Parents and sustainability

As parents, we feel strongly about doing our bit to ensure a good future for our children. What better place to start than at school?

Sustainability working group

Under the leadership of our Director, Ms Sciberras, our school has set up a working group encompassing all parts of the school community: management, administration, teachers, students and parents. The group meets roughly 3 times a year and has elaborated an action plan for sustainability. Sustainability – European School Brussels III (eeb3.eu)

Parental involvement in sustainability at EEB3

Would you like to get involved and contribute with your time, energy and expertise? You can sign up to the green updates we send +/- 3 times a year. If there is a topic or activity you can contribute to, please also let us know!

APEEE services and sustainability

The parents’ association of our school runs the canteen, the transport service and the extracurricular activities (or périscolaire). In doing so, we are managing a considerable budget and consider it our responsibility to make sure we take environmental impacts in account in our decisions.

Canteen

Good and healthy food is incredibly important for our children's wellbeing and their ability to learn. The canteen is also an excellent place for children to taste and experience sustainability first-hand.

Our menu is composed from healthy meals and respects the seasonality of produce.

We include at least one veggie meal a week and vegetarian option is available daily for students of all ages.

We prefer local produce, e.g. vast majority of our meat is produced in Belgium.

We serve sustainably produced fish, certified by MSC label.

We adapt the serving sizes to the age to reduce food waste.

We monitor the canteen waste and make continuous effort to reduce it.

We are in constant communication with the school to adapt the amount of prepared food to actual presence of students in the school.

We purchased reusable dishes for OIB garderie to reduce plastic waste.

We provide healthy snacks and meals for after-school programmes (OIB garderies and Snack & Go)

And, most importantly, our team make an extra effort to make sure the food tastes delicious – arguably one of the best waste reduction measures!

Transport

A lot of our children take the school bus every day, thereby avoiding a large number of individual car trips. However, like many people, we are concerned about the environmental impact of burning fossile fuels. It is clear that the impact of climate change will fall disproportionately on future generations – our children. We want to make the right investments now to help combat climate change and contribute to cleaner air for everyone.

Most of our buses comply with the stringent Euro VI norm

2022 will see the introduction of 2 electric buses as a pilot scheme

We are working with other European Schools to publish a call for expression of interest for the provision of electric buses

We are working with the school to make cycling and walking to school safer and more attractive – think more bike racks, more visibility for bike lanes, better signposting of the school entrance.

Extra- curricular activities

Our Snack & Go provides healthy snacks prepared by our APEEE canteen

We offer sustainability-themed activities such as initiation to Ecology

Sustainability education

Teaching and learning for sustainability is essential to help learners develop a mindset and competences that seek to restore and regenerate the planet. As parents, we advocate and support learning methods and approaches that are collaborative, based on real-life experience and engage with the natural world. These are as important as accurate information on the climate and biodiversity crisis and its drivers. This kind of learning can happen during class, in extra-curricular activities and even at times that are not ‘officially’ dedicated to learning. By involving students, parents, teachers and other staff alike, the school connects the dots between different activities that contribute to make our school more sustainable to create an environment where students can live what they learn.