St Kevin’s Primary, Lower Templestowe – Water Module Story

2015

St Kevin’s has had a long journey being ‘Eco-friendly’ with the school’s water usage. We have set some important goals to keep our school in line with our ‘Sustainability’ vision – namely to be one day a ‘Five Star’ school. The school, through parent committee fund raising schemes and environmental grants, has bought rain water tanks that provide water for our vegetables gardens and orchard. The senior building of our school now has water tanks that collect rainwater for flushing toilets.

Much of our 10 hectare property has indigenous plants that are drought resistant or need very little watering. Buckets are also used under water bubblers to collect water to distribute onto our gardens. The students are responsible for collecting the buckets of water and watering the gardens – there are many eager volunteers for this job!

Our sustainability captains regularly carry out water audits around the whole school and often use SWEP feedback to find leaks around the school. Since joining SWEP we have had some massive water spikes recorded and as a result have been made aware of problems of broken pipes or faulty cisterns, which have now been all repaired. Our junior students have also carried out water audits around the school as part of their ‘Water’ inquiry unit in Term Three of this year (2015) and presented their findings to the whole school.

Many of our storm water drains are coloured or labelled to communicate the importance of keeping these drains free from rubbish that may flow into our local water ways.

In the future we are planning to create a frog bog in an area of the playground that collects water runoff from the playgrounds hillside, to create new habitats for our local wildlife. This is just one example of a project that is discussed for the future. St Kevin’s is excited about the future and discovering new ideas to conserve and re-use water!