12 schools vie for ‘Greenest School’ award

For the past six months, students from 12 schools in the city have been diligently occupied with composting, garbage segregation, green workshops and campus gardening.

For the past six months, students from 12 schools in the city have been diligently occupied with composting, garbage segregation, green workshops and campus gardening.

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They are working for a better environment, and also for a more immediate reward – on Friday, one of these schools will win an award for the ‘Greenest School’ as part of a city-wide annual Green Schools Campaign launched in October.

Organised by GreenLine, the environment forum of the Don Bosco Development Society, the campaign was open to more than 150 schools in the city, of which 12 participated.

“We wanted to make students aware of their environmental responsibilities not just through theoretical awareness but actual involvement,” said Father Savio Silveira, director of GreenLine, which make the Green Schools Campaign its pilot project when it launched in October.

The campaign began with a series of workshops with students and teachers on how schools can function in an eco-friendly way.

The schools then adopted and bore expenses for their projects, which included conducting energy and water audits, changing faulty electric wires and water taps based on them, planting trees and vegetable gardens, and segregating school waste in separate dustbins.

Versova’s St Anthony’s High School set up a vermiculture pit and used its own compost as manure to transform a patch of their compound into a vegetable garden.

GreenLine will award three prizes on Friday – Rs 1 lakh for the ‘Greenest School’ and Rs 25,000 each for a runner-up and the school with the ‘Best New Initiative’.