BY JEM ANSHAW
Lizard lounges, frog hollows, and lush garden beds may seem a bit out of place in a school environment, but not for the participants in the Upper Hunter Shire Council Sustainable Schools Odyssey program.
Last week five of the schools who have been working on projects within their school community came together to share what they have done, in a range of fun ways.
Noah Ridding from St Joseph’s Primary School, Merriwa, was awarded the 2025 Outstanding Environmental Student of the Year award and was part of the schools presentation at the Council Administration Centre in Scone.
“We’ve been working on a frog pond so we can keep them out of the pipes, a lizard lounge, as we have this sort of dead space between Kindy and stage one classrooms so we decided to pop a lizard lounge in there and we’ve added solar panels and some water tanks,” he shared of projects the students have been involved with at the school.
St Joseph’s put together a video presentation where students spoke about the projects the school has completed, and another highlight presentation was the song put together by students at St Mary’s Scone to share their achievements.
These presentations offered each school the chance to reflect on their achievements in the past year, as well as hopefully inspiring other schools to try something different.
“There’s not a lot we haven’t done but having a representative from each class to be in the sustainability group and having everybody in the school somehow involved in it would be good,” Noah said.
“It’s lots and lots of fun.”
Ian Judd coordinates the program which has been attracting attention from councils across the state after it won the Young Legends category at the NSW Tidy Towns Awards last month.
“The purpose of today was to recognise outstanding environmental achievement from all the schools that were involved in our Sustainable Schools Odyssey which started last year, and over the course of this year, they have been developing, assessing, planning, doing, reviewing, and they are celebrating all the wonderful projects that they’ve come up with,” he explained.
“I was absolutely a bit emotional, bit gobsmacked by what these guys have done.”
The team from Upper Hunter Shire Council, with support from AGL, provide participating schools with a toolbox of meters to test baseline readings of different aspects of the school environment including air, soil and power.
Once a problem area is identified within the school, the students brainstorm solutions and begin planning how they can fix it.
Like any good science experiment, next there is the review before finally they celebrate their hard work.
The program will kick off again in 2026, with all schools in the Upper Hunter Shire invited to participate, with full support from Ian and the team.
