Warburton Primary School’s environment captains have worked to establish a professional grade weather station and website which will give key insights into the conditions in the local area.
The environment captains, students Nathan, Tara and Chill, approached local businesses in Warburton and raised $2000 which has funded the weather station and a website to display real-time information.
Warburton Primary School principal Nathan Van Der Monde said it was inspiring what the children had achieved for the school.
“We’re incredibly proud that they took it upon themselves to create an idea and actually bring it to fruition.
“I think it’s really amazing that students believe that they can make positive change, but also, enact it and put it out there in the world and make the changes that they want to see,” Mr Van Der Monde said.
The captains were encouraged by the want to drive positive positive change at the school while also looking for a way to contribute to their interests in the environment.
“So it’s very in line with their purpose at the school, which is to improve our environment, understand our environment better, and to look after our environment.”
Their research landed them a figure of roughly $1500 to fund a weather station, so Nathan, Tara and Chill took to local businesses to ask for donations.
“They wrote letters to all of the businesses in Warburton, they went down and hand-delivered all of the letters and spoke to managers of several businesses in town and got a great response.”
Seven businesses donated to the project and most businesses donated around $50 to $100.
But a “significant donation” came from the Warburton Pharmacy, which Mr Van Der Monde said was “very generous of them”.
The additional $500 will go to developing a website to display the information from the weather station and it will be installed in October.
Mr Van De Monde said they were leaders due to their leadership qualities and ability to communicate effectively.
“They spoke so well and they were so respectful and clear and people really enjoyed listening to their project. A lot of the businesses wrote emails back to the students explaining what they’d like to do and why they wanted to support them.”
The new weather station will serve a myriad of functions and offer plenty of utility to the school.
“At the moment we don’t have any way of tracking rainfall and ground temperature and all the different sort of weather patterns of Warburton,” Mr Van De Monde said.
“This [weather station] will be a way for them to track that at school, present that to the students, give them a six-day, seven-day forecast as well, so they talk about weather coming up.
“I think it’ll be really in line with their values.”
