By Elizabeth Benton, Register Staff

NEW HAVEN — Common Ground High School has received grants from the American Honda Foundation and the Toshiba America Foundation to build an outdoor museum at the school’s West Rock site.

Preliminary research began in one class last semester, but the two grants, for $46,252 and $15,200, will launch the project schoolwide with anticipated opening dates for the first several exhibits this spring, according to Joel Tolman, director of development and community engagement for the school.

While Common Ground students will be charged with researching and developing the material for the exhibit, titled “Lessons on the Land,” the majority of the grant money will go towards production of the displays, a task that will be managed by professionals at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

The Common Ground museum is expected to include 15 to 20 interactive displays, including research that students began last semester on how human history has shaped the land surrounding their school dating back to Colonial times, Tolman said.

Junior Carlos Catalan is hoping to conduct an archaeological dig as part of the project. “I’m a little nervous about how big a project this can become, but also excited,” Catalan said in a statement.

A second exhibit to be located near the school garden will center on controversy surrounding genetic engineering, Tolman said.

The school hopes to use the exhibit during student-led tours for local elementary schools and multi-age programs at their site, and also as a way to welcome weekend visitors to West Rock Park.

“Our students get a little bit nervous when they have to talk to a group of 15 elementary students,” Tolman said.

The exhibit, he hopes, will serve as a prop for those tours.

Common Ground students will be asked to create some exhibits that accommodate younger elementary students, as well as exhibits for adult visitors, he said. Continued...

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“We want to create a more welcoming gateway to West Rock Park. ... More and more people come across our site and use it as an entryway to the park,” he said. The exhibit will “make it clearer to them how to do that, and give them more opportunity to learn as they do that,” he said.

“Common Ground students will learn not only the natural and cultural history of their school’s backyard but will also learn how to communicate this knowledge to others by writing and designing museum-quality interpretive materials for the school grounds. These permanent outdoor exhibits will educate future students and, more broadly, the general public for years to come,” David Heiser, head of Education and Outreach at the Peabody, said in a prepared statement.

A charter high school focused on the environment, Common Ground is located at a 20-acre environmental education center that includes an urban demonstration farm.

Elizabeth Benton can be reached at 789-5714 or ebenton@nhregister.com.

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