Melinda Tuhus Photo
Common Ground High School’s 20-acre site on the flank of West Rock State Park may get a new harvest pavilion and a cistern to store rainwater, thanks to a $96,000 grant students at the environmental charter high school won.
The students won the money, to draw up a site plan for their school grounds, from a national committee composed of other high school and college students. Sixteen students who worked on the grant formally accepted the award Monday afternoon.
Common Ground is more than the state’s only environmentally themed charter school. It’s also a community environmental center, a working farm with both animals and a large organic garden selling produce to the public, and “a laboratory for environmental research, sustainable living, the study of natural and human history, and community-building,” according to its outreach materials.
The grant was awarded by the youth advisory board of State Farm Insurance, which handles $5 million in philanthropic funds. It was one of several grants to student-led service learning projects around the country.
Several local State Farm agents accompanied students Monday on a tour of the property.
Keith Taylor, a senior from Hamden (pictured at top of story), pointed toward the garden. He said the student grantwriters agreed that building a harvest pavilion is a top priority. It will store farming equipment as well as harvested vegetables, and will be the place shoppers come to buy the students’ produce.
Samantha O’Brien (pictured), a junior from East Haven, is focused on water — conserving it and reusing it. She said she doesn’t see why the school should pay for water from the city when students and faculty can collect it in rain barrels.
“It won’t be clean enough to drink, but we can use it in the toilets and the hoses” to water crops, she said. She’d also like to see a cistern built for storing large amounts of rainwater, but that may be too expensive.
Students will propose their ideas for making the campus more sustainable, and the ones that garner the most support will be implemented.
School director Liz Cox said the grant will not involve just the 16 students who wrote it: “They do plan to involve the entire student body, so it also is doing a lot to elevate leadership at the school.”
After the tour, several local State Farm representatives made the grant award.
Joel Tolman, the school’s development director, said of the students’ efforts, “It was a fun challenge for me, as someone who writes grants all the time, to sit down with a group of high school students and sit back a little bit and let them give the direction.” He said the students have already been at work on small sustainability projects, but this big grant award will enable the school community to tackle the bigger picture.
Natalie Reyes, a junior from New Haven, spearheaded a small project. She’s passionate about pencil sharpeners — electric pencil sharpeners, that is. She sees no need for them to exist at all, especially in a school that’s trying to hone its green credentials. So they’re being replaced by the old-fashioned, hand-generated kind.
She’s also banging the drum for reducing paper consumption.
“We recycle, but we could be using less” in the first place, she said, clearly grasping a concept that many adults fail to understand — that recycling comes after reducing and reusing in the hierarchy of materials use.
A State Farm representative asked the students gathered around tables in a big square in the school’s farmhouse how many of them intend to pursue an environmental career. Only about half raised their hands. But in conversations with the students after the ceremony, it was clear that even those who don’t define their futures that way intend to keep environmental awareness at the forefront of their lives.
“Even if we are not planning to go into the environmental field,” said O’Brien, “everybody needs to do their part” for the planet.
She said she wants to be a science teacher and share with others the concepts of natural systems and sustainability she’s learned at Common Ground. Which on second thought she decided maybe is an environmental career.
Common Ground also recently won a $1.5 million state facilities grant to build three new classrooms and a performance/athletic space. The school was founded in 1997 and serves just 150 students from ten area towns.
Kudos to the Common Ground student grant writers!