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The efforts of a group of Wiltshire schoolchildren to promote a cleaner, greener environment were rewarded when they became Wiltshire winners in the Environmental Youth Award Scheme, organised by the Bath and West Society with help from the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers. The children were presented with the award at this year’s Bath and West Show on June 1 2000. The children won the award for work carried out by the Environment Club at their school, Alderbury and West Grimstead Primary, near Salisbury. Started by two seven-year-old girls in 1998, the group now boasts 16 members and has also recently won the TravelWise Award for its “Walk to Win” scheme, in which children colour in footprints on specially designed cards every time they walk to school and collect individual stickers and badges plus class points along the way. Other activities, carried out with hardly any help from the grown-ups, have included the construction of "Charlie", a seven-foot-tall recycling robot used to collect and recycle everything from used stamps to children's magazines. This term, the Club is helping to rescue the school pond and creating new ideas for the school grounds. The children have raised funds to help with both. Angela Christie, the Environment Club’s leader, said: “Perhaps the most striking feature of this club - and maybe the reason for its ongoing success - is that it is wholly a children's club. It is the children who make it work; it is their own ideas that they work on - and it is all achieved with the minimum of help.” The children who won the award were: Joanne Allen, Charlotte Barnfield, Rebecca Bayle, Emma Christie, Paige Christie, Lucy Fosbraey, Victoria Fry, Keely Fudge, Alex Huggins, Natacha Huggins, Sam Hurley, Matthew Parker, Lucy Robinson, Katheryn Townsend and Hilary Zielenewski. For further information, contact Sharon Charity, Press Officer, on 01380 725670. |
