Our new Green Schools committee are very busy working on our 4th theme “Travel”. Our aim this year is to reduce harmful emissions and encourage more people to walk scoot or cycle rather than travel by car. Over the next year we will be aiming to earn our 4th Green flag for our school! We undertook a whole school survey to see how everyone travels to school. We know that it’s not always practical or safe to walk to some places but we are encouraging everybody to walk scoot or cycle whenever they can even for part of their journey to school! Here is our initial survey results!

We are working with Ellen O Sullivan, the Travel officer in North Tipperary, and she has been a great help to us. In November Ellen did a zoom visit to the older classes to chat about and introduce the travel theme. Due to covid she couldn’t call to us in person but in December we did a “walkability audit” with her which involved walking from school down to the village to check if the route to our school is walkable and safe. We discovered lots of positives and negatives along the way. We are very lucky to have a nice wide footpath to walk on but busy roads and lack of zebra crossings in the village prevent a lot of children from walking from here as it is unsafe.

We applied for a bike parking shelter and scooter parking and these will be installed after Easter! In March the committee did a few zoom calls to all classes to keep them updated about what they were doing and they organised a poster competition to raise awareness about green ways of travelling. The children did great work on these and also came up with fantastic green codes/slogans! We will take a committee vote after Easter to choose one code. Here are our competition winners in each class!