We have been working very hard to reduce our litter & waste here in our school Since our last Environmental Review - action has taken place to reduce litter - setting up 'litter squads' organising poster campaigns to increase litter awareness among students. Action has also taken place to reduce waste -encouraging pupils to bring home plastics which they brought into school, healthy lunch policy and setting up battery/ink cartridge recycling facility.  For Monitoring and Evaluation, pupils are continuously monitoring litter levels in the playground and classrooms, the number of bins and weight of waste going to landfill. We have produced graphs displaying our level of progress and all these results are discussed at every committee meeting. 

Green School Noticeboard
Our noticeboard is updated regularly with progress on results from our litter and waste findings. We have also re-issued an Environmental Review to see if there was an improvement and a better awareness of our green school campaign in our school. We were delighted with the results which also means that everyone is getting behind the campaign for the whole school to attain our first flag

Curriculum Links
Here in St Patrick's as part of our Curriculum Work we are covering many topics which provides information on Environmental issues examples are as follows: drawing up graphs in Maths, writing reports in English, making posters and signs in Art, planting bulbs, flowers and vegetables, reduce, reuse and recycle and caring for the environment as part of Science and Geography. 

Visitors to our School
We have had two visitors from Wicklow County Council:- Ms Moira Byrne who came to one of our committee meetings where we discussed progress to date and Mr Jim Callery who is the Asst Environmental Awareness Officer who made a presentation to all classes on the benefits to our school and the planet on recycling. There is a written a report on the visit which is displayed on our noticebaord. 

And finally, we have submitted our application form for our first green flag to An Taisce and we will continue to work towards attaining our flag. So far while working on the green school programme we have found benefits to our school which has included: 

" Our children are healthier due to a new Healthy Lunch Policy
" It has increased liaison between the school and the parents through the enthusiasm of pupils working on various projects. 
" Level of teamwork has improved through the group activities
" The level of cross-class participation has improved between all year groups.