The History Channel wants to help schools Save Our History, which is why they awarded $250,000 in grants of up to $10,000 to 27 historical organizations across the county in partnership with schools or youth groups, which included the Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation.
“We’re very pleased and very proud to be the recipients of this grant,” said Tracy Silberman, executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation (GQHF).
The Save Our History grant was created to support local history education and historic preservation efforts in communities across America. The funding goes toward hands-on educational projects that teach students about their local history and actively engage them in its preservation, according to the Save Our History Web site.
The foundation is partnering with Sunset View Elementary School in Point Loma to design and plan the project, which should be in effect by the beginning of next year.
“It should be ready to go, starting when the kids get back in school in January,” Silberman said. “We’re sending out marketing materials, probably starting with the San Diego Unified School District, but not necessarily exclusive to.”
Silberman explained that the project is an expansion of their current Gaslamp Kids Program, which gives tours of the historic William Heath Davis House and provides interactive online puzzles.
“We talk about what life was like for children 150 years ago and we relate history as though they were living in the 1800s,” Silberman said. “But we didn’t really take them on a walking tour of the Gaslamp Quarter to focus on the architecture. So what this grant does is it allows us to take the next step. We’ll still talk a little bit about history, but it also lets us bring in the architecture and why it is so important to save these old buildings.”
She explained that the first phase of the project is to develop the curriculum of the project, which is where Rebecca Mashburn, second grade teacher at Sunset View Elementary, comes in.
“She is helping us make sure it’s appropriate to the curriculum of the [district] and she’s also making sure that we’re appropriate to the ages of the children,” Silberman said. “She’s helping us create the teacher’s guide. We’ve never undertaken a project of that scope before and we couldn’t do it without Sunset View Elementary School, so we’re very excited that they agreed to partner with us.”
Once the paperwork is completed, a representative from the Foundation will go out to speak with the schools, spreading the word of their project. If the school decides to participate in the project, they would then set up a walking tour with the foundation.
“We’re going to compare the adornments on a building to their clothing adornments,” Silberman explained. “When kids put on their clothes they think about what looks cool and what looks fun and what everybody else is going to like and a building is no different.”
The students will then create their own historic buildings. Each student will cut out a paper building in a 3-D form. They will put it together and decorate it according to what they want the building to be. The students will put their buildings together to create their own model historic district. The model districts can be put up for display at the William Heath Davis House, if the school chooses.
“We want to engage the children,” Silberman said. “We want to make this an interesting and exciting project and in order to do that we felt we needed to add an artistic component to it as well. So that’s how we came up with the idea to have them design their own historic building.”
While the project is geared toward students at the elementary level, grades 2-5, the project and tours can be adjusted to students of all ages.
While Silberman believes that local history is present in school curriculum, she also believes that the Gaslamp Quarter has been ignored in the past “” yet with good reason.
“Many years ago, the Gaslamp Quarter was not safe for children, so there really wasn’t an opportunity,” she explained. “The school district has an excellent program that speaks about early San Diego history in terms of Old Town San Diego, but they don’t come here into the Gaslamp Quarter, which is an important piece of San Diego history that has been missing.”
With the changes that have occurred over the years in the Gaslamp Quarter, making it much more open to children, the foundation has been working hard to let people know of its history and architecture.
“That’s why we’re so excited about this grant,” Silberman said, “because it opens up a whole new audience to us that we’ve only just barely tapped into before.”
For more information on the Gaslamp Quarter Historic Foundation, visit www.gaslampquarter.org.
For more information on the History Channel’s Save Our History grant, visit www.saveourhistory.com/index.html.