Student Voice 

Year 7-9 Leadership Teams Projects

The Year 7-9 Student Leadership Teams are currently working on a project about educating our College community about the effects and outcomes of littering.

We have come together as a team to try and decrease the amount of litter in our school to accomplish this goal.

As leaders of Patterson River we have brainstormed a few ideas to achieve our goal of becoming an eco-friendly school. As a result, we will be holding an Environment Week starting on the 29th of October for Year 7-9 students.

 Some of our initiatives include:

• A letter being written to Sonya Kilkenny about trying to get new bins and bin lids
• New designs for the bins through student artwork
• Working on a Year 7-9 Clean-up day
• A design a bin competition where you will gets a template of a bin and you get to design the bin and you hand your design to the coordinators and the student that wins gets a $10 canteen voucher as well as the design put on the bin.
• The soft plastic team are working on recycling anything plastics for the year 7’s
• The Leadership Team have made short movies about the impact of litter in the school as well as the impact on marine life.

Did you know that every year the average Australian family produces enough rubbish to fill a three-bedroom house, producing about 2.25 kg of waste each per day? It is estimated that over 13,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square kilometre of ocean surface. This is what we are aiming to avoid. Most of the stuff that we “throw away” takes a significant amount of time decompose. In fact, some of the stuff that we throw in the bin or on the ground will be around for much longer than any of us. Everything we throw away ends up somewhere else, there is no “away”.

We have gathered a list of things that everyday people are ‘throwing out’ or ‘getting rid of’ and how long they take to decompose.

*Paper - 2.5 months *Orange Peel - 6 months *Milk Carton - 5 years *Cigarette Butt - 10-12 years *Plastic bag - 10-20 years *Disposable nappy - 75 years *Tin can - 100 years *Beer can - 200-500 years *Styrofoam - Never *Glass bottles and jars - Never

SRC Workshops and Training

Earlier this month four of our SRC members attended training workshops run by Vic SRC. This was a great day for the students to network with other schools and discuss ideas for improvement. They learnt about their leadership styles and how to influence change within the College. They were able to discuss issues related to young people and develop strategies that they could use. At the end of the day the group presented their improvement strategy that they would like to pursue to the entire group. They had very clear ideas and are looking forward on working on this throughout the rest of the year.

Catherine Blackburne

Leading Teacher -Student Voice and Engagement