Over the course of the past few years Cranbourne West Primary School has taken on many new sustainable initiatives as part of the Australian School Initiative. Water is obviously on the minds of most Australians and we at the school feel it is important to ensure that the next generation understands the importance of this commodity.

Our school has taken on many new water based initiatives over the past few years and will continue to implement school wide change in how we use water. We still have a long way to go, but we are making improvements and changes for our school, students and community.

We have a dedicated maintenance member of staff who is able to fix any leaking taps, toilets or water tanks. We have a 20 000 galleon tank buried under the ground that collects all water from our new gym. There is also a 10 000 litre tank in our veggie garden that has a pump and students use this water for all our fruit and veggies. This is also connected to a watering system for our hothouse. Last year saw us imstall a frog pond area that was filled from run off from the nearby classrooms.

We have been focused on using less water, not wasting when possible and this has seen our school’s water consumption reduce from 2010 to 2011 by 3% and from 2009 to 2011 that reduction is at 17% and calculated per student the reduction is at 6%. These are pleasing figures and figures that will continue to drop.

Our school is focused on purchasing green products that use less water, less energy, which will benefit everyone. With this in mind we have toilets that have a 2 flush system and we plan to upgrade the older toilets in the coming years. Our fridges and dishwashers in the staffroom are all 4 or 5 star appliances.

Most areas of the school have some water-based curriculum that the students participated in. The school is committed to expand on this in the coming years with whole unit focuses and special guests from the water board coming in for incursions.

We still have a long way to go, but we are changing, we are improving and we are as a school community committed to continue to make positive changes in how we use water and how to make those curriculum links relevant for our students.