Over the past few years, our Green-Schools Committee here at Ardee Community School has gone from strength to strength. We have been awarded 4 Green flags for Litter & Waste, Energy, Water and Travel to date. All four are proudly flying high and we are currently working on achieving our 5th flag for Biodiversity.
Each of these flags required an enormous amount of work and so we are very proud to have achieved so much already and are as determined and inspired to keep the great work going to achieve more flags and make our school a more environmentally friendly community.
We believe that an awareness of the impact we, as global citizens, have on our environment is an essential element of everyone’s education and that information and an understanding of ways to live in more harmony with our surroundings, will change and shape the future of our world.
Recently we felt an adjustment and improvement to our Litter & Waste management was needed, as Covid-19 brought new challenges in this area. The introduction of cleaning regimes in classrooms, as well as the new structure to our lunch time routine, created challenges for our recycling system.
A school wide initiative for the ‘Cleanest Base Room’ competition was launched at the beginning of 2021 with enormous success. We were thrilled to see everyone supporting and participating in the initiative to improve our recycling habits and an awareness around our new covid-19 waste generation. The competition is running again this year, giving students the opportunity to keep their classrooms clean and to win prizes for doing it.
Throughout the year we aim to increase an awareness, knowledge and understanding about the link between our actions and the impact it has on our environment. In February we will run the Big Travel Challenge. We encourage students to walk, run, cycle, scoot, bus or carpool to and from school, increasing awareness of how they travel can become more environmentally friendly. March will see us celebrate National Tree Week where we hope to plant more native Irish trees in our school and community to promote and protect their importance to us and our future.
Our latest quest for our Biodiversity flag will allow us to educate and create an awareness of the delicate balance our planet lives in and how the actions of our whole school, along with ourselves, impact that balance and effect our lives. We hope to involve as many students and teachers as possible in our efforts, which will include creating habitats for all types of wildlife, planting flower beds and creating wild areas in our school grounds.
We are going to be working hard over the next year and we hope to be awarded with
the flag by June 2023!
Anyone who is interested in either joining or just finding out more about what the
Green School Committee are doing and how to get involved, you can contact any of
our committee members, or email us at greenschoolacs@ardeecs.ie
Click HERE for more information.
