Minutes 3 December

Mrs Barrett unfortunately couldn't make it to our meeting today, however, we as a council brought all our ideas together to see how we were progressing.

James, Oliver and Sam reported about their Budget findings. They looked at solar panels for electricity and solar panels to heat water.

• Solar Panels for Electricity;

Electrical solar power works by transforming the energy from the sun into a reusable form of electricity, a process known as Photovoltaic (or PV for short). Your solar panels act as a collecting tray, helping you catch the sun’s rays. The bigger the panel, the more energy you can collect. The energy collected is stored for your future use in a battery. Sometimes you collect more energy than you actually need so with larger panels a voltage regulator should be fitted to control the flow of energy and prevent battery damage. The other component you will possibly need is an inverter, which enables you to run 240V mains-driven appliance.

Grants available for this are:

1. www.segen.co.uk where we can get half the cost paid but the academy would have to pay the other half.
2. Encams, Eco-Schools is a programme of seven elements that schools can adopt including organising an environmental review, establishing an action plan, undertaking curriculum studies on environmental topics and organising a day of environmental action. Open to all schools; the scheme is also operating in Europe Deadline: Ongoing. No closing date. Funding Body: Eco-Schools Award Scheme
3. http://www.eco-schools.org.uk/grants/ To take advantage of this exciting opportunity your school needs to have: Achieved a Bronze or Silver award with the Eco-Schools programme, Completed your Environmental Review, Identified a project, Completed an Action Plan which includes the project for which funds have been requested, Chosen any required energy saving white goods from the Currys website www.currys.co.uk, Completed a grant application. Deadline: 1st of February 2009

Ideas for where these could be used are in the ICT gallery, MO2, the sports hall or the mall area.

• Solar Panels for Heating Water;

1. Scottish Power, Powergen, EDF Energy, Typically provide funding up to around £30k, Scottish Power has a focus on educational aspects of schemes, Scheme needs to be visible and Utility company will want to be involved with the publicity and project launch, Will fund 100% of project costs but prefer to match other funding sources, Funding rounds tend to be oversubscribed and next round of deadlines are end Dec 2004/Jan 2009

Ravneet, Ammarah, Anjali, Jessica, Zoya and Aysha are involved in the Assemblies;

• The assemblies which we are to attend are Year 7 and Year 8 in the first two weeks of term 3 (January). All six of the group, would go into each assembly together to present ideas better and to show a better stand for the eco-council.

The improved Blog was shown;

• The improvements were approved by the council. However, we felt that we needed a new logo. An idea was to launch this as a competition when we visited the assemblies similar to last year when we tried this with motto's or slogans.

The Notice Board has been completed and revamped by Ellie and Andrew;

• This is a good achievement. As it know has a lot more relevant information and has our eco-policy and our plan to what we want to achieve.
  
• We have a section on there for 'THIS WEEK WE LOVE...' We discussed how we could judge which teacher or department was the best for the week.
  

1. Some ideas were to have teachers tell us what they have done, but this would cause work for the teachers and many of them may not participate and would simply make it up to win.
2. We could ask Mr Cuury, who teachers have to e-mail when they want the recycle bin emptied, to forward us those e-mails and see who recycles the most - but this can be bias as ICT use the most amount of paper so they would need to empty their bins more frequently whereas PE don't really use paper.
   
3. Another idea was to have a league table, similar to the premier league, where each week we could go and check which rooms are green (lights, pc, air conditioning, projector off, with no teacher in the room). We could award 3 points for a room that was fully green, 1 point for a room that has one mistake, and a room that was occupied we cannot count as it is being used. Once all the points are collected, we would have to average them to how many classrooms were judged in the department (each department has a different number of classrooms). Then the department with the highest average goes at the top of the league and could be placed on the notice board.

Other ideas;

A Green Hunt - for a term or period of time we could place a question or a statement or an anagram on the notice board and the departments would have to work it out and find the correct answer. This would encourage people to look at the notice board and get involved in the eco-side of life. For the quiz we could give a variety of statements, but start of with one and increase it as the days/weeks go by to help the teachers, and see which department wins.

Also a website which was found www.eco-tube.com

Next Meeting: Next Wednesday