By Abbe Smith, Register Staff
asmith@newhavenregister.com

NEW HAVEN — Students at Common Ground High School are taking the lead in laying the groundwork for a sustainable future.

On Tuesday, students presented their ideas for “greening” the school, projects that tackle environmental topics such as recycling, water conservation and energy-conserving building design.

“It’s central to Common Ground’s mission to teach principles of sustainability and to live these principles by example,” said Melissa Spear, executive director of Common Ground. “This fair is one way we are really trying to engage our students in how to think about sustainability.”

The school’s Leading Green Sustainability Fair serves two purposes. First, it encourages students to participate in the charter school’s process of creating a 20-year master plan. The top student sustainability projects will be incorporated in the master plan. Second, the fair provides a way for the school to pick which projects to fund through a recently secured $100,000 grant from the State Farm Youth Advisory Board.

Students spent most of Tuesday presenting their projects to peers, staff and members of the Common Ground community, including concerned citizens, board members, architects and landscape architects. Everyone who viewed the projects had a chance to vote on their favorites. The finalists will be presented to the master planning committee, which will decide winners. Thirty-eight students presented sustainability projects.

Rachel Gilroy, Leading Green program manager, said the fair is a great way to take advantage of student creativity and knowledge and put it to practical use.

“We want to be an example to other schools in the community be more sustainable,” she said.

Students at Common Ground, a charter high school focused on the environment, take classes with names like “sustainable design” and “environmental science” and their class work is often multi-disciplinary. So for many of the students, the sustainability fair is the perfect venue for applying lessons to real-life problems.

Sam O’Brien, a sophomore from East Haven, and Chelsie Labrecque, a junior from Ansonia, co-created a project that addresses some of the school’s storm water problems. They propose creating a rainwater cistern to collect “gray water” for gardening and to give to animals on the school’s campus. Continued...

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“We get so much rainwater so we might as well collect that water and put it to good use,” O’Brien said.

Labrecque said storm water runoff causes erosion, damages gardens and causes flooding in the parking lot.

Milford freshman Hannah Cruz has a plan to use glazed windows to trap heat inside during winter and keep heat out in summer, thus conserving energy. Another student suggests trapping methane from livestock gas and converting it to energy.

Santiago Achinelli, a sophomore from Ansonia, has a plan to take a tried-and-true environmental strategy — recycling — and take it to a new level. “Our ultimate goal is to get all the trash generated and recycle all of it,” he said.

The sustainability fair is part of the school’s Leading Green project, a yearlong, student-led effort to transform Common Ground into the nation’s greenest school.

Contact Abbe Smith at 203-789-5615.

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