Green Schools

Green School Flag: Biodiversity 2022

We are currently in a 2 year cycle of activities to obtain our next Green School Flag: Biodiversity.

Our ultimate aim is to make students, parents and teachers aware of the importance of biodiversity in our world.

The meaning of “biodiversity” is easy to understand when we break the word down “bio” refers to life and “living things” and “diversity” means range or variety. The word refers to the huge variety and variation of life that surrounds us on planet earth. Maintaining a high level of diversity among plants, animals and all living things around us is essential in keeping the environment healthy and fit for human life. This includes diversity within species, between species and diversity of ecosystems.

This year we are getting started with the seven steps of the programme:

• Step 1: We have elected our hardworking Green schools committee.
• Step 2: We assessed our starting point by conducting and Environmental review. We did this by (1) carrying out Awareness surveys with staff, students and our school community and (2) we created a Habitat map of our school grounds. We then made displays to show our school community what we learned.

By measuring what our school community knows and what species and habitats are present on our campus we can now start to think up ways to raise awareness about biodiversity and to encourage species-richness in and around our school. We will come up with ideas and ideas and actions and write them down as an Action plan (Step 3). Our action plan will state what our targets are and how we are going to achieve them. It is important that we plan from the beginning how we will measure the success of our biodiversity plan.

Monitoring and evaluating (Step 4) Improvements in our school will be done by repeating the Awareness surveys.

Green Schools Committee 2021

Travel Flag 2020-2021

For the past two years our school has been working on the Travel Flag. The aim of this flag is to promote sustainable travel to and from school and to explore the impact that transport has on the environment. We have been trying our best to reduce our carbon footprint here at St. Luke’s.

Some of the things we have done so far include:

• Cycle Skills workshop for 5th Class
• Scooter Skill workshop for 3rd Class
• A Walkability Audit of our Community with our Travel Officer
• Walk On Wednesday held on 25th November 2020. Over 600 children used a sustainable method of transport on this day. It was a great success!
• N02 monitors installed in the car park and school yard.
• New scooter parking and bike parking installed at the front of the school.
• A school wide poetry competition to find our new Travel Code was held in December 2020. Stella Reece Okic from Mr. Molloy’s fourth class had the winning entry. You can see her poem displayed at the school gates. Well done Stella!
• A survey taken in December 2020 found that an average of 60% of our students use a sustainable method of travel when coming to school such as walking, cycling, scooting or taking the bus.
• 40% are using a car. We encourage children to walk from LIDL or carpool with a neighbour to reduce the amount of cars of the road.

We have a lot done but we still have more to do!! Let’s all work together to get the travel flag.

Promoting Green Schools in our classrooms 2020-2021

St. Luke’s and Green Schools

Saint Luke’s National school has been participating in the Green Schools initiative for the past eight years. Through the combined effort of teachers and pupils Saint Luke’s has won three Green Schools flags to date, one for recycling, one for energy conservation and one for water conservation.

Saint Luke’s is currently working towards its fourth Green Schools flag for travel. In order to win this flag Saint Luke’s must increase the number of students walking, cycling, scooting, using public transport or carpooling on the way to school.

What is Green Schools?

Many thanks to Padraig from The Men’s Shed, Mulhuddart, for the new school sign pictured below! Pictured below are 3 children from Ms. Cullinan’s class, Ms Bourke (Principal), Ms Burke (teacher), Ms Omojolo (teacher) and Padraig!!

Stepping Stones Forests

500 Native trees and shrubs planted in Saint Luke’s NS

On Friday 10th of February 2023, we planted the latest of the Stepping Stone Forests in the grounds of St. Luke’s NS in Tyrrelstown. Due to space constraints it wasn’t possible to create a forest classroom but we still managed to get 488 native trees and shrubs planted on the day.

The children, teachers and parents all pitched in to plant almost 500 trees and shrubs.

There were 25 volunteers available to help the children to plant the trees and, for the first time, to deploy rabbit guards in a school. Along with the usual Stepping Stones Forrest volunteers drawn from Dodder Action Woodstown Village Wildlife Tallaght, Litter Mugs South Dublin Volunteer Centre we also had staff from Cloudforests / Usee and of course volunteers from forest sponsor #AWSInCommunities. (Amazon, our good neighbours)

Finally, it was great to see Minister Roderic O’Gorman TD at yet another Stepping Stone Forest event. Last time out he got stuck in with a soil prep event. This time he got his hands dirty helping to plant some trees.

Ms. Vivienne Bourke and Mr. Neary would like to thank Ms. Orla Burke, staff, children and parents as well as the volunteers above for all the effort put in to the tree planting project.