Pupils flush away wasteful habits

At one school in Cobh, Co Cork, pupils have been hard at work finding ways to increase their green credentials, much to the pleasure of the teachers and principal, writes education correspondent Niall Murray

A MEETING of young minds at a Cork school is generating ideas about how to care more for the world and for the people around them.

These boys and girls are some of the green flags committee at Rushbrooke National School, just outside Cobh. Their duties are many and varied, but all the members are keen on the work for the green schools programme, sometimes taking time out of their lunch breaks to share ideas.

“We go round and we tell the other children about not littering around the school. They try to follow the example of us older ones,” says committee member Cathal O’Dea, a sixth-class pupil.

The school started work for its first An Taisce green flag on the theme of litter and waste in 2004, setting a zero-waste policy, labelling bins for recyclable materials, and setting up a school garden with help from pupils, staff, and parents.

That was before most of the current committee members were attending Rushbrooke NS. But they are all enthusiastic and all have their own reasons for getting involved.

For Aimee Coady, third class and a committee representative, the best thing has been going on the many trips involved. She particularly enjoyed their day at the Lifetime Lab in Cork, a visitor centre offering school trips on maths, science and the environment, among other topics

“It’s real fun, we meet new friends. We went to UCC and we went to Fota, and the Lifetime Lab in Cork,” says Evan Hennessy, a sixth-class pupil.

Michelle Akhilomen, who represents one of the third-class groups, said she wanted to change Africa. She was born in Dublin and lives in Cobh, but has visited a school in Nigeria during regular trips with her family.

“In some places, the roads are filled with rubbish. I’d like to be a road worker, cleaning up the roads.”

As co-ordinator of the green schools programme at Rushbrooke NS, teacher Catherine O’Sullivan convenes the meetings of the 15-member committee: “We have one boy or girl from every class from third up to sixth, and we’d meet very regularly if we have an action day coming up to plan things.”

These action days are held once or twice a year, involving activities for the whole school, aimed at increasing awareness around a chosen topic.

“We might have to tailor things a small bit to what is practical, but the kids themselves do come up with the ideas for what we should do,” she says.

For example, one rule that a previous committee introduced was that no food should go in the bins. Only material that can be recycled can be binned, with bins for paper or different materials placed at the top of each class. As part of a recent action day, posters to remind pupils what can or cannot be recycled were designed, and each class has chosen a bin monitor to oversee compliance.

Principal Dónal Ó Ciaráin says the volume of waste going out of the school has been significantly reduced each month as a result of these kind of policies over the last few years.

“The message is simple: Any food they bring into the school has to leave either in their bellies or in their bags to be brought home. Kids tend to be a lot cleaner in the classroom as well, and that pays off in terms of getting the school cleaned.”

The school’s energy bills have also dropped, which is helpful given that a lot of electricity is used to heat some of the numerous prefabs. Mr Ó Ciaráin is glad, however, that these bills should be cut significantly from next autumn when the school moves in to a building on an adjoining site.

As part of the work to earn the green flag for energy, which was awarded in 2008, the school adopted initiatives that came mostly from the ideas of the committee. By turning down thermostats a few degrees, for example, they met their aim of reducing oil consumption by 10%.

Other ideas included committee members becoming the Energy Police, doing spot checks on empty classrooms and awarding points where lights were switched off and doors kept closed. To remind all pupils of these energy-saving measures, each class had competitions for the best sign to be put just inside the door, reminding everyone to close doors and turn off lights as they leave.

The school has had its water metered for a couple of years, but work done for the green flag for water has helped reduce the amount used around the school. The only water that should be drawn from the public supply in the new school will be what flows from classroom and staff room taps, as the rest will be taken from tanks that harvest, pump and store rain water.

“We’re paying around €1,800 a year in water charges, but it could be much higher if we hadn’t taken a lot of measures put forward by the kids,” said Mr Ó Ciaráin.

In a school of more than 700 boys and girls, a lot of toilets are flushed every day, and the committee’s research came up with a calculation of over 2,800 flushes every week. They worked out that the 4,500 litres of water flushed down the toilet every day weighed about as much as an African bull elephant.

The target was set to reduce that by 5%, but the success has seen a drop of 6%, or about 280 litres less water being flushed in the school every day.

The work involved everybody in the school recording how often they flushed the toilets. Pupils posted ideas for saving water onto paper water droplets. These were then stuck onto a giant poster of Peanuts the Elephant, a character they introduced to the school as part of the project.

For the recent action day organised by the green flags committee, the water theme was revisited when fourth-class pupil Robbie O’Driscoll dressed up in a foam water droplet outfit. The entire school was reminded in a fun way of the message to conserve water as they chased him around the yard — in turns, of course — in a game dubbed “Stop the Running Water”.

The school completed a programme last year to reduce traffic congestion around the school and get more pupils walking to and from classes every day. Rap song competitions, a road safety awareness week, and a flash mob at a farmer’s market in Cobh were among the events that led to the school earning its fourth green flag.

Green with envy

Rushbrooke National School is one of thousands of schools registered on An Taisce’s green schools programme.

While 2,310 have been awarded at least one green flag, this is one of just over 400 schools to have four flags for their long-term commitment to the scheme.

But hopefully these numbers will rise, as the vast majority of the country’s 4,000 schools have registered to take part.

The green schools programme is part of an international movement known as Eco-Schools, and Irish children are among 11m taking part across 50 countries.

Nearly one in five of all the schools in the world to have been awarded a green flag, or a number of them, are in Ireland.

A recent visit to An Taisce’s green schools office in Dublin by Estonia’s first lady Evelin Ilves was testament to the success of the programme.

Mrs Ilves plans to start a similar programme in Estonia, using the Irish green schools as an example.