What is the Green Schools Programme?
Green Schools is Irelands largest leading environmental programme for schools and it promotes long-term, whole-school actions to improve the environment by being student-led and engaging with our schools wider community.
Who are the Green Schools Committee?
The Green Schools Programme involves the Whole School! So every student and staff member engages daily, sometimes without even knowing, by using the correct bin, turning off lights or by turning off computers instead of leaving them on standby!
We also have a dedicated Green Schools Committee who meet weekly and elect executive members that are responsible for specific jobs! Our 2019/2020 Executive members and Whole Committee can be found listed and photographed on our Green Schools Notice Board.
What flag are Bremore working towards?
Over the last number of years, we have been busy working hard on 7 steps towards our first greens schools flag. In November 2019 we applied for this flag focusing on the theme of “Litter and Waste”. In March 2020 we have our assessment visit from Fingal County Council on behalf of An Taisce.
We are now awaiting to hear whether we will be awarded our flag. If we are, the next flag will be focusing on the theme of “Energy”
What 7 steps have the committee taken to becoming a “Green School”?
1. Set Up a Green Schools Committee – Done!
2. Environmental Review – we first carried this out in our prefabs in 2017! Since then we’ve also reviewed balbriggan town and our new school and surrounds multiple times!
3. Action Plan – we plan all of our tasks by future planning, this can be found on our Noticeboard and includes actions for the future!
4. Monitoring and Evaluation – We ask the clean-up team each week to complete an evaluation of the litter they cleaned up along with calculating the observed differences in our environmental reviews!
5. Curriculum Links - there are too many curriculum links to name but in particular the curriculum in Art, CSPE, Home Economics and Geography all engage the impact and effect of the environment, litter, waste and global warming!
6. Informing and involving – along with a whole school PBL on Climate Change, the whole school have been engaged with workshops by Bin it, An Taisce and the SEAI. This doesn’t include the whole school rotation for clean-up that each class takes for 1 week of every year!
7. Green Code – our Green Code is simple “It’s a 2 second choice!”
What are the Green Schools Committee working on now?
The Green Schools Committee are currently working on fundraising and planning for fitting bottle filling stations into the school. Then, we hope to phase out single use plastic bottles as the plastic in these breaks down microscopically after a few uses and becomes unsafe for us and the environment!
