Uncommon Groundbreaker Moves On

When Crystal Fernandez arrived at Common Ground High School in 2001, one of the first people she met was Liz Cox.

Then 13 years old, Fernandez was guarded; her difficult upbringing in the Bronx had taught her not to trust or confide in adults. This 44-year-old English teacher was to become Fernandez’s guidance teacher for the next four years of high school.

Over time, Cox gained Fernandez’s trust.

“She was really encouraging and would sit down with me and help me figure out life, as a young person, and realize I had power,” said Fernandez, who graduated as the class salutatorian.

Now, 19 graduations later, Liz Cox has retired after spending 11 years serving as school director — or principal — of Common Ground High, the oldest environmental charter in the United States. (Monica Maccera-Filppu, the school’s executive director, has been appointed her interim replacement.)

Cox’s curly hair is a little greyer than it was when she first arrived as a part-time teacher in 1999, but her devotion to the school and its students remains unchanged.

Two weeks after her official last day of work, she was still bustling about the Common Ground building at the foothills of West Rock, helping staff make final preparations for an in-person graduation ceremony happening on Friday.

When Cox looks at you through tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose, she commands every ounce of your attention and gives you every inch of hers. At 63, she has a matter-of-fact, non-effusive way of speaking. But her calm, reassuring voice is one that you could to listen to for hours.

During an interview the other day, she wore a buttercup yellow collared shirt untucked, reminiscent of the fields of flowers just outside, and a blue and pink plaid skirt that swept her ankles as she walked. 

During her tenure first as dean of students then as the school director, Cox led Common Ground through its exit from the No Child Left Behind ​“In Need of Improvement” status to become a school of distinction in the state. She guided the community through grief when they lost two students. And this year, she has seen the school through the biggest challenge yet: teaching during a pandemic.

An Advocate

“Her greatest contribution to the school is how she advocated for young people,” said Fernandez. ​“Whatever the situation is, she looks at it from the perspective of who we are as people. We are human and none of us is perfect.”

Fernandez grew up in the Bronx in a single-parent household. Her father was incarcerated when she was young. She lived in an area full of gangs and drugs. At home, she dealt with verbal abuse, domestic violence, and alcoholism.

In 2001, when Ferndandez was 13 years old, her aunt brought her to New Haven to move her out of the difficult home environment. Fernandez enrolled in Common Ground.

“Moving to New Haven and Common Ground was the best thing for me,” she said. She was suddenly in a high school with less than one hundred students. Her old high school in Manhattan had one thousand students. Outside the classroom windows of Common Ground, lush trees rustled and vibrant wildflowers bloomed.

“I came from a situation where you had to be this hard person,” Fernandez told the Independent over the phone. ​“It was really about survival. When I came to Common Ground it was less about survival and more about thriving.”

When Fernandez told Ms Cox she had 13 different colleges she wanted to apply to, she helped her write recommendation letters for each one. Fernandez ended up enrolling at the University of Connecticut, became a youth specialist, and now works at Common Ground as the manager for college, careers & green jobs.

Last April, Fernandez came into the school for the job interview and saw Ms Cox for the first time since her graduation 15 years ago.

When Ms Cox saw her again, she embraced Fernandez and said, ​“Come and work here.”

“I love her, and she’s been a positive influence on my life,” said Fernandez. ​“While I’m sad to see her go, she has been a great educator and she deserves to relax.”

Of all the things Fernandez will miss about Ms Cox, what sticks with her the most is a simple three-word phrase that Cox would frequently say: ​“It’s all good.”

“It helped me think, whatever the situation is right now, it’s not always going to be, and you are going be OK,”said Fernandez. ​“I can still hear her saying it — it’s all good. With the emphasis on all.”

Early Years: Not ​“All Good”

In the late 1990s, Liz Cox, then a mother of two young children and a public health administrator working in New York, heard that some of her friends were planning to start a school in New Haven with environmental education as its core mission.

“They had a vision and a dream for what education could be,” Cox recalled. ​“The whole idea that the city is a learning lab is foundational to the school. Place-based learning.” All the founders needed was to find the perfect site. They did: tucked into hillside of West Rock park sat 20 acres of fertile land.

In 1997, Common Ground High School was founded.

Cox’s father came from a family of farmers who cultivated land for at least two generations along the Mississippi River. Growing up, Cox enjoyed fresh fruits and vegetables grown by her father, who was a ​“world-class gardener” with a special knack for tomatoes. Her family moved about in her childhood — from New York, to Columbus, to Philadelphia, back to Columbus, to Nashville, to Seattle and then back to Nashville — and everywhere, her father’s garden followed.

“The school was founded with an environmental mission with all the tenets of ecology,” said Cox. ​“Really important was helping students to understand their roots, to be connected to the land, to understand what it means to live sustainably and to take that learning back out to their communities to improve them. Everything about that strongly resonated with me.”

Cox joined the staff in 1999. She started teaching an English class and helped to run the business side of things.

At the time, Common Ground embodied education counterculture. Teachers wrote the curriculum with near-complete freedom and taught subjects they were passionate about. Classes were informed by a progressive, liberal, environmental mission. There was a class on watersheds, a class on Africa, a class on harvest and a class on biodiversity.

Cox co-taught a class called ​“Egg and Seed” where students raised meat chickens and eventually killed them. The goal was to teach students how living things live and die.

The school was also fully teacher-run. There was one custodian and one person who worked on the grounds and farm. The rest of the work was left to the teachers.

But with so many interdisciplinary classes, a lack of coherence in the curriculum, and no standard for assessing students’ abilities, the school quickly got into trouble with meeting state academic standards. Staffers were teaching three-hour-long classes and seminars on biodiversity when some students were still struggling with grade-level reading and writing.

“The students were really behind on math and science,” said Cox. ​“We weren’t meeting students where they were academically.” Cox was giving students material that they could not read. Students would jump from a class on biology, to one on chemistry, to one on physics, without any coherence in the curriculum.

As she recalled the early years of the school, Cox sat with her sandaled feet firmly planted on the ground, giving an impression of solidity.

“At the time we felt like the walls were crumbling around you,” she said. ​“But there still was the floor.”

Over the next three to four years, Cox and the other staff began to turn things around. They started assessing the students’ academic abilities to understand their needs. They designed curriculum to meet kids where they were, holding phonics classes for students struggling with language and reading skills. They began to regularly review the students’ abilities and classroom data.

The early challenges revealed to Cox a central tension in Common Ground’s education model that she said remains to this day. ​“There was a real mourning that we’re not getting to teach these great classes, and how can we stay true to its mission?” said Cox.

They reexamined how to incorporate environmental education into the curriculum and found ways to teach the students to become stewards of the farmland, gardens, and buildings that they studied in. Today, students at common ground keep a compost bin, grow herbs, tend to two sheep, and raise chickens and collect their eggs.

More importantly, Cox realised at the time that she had to change the culture and climate of the school. ​“While kids were feeling so disconnected and hating the place, it was hard to get anything done in the classroom. We had to get them to buy into the place,” said Cox. They developed a school logo, did more collaborative creative projects, and devoted more time for teachers to build relationships with the students.

They started a guidance system where 12 to 14 students would be paired with a teacher adviser. The group would meet every day for an hour, and go around in a circle to talk about their day.

“We started to see more buy-in and more students who were here because they want to be here,” said Cox.

One of Cox’s early innovations that has since become a Common Ground cornerstone is the portfolio of leadership and learning, which students develop over four years. In their senior year, they reflect on, present and defend their best work produced during their time at the school.

Cox led the school through triumphal increases in the students’ math, science, reading and writing abilities. Between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of students demonstrating proficiency on the state standardized writing test increased from just over 40 percent to 97.7 percent. Common Ground’s four-year graduation rates have consistently exceeded state averages. Almost all Black and Hispanic students as well as special education and low-income students successfully graduate and between 97 percent and 100 percent of graduates in the past five years were accepted to college.

Joel Tolman, the school’s Director of Development and Community Engagement, attributes the school’s academic success to Liz’s leadership and method of teaching. ​“Liz led us through [the process of] recognizing that our students’ academic success was critical but also that our students are whole human beings,” said Tolman.

“Door Was Always Open”

Throughout her time at Common Ground, Cox was one of the first to arrive and the last to leave the school each day. Her earliest emails would be sent as early as 5am. Tolman recalled how Cox would wake up before sunrise every Sunday to plan her ​“week, year, or life” ahead.

“Throughout the years I used to joke Liz had a cot someplace in the school,” said Iris Jimenez, an administrative assistant at the school. ​“She was there before anybody else. She was there after people.”

“She is an educator who thinks about how to give students opportunities to do real work with a public purpose that holds them to high standards, really pushes them, and treats them as individuals,” said Tolman.

For 17 years, Iris Jimenez has worked in the school office at Common Ground. For the past 11, she has worked right outside Cox’s office. She recalled how Cox had a habit of being so focused on work that she would often take hours to finish her lunch.

“I’d say why don’t you sit down for lunch? She’d start eating, and something would happen and she’d walk away. Then it’d be 3 p.m., and her lunch would still be there,” said Jimenez.

Jimenez described Cox as someone who cares deeply for the students and staff. She herself was on the receiving end of Cox’s kindness. Jimenez returned to work days after her daughter was hospitalized, and one of her tasks at the time was to tutor hispanic students in English. But the kids were mischievous and the job was stressful.

“In a stressful time even a joke is more than you can handle, but Ms. Cox was awesome at understanding about how I was not in a good place, that I was really emotionally drained,” said Jimenez. Cox relieved Jimenez of her tutoring responsibilities. ​“I didn’t have to say anything to her. It’s like she understood me without me having to tell her.”

Cox always left the door to her office open. Noor Fadhil, while she was a student at Common Ground, would go into Cox’s office every day and tell her everything from what she had for breakfast to the latest fundraiser that Fadhil was organizing for Speak Club, of which Fadhil was a leader.

Speak Club, a multicultural club focussing on first and second generation immigrants, was started by Fadhil’s brother as part of his senior capstone project. Cox encouraged Fadhil to organize a bake sale to raise money for the Speak Club members to take a field trip to New York.

Fadhil, whose family emigrated from Iraq eight years ago, arrived in the U.S. barely able to speak English. When she enrolled for Advanced Placement Government and Politics in her senior year, she told Ms. Cox she wasn’t sure if she could pass it.

“Ms. Cox said, ​‘Let me tell you something, don’t give up just because it’s hard. I’d say just try it, and if it doesn’t work out, just come back to me,’” Fadhil recalled. She took Cox’s advice and not only passed, but got an excellent grade in the class.

Now, Fadhil is about to enroll at the University of Connecticut in the fall with plans to go to medical school or train to be a physician’s assistant.

A Trauma-informed School

Cox described the school grounds as a therapeutic space, a place for healing, meditation, and quiet. With lush trees around the property, lavender and lemon balm and thyme and rosemary grown in the gardens, and the occasional bleating of one of the sheep sounding through the still air, it is not hard to see why.

Cox is a proponent of being a trauma-informed school, handling discipline and behavioral issues restoratively rather than punitively.

“Detention and suspension doesn’t work. Suspension is a bad thing, you should avoid it at all costs,” Cox said. The school has long had a very low suspension rate, but has occasionally suspended students for serious infractions including possession of weapons.

“This is New Haven,” said Cox. ​“We’ve tried hard to make Common Ground ​‘common ground’ and we work really hard on being one community, but they still have to leave and go home, and some of the neighbourhoods are not safe.”

Cox began to talk about the two students that the school community has lost, one of them to gun violence, and her voice grows quiet.

In 2014, between Christmas and New Year’s, a Common Ground student named Javier Martinez died after he was shot. He was months away from graduation. Cox knew him very well and co-taught the senior seminar that year, which Martinez participated in.

Immediately after Martinez was killed, Cox made the decision to open the school and invite students, staff, and family members back, even though it was winter break. They provided food and mental health counsellors. ​“People wanted to be together,” said Cox. ​“So they could have a safe place to express how they were feeling.”

“I remember thinking ​‘Wow, we were all in this space and Liz was sort of that constant there, keeping us together’,” said Monique Frasier, Common Ground’s assistant director. ​“This was upsetting to everyone but she was just so strong in that moment and it was what I needed.”

The day that Javier died, Cox visited Javier’s grandmother. ​“She asked for a garden,” Cox recalled. Javier loved gardening and planting trees. ​“And we said, we’re going to make the garden happen.”

They spent months planning it and within a day, staff and students built the wetlands garden, filled it with flowers and varieties of plants, and placed a wooden bench overlooking a pond.

Not far from Javii’s garden lies a half-finished handicap ramp, planted around with shrubs and red and yellow flowers by students in commemoration of Christopher Franco, another Common Ground student who was killed in a car accident last summer right after graduating. Franco was passionate about advocating for disability access in the school.

“We didn’t really try to move on,” said Cox. ​“My favourite spot on campus is definitely Javii’s garden.”

Choice And Power

Emblazoned on the walls of the school cafeteria is the word ​“POWER.” It is part of the school motto and a core tenet of Cox’s teaching philosophy.

“A lot of the work we do with the kids is helping them understand they are drivers, they are in charge,” she said. She wants to show students that they can make things happen, whether it is making a flower bloom or a seed bear fruit, cooking a meal for their classmates or starting a fundraiser, protesting on the New Haven Green in support of Black Lives Matter or marching to demand climate action, she said.

And Common Ground students have done it all. Activism and organizing are part of the core curriculum for tenth graders at this school.

The classroom that Cox sat in when she spoke to the Independent was the same one that the Gender Sexuality Awareness Club would regularly meet in, before the pandemic broke out. Common Ground has had several trans students; Cox has made it a point to educate the adult staff about using the students’ preferred pronouns.

Cox spoke of giving choice and freedom to students, while providing them with a structure and consistency so they know what to expect when they enter the classroom.

“Students learn the best or the most when it’s something that they care about, when it has relevance to them, reflects their lives, when it matters to them,” said Cox. ​“When they have choice in their learning.”

Cox has a son and a daughter. ​“I learned more from the kids here that was ultimately helpful in my home. I learned to meet kids where they are,” said Cox.

Her two children went to the private Hopkins School. Cox said she wishes her son had been in Common Ground instead. ​“I wish my son had more experiential learning experience, I think that would have worked better for him at the time,” she said. Her son has followed in her footsteps and has since become a teacher.

Farewell During A Pandemic

For the past three years, Cox has considered retiring, but it never felt like the right time. This year, with a new school executive director on board and a strong sense of ownership among the staff, she said, she felt the school was ready to continue without her.

A week after she announced her retirement, the school had to close its doors due to the pandemic.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done as an educator,” said Cox.

For the first time during the interview that day, she seemed at a loss for words.

“It was just Covid itself, all the anxiety, not being able to be together. It’s just all the things we would have normally done in a situation that was catastrophic like this we couldn’t do.”

Cox and the staff at Common Ground built a system for online learning in four days, and launched it within a week. All Common Ground students have Chromebooks, which allowed 90 percent of kids to connect to the learning management system on a given day. Cox and the teachers made it a point to follow-up frequently with students who were connected but not working.

What kept her up at night throughout the pandemic was the thought of what students were facing: those whose parents were essential service workers, those who were now faced with added domestic responsibilities, those who were taking care of their younger siblings. The school held evening-time tutoring sessions for them, but Cox still worries she has not done enough.

“You never feel like you’ve done enough,” said Cox. ​“It’s hard looking at the next year, and [knowing] next year is not my year.”

“This is like a family. It’s not like I’m walking away and will have no contact. I’ll definitely keep track on what’s happening here. I feel confident that the folks here will look out for the best interest of the kids,” said Cox.

She sat in an empty classroom in the deserted hilltop building of the school while outside, a group of New Haven kids played basketball beside the sheep pen. Cox said that she believes the original dream of the founders has been fulfilled: ​“Students have learned what it means to be connected to this earth, and responsible for one another, and responsible for creating a just world.”

As she prepared to leave for the day, Cox walked down the wide school driveway to Wintergreen Avenue and remembered how once, one of the school sheep was killed by a coyote who left its dead body behind.

“It’s part of the natural cycle of things. But the kids get attached,” she said. Then she got into her car and drove away.