Manurewa High and Murray's Bay Intermediate

Full bus: Be The Change visits Manurewa High in South Auckland.We have had a busy couple of days doing school visits. We went to Manurewa High School and spoke to over 500 year 10 students. It was an awesome opportunity for us to speak to so many kids and hopefully reach many more people through word of mouth, and students spreading the message of everyday climate saving actions to their whanau and friends.

The students there had a whole heap of energy to check out the bus and were really interested in the solar panel systems and watching the short films. They also had some very creative ideas to help tackle climate change and help the environment in general, including putting a basketball hoop over rubbish bins to encourage putting litter in the bins. Many students recognised an area for improvement in their own school would be getting recycling systems, they also thought a good promotional tool could be graffiti bombing (permission granted of course) of the "Reuse Reduce Recycle" message.

Peace: Be The Change visits Manurewa High in South Auckland.When I was speaking to the whole year level I asked for a show of hands about how the students got to school that morning. A few people had walked, more biked, only a few came by bus, the largest proportion came by car and more than half of those only had the driver and the student. This was really interesting and generated a lot of ideas later on from the students about how they can get to school in a more climate friendly way.

Yesterday we had a brilliant time working with the students at Manurewa High who were a very diverse group of individuals and their teachers, a huge thank you to Ms. Vaas who organised our visit and had so much energy and passion for getting new ideas presented to her students.

Murrays Bay IntermediateThen today we headed slightly north to Murray's Bay Intermediate on the invite of Ms. Gilmore. Originally the contact came through some students from the local high school, Rangitoto College, who are a part of the Greenpeace Student Group there. They approached Ms. Gilmore and got her on board! These students are super pro-active in their work to help protect the environment.

The Murray's Bays students could suggest LOADS of everyday ways to reduce our carbon foot print in our homes, in transport and in industry. At one stage there were hands shooting up everywhere with great ideas. We spent time working with the kids on how they can use their knowledge to persuade, convince and influence others to also make good decisions with climate in mind. Some of the kids were great actors, my personal fave was the boy who was the TV news reader, he has a definite career there!

Unfortunately because of the weather some of the students in their Enviro Groups couldn't go to the beach as planned, so I hope that having us there was some consolation. I commend Ms Gilmore and the other teachers for their work teaching the students about the environment, and hope it continues with the Be The Change website being a good resource!

- sal