it is to show you a front page. This one belongs to a school we invented.

The Northside Dispatch

Northside High School

Friday, September 25, 2026

Issue 3

A sample issue. Northside High School does not exist, and every name, quote and number in it is invented. No real school has published with The Rafters yet.

Sports

New scoreboard debuts against Westfield

Three years of car washes, cookie tins, and concession shifts light up for the first time on Friday night.

By Maya E.

The old scoreboard died the way it lived: slowly, and during a timeout. When its center panel went dark for good last November, the athletic department put the replacement cost at $38,000 — money the district budget did not have.

The boosters had it in thirty-four months. The total came from the kind of fundraising nobody writes about: $6,200 in car washes, $4,800 from concession stands the volleyball parents ran at other schools’ tournaments, and a donated match from Fairview Auto Group that closed the gap in June.

The new board arrives with a clock that works, a screen that can spell every player’s name, and one condition from the boosters: the first name displayed had to be the custodial crew’s, who kept the old board running two seasons past its warranty.

Read the whole sample issue — three stories, the short-items column, the corrections note, and the note under each story saying how it was made.

What the AI does

The AI does seven jobs, and this is all of them. Each can only fill in a fixed form, and no form has a blank where the words of a story could go. That is not a rule we ask the AI to follow — there is simply nowhere for a story to come out.

The job	What it gives	Story text
Story ideas	A weekly list of story ideas, each with a hint at where to look.Runs once a week.	None
Keeping work moving	A nudge, a reassignment, or a flag to a person.Runs when work stalls.	None
AI Coach	Questions about the draft, and the sentence each one is about.Runs while a reporter writes.	None
Source check	Every claim marked sourced or unsourced, against the reporter’s own notes.Runs when a reporter turns in a draft.	None
Headlines and captions	Headline, caption and alt-text options to choose from.Runs when a reporter turns in a draft.	None
The final check	A report on the things that get a school paper in trouble. It can hold a story back, never let one through.Runs before an adult approves.	None
Publishing	The layout, the schedule, and the public record of how the story was made.Runs when an adult approves.	None

Headlines, captions and alt text arrive as short lists of options with length limits. A reporter picks one or writes their own, and the record under the published story says which.

Nothing else the AI produces ever reaches a reader. There is no chat box anywhere in the product and there never will be — nowhere to ask a machine to write something.

Who can stop a story

The reporter turns the story in. Turning it in does not publish it — nothing a student does puts anything in front of a reader.
A student editor reads it first, and sends it back or passes it on. They cannot publish it either.
The adult the school names is the only one who can. They approve it, send it back with a note, or spike it — the newsroom word for turning a story down for good. A spiked story never runs, and nothing in the product can publish it later. After a story is published, the same adult can take it down, in one action, immediately.
The AI can hold a story back and cannot let one through. Before the adult decides, it checks every story — for naming a student who should not be named, invading someone’s privacy, printing a false claim — and hands its report to the adult. It has no approve button.

Taking a story down does not erase the record of how it was made — a paper that can delete its own history is not a paper. Corrections are printed on the paper itself, in the same place every issue, never swapped quietly into the text.

Nobody at the school takes on a new job. The adult’s whole part happens in email: the story arrives as a message, and the reply is the decision.

What The Rafters never collects

No birthdates, and no age check. We never ask who a student is or how old they are. A student gets an account only when an adult at their school invites them, and that adult vouches for every account.
No tracking. No analytics on any page that shows student work, and no advertising technology anywhere, on any page, ever.
Nothing academic. No grades, no attendance, no discipline records, nothing from a special-education file. None of it is collected, and there is nowhere to put it.
No audio. No recording, no uploads, no transcription. Interview recordings stay on the reporter’s own phone.
No location data in photographs. Phones hide location details inside photos. We remove them the moment a photo arrives, every time.
One school cannot see another. The database itself keeps each school’s work walled off from every other school’s, and we test that wall before building anything on top of it.

What the numbers say

There are about 23,500 public high schools in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The number with an adult running a newsroom inside one is roughly 2,500 to 3,000 — our own estimate, from Journalism Education Association membership, and the weakest number on this page. If anything it overcounts, which would make the gap wider than we claim, not narrower.

The only rigorous local count is Baruch College’s study of New York City public high schools: nearly 73% have no student newspaper, no news website and no journalism program at all. That is one city — nobody counts this nationally, and the Student Press Law Center confirms there is no dataset.

In the same study, among schools with poverty rates of 78% or higher, the ones with a newspaper had higher four-year graduation rates. That is a correlation, not proof that a newspaper causes anything.

Write to us

Start by telling us which of these you are, so we know how to answer.

You run a school. Tell us the school, and whether anyone there is already trying to keep a paper going. We will tell you honestly whether this is ready for you. For most schools, today, it is not.
You fund local news. Ask for the pilot design and the measurement plan. Both are written; neither has been run. We are not raising money yet, and we will say so if you offer.
You write about this. The specimen issue is open, the seven shapes above are the real constraints in the code, and we will answer a hard question in writing.

hello@therafters.org