COMMUNITY ANIMAL
FINDING YOUR VOICE Students at Warrnambool East Primary School have been working hard to educate their community about the local threatened species — and their work is paying off.
G
Lejeune
rowing up in a town situated on Victoria’s iconic Great Ocean Road has given the students at Warrnambool East Primary School an acute awareness of the animal life that surrounds them. Having passionate science teachers like Kerry McCarthy, who encourages conservation-based education, doesn’t hurt either. The school has a long history of participation in Zoos Victoria initiatives, beginning in 2014 with its involvement in the Marine Guardians program – where they collected plastic debris at a local beach – followed by Seal The Loop action day in the same year. It was through this conservation work that the school established a relationship with Zoos Victoria and became a Fighting Extinction School.
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“Since then, we’ve had this really great relationship. We’re doing lots of things and the kids here think it’s pretty special,” says Kerry.
The best buds
In late 2019 the school worked with the local Beach Patrol to launch the Better Buds campaign to educate the community about the harm plasticstemmed cotton buds can have on marine animals. “Plastics in cotton buds became a real issue on the local beach, where the outfall from the sewerage plant is. Local beach patrol volunteers have found more than 26,000 over the last three years,” says Kerry. “One of our kids came up with a title, Better Buds, and at school we made posters, we made a video and we educated our local community here.”
At the time, the students (now in grades six and seven) travelled to Melbourne Zoo to present what they had been working on. The campaign was a success, with plastic-stemmed cotton buds added to the list of single-use plastics that will be banned in Victoria by February 2023, and is a 2021 finalist in the Sustainable Communities — Tidy Towns Awards for litter through the environmentalist group Keep Victoria Beautiful.
Planting for wildlife
More recently, the grade one and twos began a habitat restoration project at the beginning of 2021 to learn more about Zoos Victoria 27 Fighting Extinction animals and to plant a garden at the school with trees that would attract local native species. Each class chose a different native animal to
IMAGES: JO HOWELL
WORDS Georgia
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