Call to pay expenses to school boards

SCHOOL board officers should be paid expenses for their voluntary work, a school management leader claimed yesterday.

As more than 25,000 people begin a four-year term on primary school boards of management this morning, the amount of expertise they must have on legal and other issues is increasing every year.

About half of the boards of the country’s 3,000 Catholic primary schools have a non-clerical chairperson, a role once almost always the exclusive job of the local priest. But while principals are paid an extra allowance for acting as board secretary, other officers do the job on a voluntary basis.