A native of England, Dominic James has found a home at Carmel High School.
James had been the WHJE-91.3 station manager and radio adviser since 2017. The Carmel Clay Schools board of trustees recently honored James for being named the 2024 National Teacher of the Year for Radio by the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System. The conference and competition were held in March in New York City.
“We had 26 individual winners in different categories, and we won the National High School Radio Station of the Year,” James said.
WHJE has won the national honor three of the last four years.
“We want to keep that tradition going,” James said.
Carmel’s only radio station runs 24 hours a day with an alternative rock format.
“Many of the students I teach have had parents or grandparents work there,” James said. “That sense of tradition and family is central to the station. People feel very fond of it for that reason. It’s important you can find a niche, and for many students, radio provides that.”
The station is run by the students with seniors in key positions.
“One of the joys of the job is to work with students who have such passion and sense of responsibility that they are the ones who keep the station going,” James said.
James, who lives in north Indianapolis, has been in the United States since 2016 when his wife, Nicole Tremblay, took a job at Park Tudor School as a theater teacher. James was an English teacher at Park Tudor for one year before taking the CHS job.
“My wife is American, and when my two daughters graduated from university and had jobs, we thought it might be a good time to do something different ourselves,” he said. “It’s great to start something completely new at this time of my life.”
James had previously taught theater, film and digital technology and was an assistant principal in Norwich, England.
“It gave me a lot of experience in teaching large groups of creative people, that’s what really being the radio adviser is,” James said. “There are 100 staff members all with fantastic ideas about things they like to broadcast and talk about. My job is to enable them to do that, often without getting in the way too much but just trying to advise them on the best way to do that.”
