New Haven Independent

Barton said he’s leaving because Common Ground is in great shape and he’s ready for a new professional challenge. He’ll become principal of Old Saybrook High School.

Liz Cox, Common Ground’s dean of students, will take over. The board is conducting a national search for an executive director, who will oversee all aspects of the school and related programs.

In an interview in his office before the gala dinner, Barton reviewed the history of Common Ground. It began as the New Haven Ecology Project in the late 1980s, which he co-founded (the letterhead listed his home address) with the goal of opening a farm school. (Full disclosure: this reporter briefly served on the board in the early 1990s.)

Already a city high school teacher, he earned a master’s degree at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He helped launch a summer ecology camp at West Rock Nature Center in 1993 and the next year got enough money to become the project’s first paid staffer. “I called myself the executive director of none,” he quipped.

Chickens figured early into the project’s efforts, which included teacher training on the environment through growing seedlings and raising chicks.

The timeline for a full-fledged school accelerated madly when the state passed charter school legislation effective in July of 1996, with a December deadline for proposals. The Ecology Project learned in January 1997 that its proposal was among the first five approved statewide; the school had to open its doors in August. Whew!

That it did with 67 ninth and tenth-graders at a building on the campus of Southern Connecticut State University. Then, Barton said, “We went all out raising money and building our first school house.” Unlike New Haven public schools, which are in the midst of an over $1.5 billion rebuilding campaign paid for mostly by state money, charter schools must do most of their own fundraising for construction from private sources. And charters get less money per pupil from the state than urban school districts like New Haven.

Barton said Common Ground follows all state education regulations and has agreed to the same pay scale and benefits that New Haven’s unionized teachers earn. For several years, teachers rotated through a coordinator position. In 2004 he became the director of both the school and its related after-school, weekend and summer programs

The school leases 20 acres of city-owned land on the flank of West Rock Ridge State Park. It added one grade each year until it incorporated freshmen through seniors beginning in 1999, for a total of 150 students with 14 full-time teachers — a small high school by any measure. That dovetails with the school’s philosophy of experiential education — learning by doing, with a core of interdisciplinary classes, “which helps kids see across disciplines, which is how the world works,” Barton said.

One example is the biodiversity course. It “compares the diversity of what we consider our three campuses — the city of New Haven as an ecosystem, our farm and related fields, and West Rock ridge. So it’s a science course but it’s also a math course, because students are using statistics to study samples.”

As for experiential learning, instead of sitting in class for six hours a day, students grow a wide variety of vegetables on the farm and raise animals including chickens, turkeys, sheep and goats. The veggies are incorporated into the lunch, prepared from scratch by chef Rhonda DeLoatch. Students also sell some of the farm produce.

As for the chickens, well, several met their fate when students slaughtered and cooked them for Thursday’s dinner, which also included freshly harvested greens for the salad, risotto, and ice cream churned that afternoon.

Barton looked through ten photo albums for representative images to appear in a slide show at the dinner. Photos were also scattered around the tables. One showed a somewhat younger, smiling Oliver Barton holding a chicken upside down with a blade to its throat.

The school has evolved significantly over the past decade. In its early years, Barton said. “60 percent of our students were coming in in the lowest band of five bands on the eighth-grade CMT [Connecticut Mastery Test]. I think it was partly a communication issue, in that we saw ‘farm school’ and ‘environmental school’ as something progressive and college prep and seriously academic for kids at all different levels. But I think the community perceived it as a vocational and low academic program.”

He added that many parents wanted their children who didn’t do well in a traditional setting to be in a smaller school where they’d get lots of adult attention. “And we were very good at that, at taking at-risk kids and supporting them.”

The school has evolved. One example: the “mock trial” conducted by students in teacher Jeremy Stone’s class, in which they had to understand complicated issues of air pollution and environmental regulations. (Click here for that story).

Barton said Common Ground has been better able in recent years to convey the mission and purpose of the school, “so we’re attracting a lot of students who come here right from the beginning with an interest in environmental work, or working outdoors, or the sciences.

“But there’s still a lot of kids who come because it’s small, and they’ve heard good things about it. I call them the born-again environmentalists. They don’t see that in themselves, and then all of a sudden here they become really passionate about it. They all get a really deep understanding of their relationship to the natural environment, some positive outdoor experiences, concepts of land stewardship and the importance of parks in urban areas, the importance of cities in global environmental issues as important living communities.”

Last year the school won a prestigious national award from the National Wildlife Federation.

Test scores have improved dramatically over the past five years, after the faculty took a hard look at how they could help kids coming in below grade level and initiated a staff-wide effort to teach reading across all subject areas. “Last year our CAPT [Connecticut Academic Performance Test] scores doubled,” Barton said proudly, “so we were in the state target range for what the kids should be doing.” And about 90 percent of seniors go on to college, compared to half that many in the early years.

Of all the accomplishments of Common Ground — inextricably bound up with his own career over two decades — Barton said he’s “most proud of the students’ commitment to the program and each other. The students really care a lot about each other here and support each other in moving forward. And I’m proud of the fact that the kids who didn’t see the value of an environmental lens in their own life have discovered that and want to carry that forward.”

As the interview ended, Barton described some of what awaited the dinner guests — including the chicken served with a maple syrup glaze as the piece de resistance. “The chickens are raised very humanely,” he noted. “They’re free-range, they’re outside a lot. They’re very happy birds, without the environmental problems” of industrial meat production.

Guests — current board members and spouses, as well as some of the earliest boosters of the Ecology Project — sat down to the elegant dinner in the rebuilt farmhouse. But first they gathered outside to appreciate the brand-new founders’ garden (pictured above), dedicated to Barton and to Joan Gillette, another founder and long-time teacher and consultant at the school, who is also retiring.

Senior Rasheen Sessions (pictured, second from right), one of the students who helped prepare and serve the meal, said he was grateful to Barton. “He taught me how to acknowledge what people teach me,” he said. “This school has changed me in many different ways; it taught me how to learn and how to respect and how to be creative.”