It is with great pleasure that I can announce that OSC is the first ever recipient of the MSA Sustainability accreditation! This accreditation is so new they hadn’t even added it to their website or provided any information on what it entails. The MSA/CESS reached out to our head of school Dr Kleiss and asked us personally to be the first school to apply so this is a great honour.

At the end of the last school year we filled in an application on how we are sustainable in school as students, as staff, as a community and what we do to involve the topic of sustainability in our lessons.

We spent the whole of the 26th of October in meetings with the MSA representative in Dubai, Laurence and were later joined by his on site colleague Priscilla who joined us for the second half of the meeting. During this meeting we presented what we did in the school to do with sustainability and answered some questions about how we felt we achieved everything.

My biggest highlight of the meeting was when all the student leaders of environmental focused service groups (Me, Sam, Millan, Senaka, Dmitri, Cohen, Ansel, Jed) crowded round the computer to talk to Laurence about how we felt we engaged with sustainability and what it meant to us. The question really made us thing about the global engagement we held in the world, and offered us the time to take into account our own perspectives. We all talked about how we enjoyed the week without walls trips and how we were able to connect with our host country of Sri Lanka and how thankful we are for the opportunities school grants us.

As a key member in this accreditation I have been able to collaborate with other services and see just how much school is doing to stay sustainable beyond the environment. We have strong connections with local schools that have been spanning over 5 years with room to read, over 15 years with local cancer centres, and starting new connections with our immediate neighbours.

The best thing that I said during this meeting was:

It’s impossible to not engage in sustainability at OSC. You would actively have to seek out to not take part in this initiative.

I stand by my statement because its so integrated into the school curriculum that you would have to skip on mandatory service after school, not eat at the canteen, skip science class every day, skip language and literature, skip individuals and societies and so many more subjects if you were not going to take part in sustainability on campus.

I know this stuck with everyone because the next day when Laurence was giving his feedback to the Dr Kleiss, Ms Melinda, Mr Poulus, Mr Lockwood and the other adults involved he recalled how I had said that and Dr Kleiss piped up and reminded him it was me who said that. It feels really nice knowing that people also recognize my achievements within service individually and not just as a whole team.

I would like to take this time to acknowledge the OSC class of 2023 because their efforts throughout the year in service also contributed to what we were able to fill out in the form. Everyone who was a part of Housing and Habitat, Recycling and Sustainability, Eco-Schools, Young Reporters for the Environment have all contributed their time and effort into making school a better place for the environment.

Featured Image Credit: Melinda Tondeur