About This Project
Common Grounds High School is a design project created by a graduate student team. This page covers who built what, what the team still needs to decide — and the part worth paying attention to: a website you can talk to.
The Student Team
Common Grounds High School was designed by these graduate students as part of their coursework. Each team member led a different aspect of the school's design.
Annie Walkup
School Culture & Restorative Practices Designer. The heart and soul of Common Grounds' school culture — designed the restorative practices framework and relationship-centered discipline approach.
Gaby
Event Architect. Designed six school traditions including Worlds of Learning Days, Student-Run Farmers Markets, One School One Story, and more.
Vicki
Curriculum Designer & Campus Architect. Co-authored curriculum and inclusion framework; co-designed the physical campus. Expertise spans de-tracking, IEP writing, and accessibility planning.
Sayo
Curriculum, Inclusion & Social Justice Lead. Co-authored curriculum framework and social justice section with a focus on equitable rigor, co-teaching models, and culturally responsive pedagogy.
Emma
Social Justice & Access Specialist. Co-authored social justice section covering linguistic justice, equitable rigor, and graduation pathways.
JoJo
Community Builder & Campus Designer. Authored parent involvement framework; co-designed physical campus and extracurricular programs to serve the neighborhood.
Alijah
Classroom Practice Documenter. Co-authored detailed week-long classroom walkthrough showing what Common Grounds instruction looks like day-by-day.
Built By
The student team designed the school. The website was built separately to support their vision.
What We Need From the Team
First: you don't have to use this website. Gwen built it as a fun weekend project and genuinely enjoyed doing it. If it's not the right fit for your group, that is completely fine. No one's feelings will be hurt. If it is useful, great — here's how to work with it.
Everything on the site is placeholder. Every word on every page — including the restorative practices essays, the accessibility plan, the course catalog, all of it — is filler content that Gwen wrote to test the site. She made no decisions for the team and had no intention of making decisions for the team. She just needed content to build against. Your real work will replace all of it.
Send essays first. Aesthetics later — if there's time. Your academic work is what matters: the policy essays, philosophy statements, and program descriptions that define the school. Get those to Gwen first. She is willing to change colors, fonts, and visual design if that's important to you, but time is very limited. Essays and written content are the priority. If there's time left over after the writing is posted, she can do hex codes and fonts.
Gwen's availability:
The week of April 14: Gwen will be traveling. She'll find time to work on submissions but may be slow to respond. April 21 – May 4: Back and available — this is the best window to get things done. After May 4: nothing. Gwen leaves for Spain on May 5 and will be eating tapas, not building websites. Anything sent after May 4 will not get done. So please — send your work as early as possible and don't wait until the last minute.
How to submit content — send everything through Annie, who will email it to Gwen. Two options for written content:
Option 1: Plain text. Just write your section and send it. Gwen will post it on the site. It will look great and read great — but Capybara (the voice assistant) won't be able to answer questions about it. This is totally fine for content that doesn't need to be voice-searchable.
Option 2: Capybara-ready. If you want Capybara to be able to answer questions about your content, it needs a few extra pieces — a one-line summary and a list of key facts. This is what makes Capybara able to cover so many topics: every section on the site feeds searchable facts into its knowledge base. It's not magic — it's structure. Ask Gwen for an example if you'd like to see what that looks like.
For each essay or new section, tell Gwen:
1. Where should it be linked from? (e.g., "link it from the Community page" or "add it to the main nav") 2. What should the blurb say? (the short teaser text that appears on the linking page) 3. The full written content — either plain text or with summary/facts if you want Capybara access.
For changes to existing content:
Be specific. List the URL of the page (e.g., https://commongrounds.bungfactory.com/academics). Say exactly what should change — "replace the curriculum overview section with this text: [your text]" is great. "Update the academics page" is not enough to act on. If you want something added, say where. If something needs to change, list the URL.