St Patrick School

Chatham’s St. Patrick School made great changes thanks in large part to the school’s newly-formed environmental club.  The students kicked off their recycling efforts with a waste-audit and used the data to create recycling signs and data posters that they posted throughout the school. They furthered their efforts by monitoring recycling rates in each classroom, and creating tables to show the results. 

The club planned educational events such as Environmental Week, where each day had themes such as the litterless lunch day and “turn the key-be idle free” day. 

For Earth Day , the school held an assembly with an environmental play and handed out Enviro-tote reusable lunch bags made from recycled plastic bottles. 

The environmental club’s president, William Brockman commented in the Beacon that, “We need to conserve energy and our non-renewable resources. God has gifted us with the earth. We must to do something to protect it.”  The school kicked off their second initiative, green cleaning, with a Power Point presentation to introduce the issue. Subsequently, St. Patrick’s replaced pesticides with vinegar-based products and placed their first order for green cleaning products in the spring.