Ride to School Day

As the official 'Ride to School Day' for 2024 fell on our Curriculum day last Friday, we have been celebrating this great event today (Wednesday 27th) at SKiPPS.

Riding, scooting or walking to school is a great idea for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is a great way to get active and get some incidental exercise on the way into school each day.

Secondly, by using Active Travel like this, instead of driving, we remove a car from the roads and so reduce the amount of congestion and pollution.

For most of our families, there are safe ways to get to SKiPPS each day, using the park, cycle paths or footpaths that surround the school and so we like to take this day each year to celebrate those students who ride, scoot and cycle all of the time and encourage others to join them!

The day started with fresh fruit and the 'smoothie bike' in action in the quadrangle for those students arriving early.

During the day, each class then got to bring their bike or scooter (or roller blades) to our special SKiPPS circuit to complete some laps.

This was followed by class smoothies in the quadrangle made with pedal power!

After school the St Kilda Bike Kitchen attended school to help with some bike maintenance for families in the yard. Huge thanks to them for this.

I would like to thank our amazing sustainability co-ordinator Allison Shanahan for masterminding and running the whole day.

I also want to thank the huge team of parents and SKiPPA, our Parent's Association for their help to make it such a great event.

I particularly would like to thank Isla Shaw, Bec Walton, Matthew Barbuto, Hannah Lawson, Hannah Liddeaux, Karolina Kurzak, Tally Konstas, and Laura Marini.

ACTIVE TRAVEL & THE ENVIRONMENT

Not only is active travel good for your health, it’s good for the environment too! Riding, walking, scooting or skating to school means there are fewer cars on the road, which results in a;

Reduction in noise pollution
Reduction in energy use
Reduction in carbon emissions

For every kilometre you actively travel instead of driving, you save 243.8 grams of carbon emissions. But what does that actually mean?

On National Ride2School Day in 2023, students across Australia saved 29 tonnes of CO2 by actively travelling to school – the equivalent of planting 202 trees. That’s only one day. Imagine if we did that every day of the school year. Over a year we’d save more than 5,700 tonnes of CO2 – the equivalent of planting 40,000 trees!