Teacher wants parents to sue State over trouble students
Dan Mahony, 58, wants the parents of children whose education is being adversely affected by difficult students to seek compensation.
Already he’s received dozens of phone calls about the proposal after placing an ad in a newspaper calling on parents to consider legal action.
“I have been doing substitute teaching in schools in Tralee and I also teach maths grinds regularly. Parents and teachers are powerless at the moment, and something must be done,” he said.
Mr Mahony believes that a failure to segregate difficult students is damaging the majority of pupils’ secondary school education.
“I’ve seen that in a class of 30 there are always about two students who cause problems. I know one girl who had to keep her fingers pressed to her ears in order to concentrate,” he said.
The Kerry-based teacher, who also taught in New York for 20 years, said the disruptions are forcing students to enrol in private tuition centres.
“These kids will have to pay a large sum of money to go to private schools and the department should give them their cash back,” he said.
However, the head of law at Portobello College, John O’Keeffe, believes it would be very difficult to prove schools are negligent with troublesome students. “If this was easy then it would have been done before. It’s hard to see how a case like this could be won,” he said.
A spokeswoman for teachers’ union the ASTI, which has 17,000 members, said a reduction in class sizes is the most effective way of coping with disruptive students. The union does not advocate suing the department.
The Department of Education insisted last night there is no precedent for this kind of action and a school’s board of management is responsible for discipline.
Mr Mahony said teachers have been encouraged by a number of their colleagues winning harassment cases and he feels that legal action on disruptive pupils will follow.
