Eco-Schools is an international programme for environmental education and management, which aims to raise students' awareness of sustainable development issues and encourages students to take an active role in how their school can be run for the benefit of the environment.
The Eco-Schools methodology includes Seven Steps that enable a school to develop and implement a policy and objectives to achieve improvement in environmental management of a school. The process involves a wide range of stakeholders, but pupils play the central role.
After achieving the Eco-Schools award in September 2020, we have started a new cycle at the Eco-Schools project. It means we needed to identify the main focus for the project for the next two years.
After the environmental audit was carried out, the eco-committee team decided to focus on developing opportunities for outdoor learning at BIS using different approaches. First, we started organizing monthly ECO-CHALLENGES to encourage learning in nature, about nature, by helping nature. The first challenge in March was the spring forest cleaning, the next one in April was about food waste reduction in our school and homes, in May we surveyed out wardrobes to look at the impact of our clothing on the environment and donated some clothing to charity, but donated not to get rid of our rubbish, but donated what was needed and for this school year we finished off with some landart pieces made on our walks.
Another way to increase outdoor learning at BIS is to develop the school yard area into CLASSROOM SPACE more. After a year of quarantines and lockdowns, we would like to use every opportunity to learn surrounded by nature. We have involved students and teachers with the designing of areas and we will be working together to bring these designs to real life. Our aim is to build up at least one space that could be used for teaching by June 2022.
Our plans are ambitious and we know that one person cannot do everything, but every one of us can do a little bit. You are invited to join!
In autumn 2018 the Eco-Committee completed an environmental audit at school. Based on its outcomes we decided that the main focus for the two coming school years will be SAVING ENERGY. We are trying to emphasize that we save energy if we produce less or no waste, if we use fewer resources, and if we make relevant choices when we travel, eat... basically in each area of our lives. We encourage our school community to SIMPLIFY THEIR LIVES and REDUCE THEIR CONSUMPTION as these are the only ways we can live more sustainably.
We also promote PARTICIPATION TO CHANGE. Based on our experience, we try to involve as many people from the school community in activities, but we also try to listen to them to hear their opinions and priorities and want to get them involved in decision making and taking action.
We would like to continue with reducing waste produced at our school this year. The area that we will focus on will be the school events. We realised that when organising any events for the school community in the past, we did not take any measures to reduce the amount of waste produced and we ended up with a lot of plastic waste that did not even get recycled many times. We would like to involve the management, students, and parents to bring a change.
The main focus of our action was WASTE last year. The eco-committee established a system of recycling paper, plastic, and batteries several years ago, therefore we were looking for ways of moving forward in this matter.
We were inspired by Bea Johnson who promotes ZERO WASTE LIFESTYLE with her family of four. As a result, we organised a series of activities to inspire the school community, e.g. we invited a Slovak Bea Johnson, Mrs. Males to school and we prepared ZERO WASTE SNACK WEEK to show students that with a bit of planning they can avoid using plastic bags and other plastic waste when they prepare their snacks. Year 13 students helped us with promoting plastic free lifestyle to parents through regular articles in the newsletter and school blog.
