Meet our Team

In order to have all voices of our school community be heard, we wanted our Core team to have members from staff, parents and students. Our team comprises of teachers: Sarah Lombardi, Jane Gallacher, Penny Tierney, Miriam Fish, Jemma Lichtendonk, Maria – Grazia Richetti and Principal Carmel Purdey. Along with parents Mary Woodgate and Tracey Gosby and the Year 6 Civics, Citizenship and Environment Leaders.

2010 has been a year of ‘laying our foundations’ in becoming a sustainable school. We have sought feedback and support from our school community to develop a strong plan to ensure our school is sustainable and remains so. We have developed our Whole School Sustainability Policy, established an Action Plan and communicated our findings through our curriculum.

Curriculum Highlights

In Term 2 our whole school’s Inquiry topic focussed on the environment and sustainability. In particular Level 3 and 4 focussed on water usage in our school, local and global communities. A positive learning experience in the unit was students analysing the schools water usage, locating the positive and negative water usages and developing an Action Plan that they presented to address a water wastage issue at our school. Students developed creative and realistic action plans ranging from addressing issues such as water wastage of the bubblers, to ineffective use of our water tanks and unnecessary use of taps in our classrooms. Ideas from their Action Plans have been added to our Core Module Action Plan and implemented to reduce our water consumption at SFX.

Our Action Plan

To develop our Action Plan we used our baseline data to inform us of our key areas for improvement. Paper waste, water usage and lack of biodiversity in our school were highlighted as issues we need to address in our data. As a core group and through feedback from other staff, parents and Year 6 children we brainstormed actions and targets we wanted to achieve in the next 12 – 18 months.

Energy Savings

SFX has been part of exciting changes in the past four years with our Building Projects; the final stages finishing this year. Students were actively involved in the design of the buildings and some energy efficient strategies were implemented in these buildings to decrease our energy usage. These initiatives included energy efficient light globes, timers on all lights and the use of natural light in the classrooms. We are excited that through these initiatives and through educating our students on reducing energy wastage in our classrooms (heaters/air – cons, turning switches off when not in use) our electricity usage in the past year has decreased by 32%.

Whole School Celebration

To address our focus of reducing paper wastage, our School Celebration for 2010 is National Recycling Week. During this week each class is auditing their recycling and setting targets and strategies to reduce paper wastage in their classroom. We hope that through education and ownership of wastage; students will be proactive in recycling at school and home.

Where to now…

The year ahead is an exciting time for SFX in sustainability. We have got the momentum rolling in 2010 and want the enthusiasm across our community to continue to grow! Our next step is to attain our Waste Module in 2011 to decrease our paper and food scrap wastage and we are excited about starting our own sustainable Vegetable Patch with Compost.