Award Nominee

Prospect Primary School, Glen Eden, has been busy busting the weeds on their streamside over the last six months. A small stream, the Waikaukau Stream, runs through or alongside the school s boundary and over the years, the stream banks had become infested with introduced weeds. Not anymore though, as staff and students at Prospect Primary School are on the case!

Last year the children at Prospect School carried out water tests at a native forest stream in the nearby Waitakere Ranges and then compared it to the local stream running alongthe back boundary of their school. They decided as a school that they needed to do something to help rejuvenate the area around their own stream in order to encourage and protect the aquatic life and help create an area of natural beauty for children to carry out more environment based study in the future. Prospect Primary is an Enviroschool and so this issue was discussed with the Envirogroup committee who decided that they would tackle this problem as a whole school. As a result they the school has been working with the team of Sustaining Our Streams , a one year funded project to help properties in Glen Eden restore their streams, to start restoring the school s streamside area.

Sustaining Our Streams worked with the school to develop a weed management plan for the school s streamside and the students and staff have been putting the plan into action. The school has been working hard weeding part of the area since late 2009. Classes at the school have been having regular weeding bees to remove the tradescantia, montbrecia, monkey apple seedlings and bindweed pulling them by hand and placing them in large weedbags where they can safely decompose without spreading. At the time, the children are learning about the problems some introduced plants create and more about the natural environment of the school a real learning opportunity for the children. The children have done some great work down at the site so far and always look forward to getting out for a bit more hard work. There s some fun to be had too, with competitions to see which school house can extract the longest continuous stem of bindweed 6 m is the record so far!

To meet the sustainability aspect of the new curriculum, Science teaching at Prospect in 2010 has been geared towards the Living World Strand. The Senior school have studied the school stream, identifying its current state, the causes for this and how they can help improve it. In Middle and Junior school the focus has been on plants, their importance, what they need for growth and what our role is in helping to nurture and protect them.

The school caretaker and teams of Community Workers have been dealing to some of the more physically demanding weeds on the school stream crown lifting large areas of Chinese privet and cutting back swathes of Japanese honeysuckle to improve access to the site. The caretaker is following up with some use of herbicides in some areas to make sure that the weeds don t come back. The school is very excited about the possibility they will be able to plant up to 600 native plants in the weeded area this winter and are looking forward to taking care of their new plantings and making sure they keep the weeds at bay over the long term.

Many of the Schools neighbours along the stream have also been doing their bit controlling the weeds on their properties and have commented on how it is great to see the School working alongside the community at restoring the local environment. The children are taking what they are learning about weeds back to their homes and have already noted that they have some of the same weeds at home and starting to tackle the problem in their own backyardsll!. A recent questionnaire from the school found that 94% of the parents involved with in the stream study had talked about it at home. The children are also able to relate what they are doing at their school with other areas the children are involved in restoring an area on the larger Waikumete Stream that their own school stream flows into through another local project, Project Twin Streams.

Nominated by: Leigh Marshall, Sustaining our Streams Community Coordinator, Ecomatters Environment Trust.