St Lukes Science and Sports College - Mission Update!

So Autumn is being blown away by the cold winds of Winter after a productive Summer and the beautiful Autumn colours. Our fruit and vegetable growing was really successful, the team winning an award in the Dig It, Grow It, Eat It initiative, and by allowing the wild flowers to grow amongst the vegetables a whole new habitat was created with many insects, birds and even a frog moving in.

Within the raised bed area we have developed sensory garden and will extend this next year. All of the growing area is accessibleto our wheel chair users and the conservation area is such a quiet comforting area that we have linked up with our peer mentorgroups for their one to one work.We are also going to plant some wild flower banks and have protected zones around the sports fields which will not be cut and the longer grass and wild flowers will become yet another essential wildlife corridor. We are hoping to have swift boxes put up for next year and Devon Wildlife Trust will provide a DVD with swifts calling on it to encourage them.Our Green Team continued their hard work on Project Gold and at the beginning of the autumn term were really proud when a unit arrived which shreds and then heats and reforms thermoplastics. This means that we can takes our plastics out of the wastestream and reuse them in school. The vision is to offer this pioneering initiative to our local community and to also send appropriate useful plastic items to the schools we support in Nigeria and at the Kambilio Project in the Congo. The other aspect of Project Gold is to compost all our food and paper waste using a rocket composter.This works at a high temperature and transforms waste into compost within a fortnight. This has been approved in principal so it is all very exciting. Once it is up and running this means that St Luke’s will be reusing on site three main streams of ‘waste’ and benefiting the local community as well as reducing our carbon footprint.St Luke’s teamed up with the Rotary Club to plant 500 purple crocuses as a part of their commemoration of the polio vaccination next February. As Dr Jane was involved in the evolution of the first World Peace Day which was when a ceasefire was agreed in Afghanistan to enable aid workers to go in to remote areas to give polio vaccinations we shall have double commemoration in February. Mr H will oversee proceedings no doubt! Peace Day was observed in college with a video being shown of the founder. When they showed the delegates at the United Nations it came as no surprise to see Dr Jane and Mr H in the line up.The whole college is busy putting together Christmas shoe boxes for families in Moldova which will be shipped out on December the first and we continue to support the invaluable work at the Kambilio Project in The Congo.In Humanities students studying the lives of people forced to live in slums build a slum type building and spent the night in it. Next year the Green Team are going to team up with them and provide vegetables from their garden to eat.On November 8 Star Clapp, a Green Team Leader, is running a cake sale to raise funds for orangutans’ and we going to have a fund raising initiative for Roots and Shoots.The Green Team and Mr H have given numerous presentations and their clear message is always 'that every action, no matter how small, makes a difference and gives everybody Hope'.