Hitting the Ground Running

WPS have started the year running! To kick start Your Move for the year I presented at the SDD. I admit that I used a little bribery - Your Move pens purchased through the Rewards Shop and lollies and chocolate purchased with an Officeworks voucher from the Rewards Shop. This turned out to be a valuable presentation. Whilst most staff know what Your Move is, as they hear me spruiking it constantly, they didn't really know how the program worked and that it was all self funded. I even had teachers checking out the class activities that I had printed from the website to see which one they would do this year.

Next on the agenda was to complete the hands up survey. I sent my trusty class out to conduct these surveys and the results were very pleasing. We have a 4% decrease in car use. It doesn't sound like much but every bit counts. It has also been noted that our bike racks that we got new last year are almost full!! We are getting between 5 and 10 more bikes at school every day than we did last year. I have already been told by a few people (staff and students) that we are going to need more racks!

The final step at this point was to re-establish my student committee. Last year I had 12 devoted students working with me, however most of them were Year 6 and have now gone off to high school. I decided to limit the committee to Year 5/6 and see what response I got before opening it to the younger grades. I was totally blown away when 20 students turned up for the first lunch time meeting!!

During the meeting we looked at the survey results and thought about ways to keep this improvement going. We set up a regular meeting time - Week 1 for planning, Week 5 for progress updates and Week 10 for review with additional meetings added when needed for events. We also looked at the Your Move website, particularly the Rewards and the Activities and began our planning. We discussed out platinum accreditation for last year and set out goal on Double Platinum for this year - we really want some shelters for our bike racks. Finally, 2 committee members were chosen to write the first article in the newsletter.

At the end of all this, it is really exciting to see how motivate both staff and students are to support this program and achieve our goals.