Sustainability

Foreshore Program

This year, I joined the Foreshore Program with many other Year 8 students. We are led by the Kingston Council rangers. We are known as the Foreshore Team and we go to Mentone Beach every second Thursday.

During our time we have picked up lots of rubbish, such as food wrappers, balloons and paper. It’s a very rewarding feeling knowing you have done something good for the environment. We have also started planting Indigenous grasses and climbers. We were split into two groups and planted over 150 plants. We planted shrubs at a revegetation site to help restore the environment alongside the Mentone Foreshore. It was a fun challenge as some of us were located on a slope. It was really surprising seeing the before and after and how good it looked already.

It’s very interesting when the rangers teach us about the conservation of Mentone Beach.

Olive Davies
Year 8

Living Justice

Building Bridges Interfaith Program

On 11 May, we had our first session in the Building Bridges program. Killester College was the school that hosted the first session and we were welcomed into a very comfortable environment. The other schools that are part of the program are King David School, Mt Hira College, Nazareth and Mazenod. Each school represented a religion, and this program is all about learning their religious practices and traditions. We were in for a fun night!

To begin, we had an introduction about Killester and the background of the College. They explained how they are a Brigidine school, like us, and talked about the symbols of St Brigid that they have around the school. We were then greeted by a staff member from the Building Bridges program and did some icebreaker activities, with the intention to prove our different faiths shouldn’t keep us apart. We also made a Brigid’s Cross out of coloured paper and wrote some goals we would like to achieve from the program. This was a good way to interact with the other students. 

Killester then treated us to a pizza dinner before we moved into our groups. We were allocated a past program member to run our sessions, which was very interesting as we heard about their experience and how much they enjoyed the program! We went around the group introducing ourselves and our schools, the practices we do and what we wanted to take from the program. It was nice to get to know the others as we will be spending our sessions with them in the future.

Overall, the first day of the program was very good and I have already learnt a lot from the other schools and the person who ran our session. I am excited to visit the other schools! 

Nyrie Bedikian
Year 11