Raising our first Green Flag. A very proud day for the whole school community.
The committee meets on a regular basis to discuss their progress and plans for the future.
The committee has organised various events to raise awareness around the issue of litter & waste such as:
the ‘Green Day/Climate Action Day’ within the school
creating awareness of recycling plastic bottles - guess the number of bottles in the bags
a poster competition
promoting Green Schools at our annual open night
committee members promoting Green Schools to their younger peers through the medium of PowerPoint presentations
as part of the Meitheal members role, they induct 1st years into the ‘Keep the school clean’ system
Green Schools Committee member Patrick Mc Grath was among the speakers at the ‘Inter-generational Climate Justice Conference’ in city hall and is pictured below with President Michael D. Higgins.
The committee were hard at work completing a bin audit to determine the most common waste types in the bins around the school. This formed part of their work towards the ‘Litter and Waste’ flag.
Front page news! The committee teamed up with ‘Clean Coasts’ to help with a beach clean at Ballycroneen beach. Their efforts made front page news on the Irish Examiner.
Keep up to date with our Green Schools Committee by following their Instagram account @greenschoolsccn
“My name is Ava Lynch. I am the former chairperson of CCN’s first Green Schools Committee. The committee was genuinely one of the highlights of my last two years of school. I stumbled into the role of chairperson and haven’t looked back since. When Mr Lombard first asked who would be interested I didn’t even put up my hand (because I wasn’t doing geography). But something made me go to the talk about it.
I am not exaggerating when I say I was shocked when I was chosen as chairperson. I’d never been in charge of anything before and if we had had to interview for chairperson I definitely wouldn’t have gone for it. There’s a saying though that those who didn’t choose to lead are the best leaders, and while I’m not sure if that was true in this case, the Green Schools really helped me to realise that you don’t always have to be the loudest in the room to have your voice heard.
The committee gave us something to focus on outside of school work and helped us all to see that it’s always possible to make a difference. Through the green schools we managed to improve the impact the school was having on the environment and also improve our impact on the school environment. As the first flag is for litter and waste we focused on this. We encouraged students to recycle through the use of colourful posters. We started a lunchtime cleaning rota in order to make our school a much cleaner place for all students and staff. We were careful to lead by example but we did not want it to turn into the ‘cleaning committee’. So we got the whole school involved and cleaning.
We, collectively as a committee also had a wider reach than just cleaning at lunch time, we encouraged teachers to car pool and some committee members even went litter picking at a beach in Cork. Our biggest role though was raising awareness. The twelve of us picking up rubbish or turning off lights while great would have been relatively ineffective. We wanted to have a lasting impact so we organised non-uniform days, games of ‘Guess the amount of one use plastic bottles’ and our representatives even did slide shows for their respective year groups.
Finally I’d like to say that the Green Schools Committee is a fantastic team to have in the school and that even just the existence of the committee shows to all students that as Greta Thunberg said; “You are never too small to make a difference”.”