ENV 3

Dear Parent,

Our Green School campaign is well under way and the children are trying really hard to be more environmentally aware.

Let me outline where we stand at present. Our Green Committee has expanded to include two members from Fourth and two from Fifth – a boy and a girl in each case. This brings the number of pupils on our committee to ten and meetings usually happen on Thursday afternoons.

A Green School notice board has just been completed. Called “OUR GREEN SCENE”, it was made from recyclable materials (plastic, stamps, etc) by the children of 1st and 2nd Classes. It can be found just inside the main entrance of the school. Our Green Code was put together from ideas given by pupils and both this and our school motto can be found here. One of the pupils of Fourth Class wrote our school motto:

Green can be extreme,
If we work as a team!

A transport survey has been conducted by our two Fourth Class committee members and this will be recorded on a chart shortly. A record of all materials collected for recycling will be kept and filled in on a regular basis.

Our Green Campaign has impacted quite dramatically on our school. The amount of paper used in photocopying was of very real concern to us – interestingly, photocopying has reduced quite a lot. Littering in the playground is no longer the issue that it was in our old school, with many children going to great lengths to pick up and dispose of litter that they find, ‘naming and shaming’ those that drop orange peel, etc. or ‘miss’ the bin! Most children are making a big effort to use proper lunch boxes or other reusable container, instead of aluminium foil or ‘cling film’.

A website has been set up devoted to ‘Our Green Campaign’ and you can access it by clicking on the link on our homepage. Indeed, all letters to parents and anything to do with our ‘green’ efforts can be found here.

We have decided to put plastic recycling on hold and concentrate on other areas for the moment. However, any plastic bottles used in school – staff room milk cartons, for example – will be collected for recycling.

Finally, if our Green Campaign is to work, we need to enlist the help of parents to help bring our recyclables to the ‘bring centre’ in Dun Laoghaire. I would like to organise a rota over the next few days that would enable this environmental project to run more efficiently and smoothly. We would therefore be very grateful if you could help out in this regard by taking the time to fill in the attached form.

A letter has been written to An Taisce outlining our Green Flag status so far and sometime fairly soon we hope to have our school assessed for an award - we’ll keep you posted.

Thank you for your support.

Yours sincerely,

James Malseed