St Brigid's Primary School have taken out the Minister's Young Climate Champion in the 2022 NSW Sustainability awards, for their ability to reduce waste and build habitats for wildlife on their school grounds. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teacher Kristen Jones has helped the students become environmentally aware and said she was feeling proud of the recognition. "It was amazing, we were surprised but thrilled," she said. Their award was presented by Treasurer Matt Kean at a ceremony in Sydney on Tuesday, October 25. The recognition came after introducing a new sorting system at the Raymond Terrace school, which includes three different coloured bins on the playground. "We're separating our red cycle, so soft plastics we are sending down to the Redcycle program, we're separating our cans and bottles and poppers for the Return and Earn and we've got our landfill bins," Ms Jones said. Each classroom also has a recycling station where students collect glue sticks, white board markers and textas. "We send them back to Office Works and in our canteen we have between three and 400 lunch orders a week, so our students have petitioned for a more sustainable option for the bags," she said. Students wrote letters of petition to their principal to fund reusable canteen lunch order bags through the Steakybeaks program. "Our principle agreed to that so we'll roll that out next year," Ms Jones said. Along with their win, St Brigid's has also been named a finalist in in the Keep Australia Beautiful Tidy Towns Awards and Creative Koalas program. Ms Jones said it was important for the students to learn about sustainability and how to live in a sustainable way. "They're all aware of what's going on, with drought and floods and we wanted to do our bit for the environment. The kids are driving it and it's just been amazing," she said. She said St Brigid's also has plans in the works to build a Bee and Butterfly garden and is encouraging other schools in the area to jump on board. "This is kind of where we're heading with it now, we've got a designated space to start building and a couple of our year six students are in the process of writing to other schools to create a general corridor across town for our bees and butterflies," she said. Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can access our trusted content:
