Ma Sang Primary School of Luo Township, the green school in the “hometown of tea” —— Xi Xiang, is located in the north of Mi Cang Mountain at north-east of Xi Xiang County. As the only boarding school in Luo Township, it has altogether 7 classes in 6 grades, including 169 students and 22 teachers. In May 2009, it was appraised as Green Civilization Model School of Xi Xiang County. In November 2009, it was again awarded as Green Civilization Model School of Shaanxi Province. The standard of defining Green Civilization Model School of Shaanxi Province covers three aspects: campus environment, capacity building and education performance and this school has met all the requirements.

In 2005, Ma Sang Primary School joined into the project initiated by Plan China: building ‘Child-FriendlySchool’. Afterwards, Plan China successively implemented project activities including both hardware support and software capacity building.

In order to provide a better environment that is favorable to the students’ study and life, Plan China successively helped the school construct new teaching buildings, children computer rooms, electronic music rooms and teaching aids. In addition, Plan China also supported to build sanitary toilets that effectively solved the problems caused by the old-fashioned toilets in this school. Besides, with the support of Plan China, a new canteen was constructed and it provides a better dining environment for boarding students; meanwhile, the creation of a ecological base and the hardening of the school playground not only beautified the school environment, but also made it more safe for the students to live in the school, e.g. students would mot easily slipping in rainy days due to the muddy roads.

Along with hardware support, Plan China also advocated for initiating relevant activities to enhance the students’ abilities. While implementing the activities, the teachers in this school was no longer using traditional preachment teaching methods, but left much room to students. Over the years, the school has been continuously supporting activities like Children’s Broadcast, Children’s Theater, Green Classroom Creation and ‘Best Environmental Guardian’ Competition. Over five years, students have produced more than 20 plays, nearly 200 paintings and more than 20 blackboard newspapers concerning environmental protection. “These activities have not only enhanced children’s innovation and awareness of environmental protection, but also generated influence over villagers through children.”

In the process of building a green school, the school always placed importance on practice of educational activities, such as organizing students to collect white garbage in the communities, to volunteer in the resthome of the Township and to protect water resource in the community, etc.

Paint on environment-friendly shopping bags to advocate villagers to join in environmental protection

On 5^th May 2009, the school organized students from grade 3-6 to undertake an activity of environmental protection publicity. Through handing out shopping bags with paintings on environmental protection to villagers, the students encouraged the villagers in Luo Township to voluntarily join in the activities of protecting environment.

The painting activity consisted of four themes: “Best Environmental Guardian” for grade 3, “Pioneer of creating green school” for grade 4, “Protect Environment and Love our river” for grade 5, “We have only one earth” for grade 6. Through painting on shopping bags, the students demonstrated their understanding on environment protection: they created many vivid works, such as “Let’s go and plant trees!”, “plant more trees and turn our motherland green”, “clean river is the mirror of animals, don’t pollute it any more”, “I dress the community in green” and so on.

“This is a doll which I made of wasted water bottles; I hope everybody can protect our environment and resources”, Xinxin said.

In the past five years, Plan China has invested a total of 1.7 million Yuan in helping this school to build a green environment. In the meantime, the school appealed for “raising environmental-protection awareness through taking actions, and taking further actions with increased awareness”, and in addition, the school was able to integrate external and internal resources to make efforts to build it into a green school.  With regard to the education, the school adhered to the principle of “people-oriented education” and gave prominence to develop its characteristics and strengths. Nowadays, the school has become a beautiful, safe and clean green environment that is favorable for the students to study and live in, and for the students themselves, they have also greatly enhanced their awareness in environmental protection and formed good living habits.