Newsletter

Sustainabilty 

St Mary’s Parent Green Team - ‘Team Green’

Meet our very passionate St Mary’s Parent Green Team - ‘Team Green’! From left to right Inece Bray, Briana Devitt, Ellen Weeks, Sam Spedding, Bec Nevill (with son Joseph) and Jade Homann.

 

Team Green finally got to meet face to face on Tuesday for the very first time. With such a diverse skill set and shared motivation to help our school become even more Sustainable we covered many topics including:

  • Exploring the ResourceSmart Portal. 
  • A whole school Book Swap, including a permanent book swap area in the playground
  • A day trip to visit other sustainable schools next term in Bendigo
  • Team Green articles for the newsletter
  • Guinea pig grooming
  • Potential sustainability grants
  • Rain sensors for our sprinklers
  • Appropriate dress with the awareness that we set our heaters to 20 degrees only.

Team Green Report - ST MARY’S BOOK SWAP

Bring in your pre-loved books for our end of term Book Swap.

Everyone’s bookshelves need a tidy out and our school and environment love saving money and trees by buying less books!

Children can bring books into the office prior to June 21st and place them in the Book Drive box provided. We’re looking for:

  • new / near new books to donate to the library.
  • preloved books in preparation for a whole school ‘Book Swap’ on Tuesday June 21st

 

Year 6 Green Team Report - Leak Test 

Hi I’m Cody from the Green Team and in the Green Team we have been doing a test on all the toilets in the school called the leak test. To do the leak test you need to take the lid off the top of the cistern and then squeeze in five drops of food dye. For example we used green food dye and it makes it so much easier to tell if there is a leak. You put it in and make sure not to flush the toilet. If the toilet bowl water starts to go green that means the toilet has a leak, so that means water is being wasted.

We found two leaks in the boys toilets and the girls toilets had more. The Green Team reported this information to Mrs Ryan and Lee. Lee is going to talk with Muz, our plumber. We will let you know next term how we got on.

 

ResourceSmart Update 

On Tuesday our ResourceSmart facilitator Robyn MacLean presented our school with our RSS sign to proudly display on our school fence.

We are now a Three Star ResourceSmart School. We are 63 % of the way to receive our fourth star for the Water Module and 27 % of the way in completing the Energy Module being our fifth and final star.

As seen below we have saved as a school community $5,552.19 since November 2020. This has been predominantly based on reduced rubbish intake due to our students bringing nude food in their lunchboxes or responsibly taking their rubbish home. We hope these savings significantly grow when we become even more conscious of our water and energy usage.