We were fortunate to attend the Grenada Solid Waste Management Authority’s (GSWMA) Environmentally Friendly Schools Initiative Awards recently. GSWMA aims through the programme to encourage resourcefulness and discourage waste.
Participating schools develop initiatives and activities such as the formation of environmental clubs, establishing school rules to foster litter avoidance and management; the production of songs and slogans to convey waste management messages; beautification of the school environment; recycling and composting; and public education initiatives.
Where appropriate, the media, the community and the parent-teacher associations (PTAs) are involved, and GSWMA provides guidance throughout the 9-month duration of the project.
A list of participating schools would be too long to provide here, but the achievements included the adoption of roads, bridges and stretches of river and coastline; composting; songs poems and slogans; community outreach; a motorcade, bumper stickers, billboards, water quality monitoring, in-school waste separation, and recycling.
The reduce/reuse/recycle message was clearly understood and put into practice in some truly impressive exhibits of schools’ work. It is obvious that these youngsters know the perils of abusing the environment and will fight to protect the ‘purity’ of Grenada.
We very much hope that their enthusiasm and good sense will come to ‘infect’ the adults whose misdeeds of littering, dumping and polluting motivated the students’ endeavours.
Meanwhile, we ask the government to do their part to support these young people, their teachers and the GSWMA by implementing the Abatement of Act 2015.
The winners:
Pre-Primary
- Marquis Primary School
- Snell Hall SDA Primary School
- St Ann’s Infant Catholic School
Primary
- St George’s Methodist
- Victoria School for Special Education
- Grenada Junior Academy
SecondaryÂ
- Westmorland Secondary
- Hillsborough Secondary
- Boca Secondary
Most Outstanding School 2017Â
St George’s Methodist School
Grenada Green Group