The Sea Is Our Best Friend - 2026 Tidy Towns Environment Category Finalist
Grade 3 and 4 students at St Joseph's Catholic Primary in Crib Point have a fortnightly appointment with Western Port Bay.
At Woolley's Beach, students collect mangrove seeds, propagate them in the school greenhouse, then return to plant the seedlings and track how many survive. This year they've planted 1,000 seeds, with roughly 30% establishing, a result the school rightly counts as a strong outcome for young mangroves in a tidal environment. Funding through OzFish's Big Blue Ocean initiative, with support from BCF, covers the propagation and community planting days, while the local Ranger and the Dolphin Research Institute provide the expertise behind the fieldwork.
Two student-led groups carry the project beyond a single class: the Mangrove Warriors, who care for seedlings, and the I Sea, I Care Ambassadors, who take marine conservation lessons to younger students across the school.
What the school has found is that kids develop a genuinely different relationship with an ecosystem when they follow one plant's whole story, from seed to sapling to survey data, rather than learning about mangroves from a book.
The X-factor: students aren't studying environmental stewardship as a concept. They're doing it, on a real beach, with real data, right now.
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