St. Patrick’s N.S. has a long tradition of involvement with the Green Schools scheme, run by An Taisce. We have a number of flags proudly displayed outside our school and a lot of sustainable practices in place, including composting, clothes and waste recycling, food growing, school hens, Bus, Bike or Walk on Wednesdays and energy conservation.

This year the theme for Green Schools is travel. Fourth classes have already taken part in the GLOBE Air Quality programme. This involved two test tubes placed at the front of the school to measure the amount of nitrogen dioxide in the air. Nitrogen dioxide is one of the gases that is emitted from vehicles. Unsurprisingly, as we are right on the busy N2 road, the results are not good for the village of Slane. Our school was placed 16th out of 160 schools for our high levels of nitrogen dioxide found in test tubes at the front of the school. You can see the map of all schools in Ireland here https://grnsch.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=6427f0c764d447348d9dada0c1df624e

Every school used two test tubes. Some placed one at a part of the school where there might be high levels of nitrogen dioxide and the other in a place where there would be little nitrogen dioxide, so some schools have very different readings. In Slane, we placed them both near the N2 so our results are similar. You can also see the full spreadsheet of results here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yYmqyYph5pNlqpLkuC-zjmdP6Ya-Bb17/edit#gid=879374859

This year’s Green School committee is in place with Mrs. Connor working as school co-ordinator. They plan to assess idling (where cars stop moving but keep their engines on) in the school car park this year. The committee hopes to change people’s behaviour to have less idling and so less emissions in our school car park.