Hugh Codding was one of Sonoma County's most successful developers, the man who built much of Santa Rosa's postwar suburban landscape. He was also an avid hunter, and over decades he had assembled an enormous taxidermy collection, housed in a nondescript industrial building on Summerfield Road in Santa Rosa that locals called the Codding Museum. Inside were some four hundred stuffed animals: bears in menacing poses, a Bengal tiger, a leopard, walls of mounted heads, and smaller specimens like South African dik-diks no larger than cocker spaniels. Generations of Santa Rosa schoolchildren took field trips to the collection in the 1960s and 1970s. But by 1989, Codding was ready to close the museum. He was crestfallen to learn that people had begun disparaging the collection because of the hunting trophies. Rather than let it disappear, he donated the entire inventory to Ron Head at Petaluma High School.

The collection quickly outgrew Head's classroom. The Codding family stepped in again, purchasing a new bus garage for the school district, which freed up the old one on the Petaluma High campus. That 9,000-square-foot concrete building, never designed to hold anything more charismatic than a school bus, became the Petaluma Wildlife and Natural Science Museum when it opened in 1992. Head's vision was never primarily about the animals. "I saw what kids could do and how a museum could motivate kids," he said. The museum became a laboratory for career skills, leadership, and management. Students maintained the exhibits, cared for live animals, led tours for visiting elementary school groups, managed the nonprofit's finances, and learned to speak publicly about ecology and conservation. The old bus garage became the largest student-run museum in the United States, a distinction it still holds.

Walk through the museum on a Saturday, when it opens to the public, and the experience is unlike any conventional natural history institution. The guides are high school students. They are not reading from scripts. They are docents who have taken specialized elective classes in wildlife management and museum maintenance, learning fauna biology, animal husbandry, and conservation science before earning the right to lead tours. The collection itself has evolved far beyond Codding's taxidermy. Live animals now fill the museum: snakes, lizards, chinchillas, and other species that the students feed, clean, and care for daily. Phil Tacata, the current teacher overseeing the program, has shifted the museum's emphasis toward conservation and habitat preservation, connecting the mounted specimens to broader ecological stories rather than treating them as hunting trophies. The transformation mirrors a larger cultural shift, but it happened here because teenagers decided that the animals in their care deserved a different narrative.

The museum operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, governed by a board of directors and sustained by community donations. Students who participate gain volunteer service hours, hands-on experience in biology and animal care, and practical business skills that most high schoolers never encounter. The program runs summer camps for children ages five to twelve, with student docents supervising activities in animal behavior, ecology, and conservation science. Each year, a handful of students earn the title of Lead Docent, the museum's highest student honor, chosen for their professionalism and mastery of the tour material. The position has become a point of genuine pride at Petaluma High, a recognition that carries weight precisely because it is earned through competence rather than popularity. Ron Head's original theory, that real responsibility produces real growth, has been tested now for more than three decades. The converted bus garage on a public high school campus remains the proof.