Where pupils ‘cross the yard in the rain’

STUDENTS at Ennis National School spend their lunch breaks playing around the cars parked by staff in the yard — because of the number of prefabs on the grounds.

The school was built in 1972 to cater for 16 teachers, but 26 years later it has more than 40 staff and almost half of them work in prefabs.

The school is home to 16 prefabs in which seven classes are taught, with the rest used by 11 of the school’s resource, learning support and language support teachers.

This means that children who avail of these extra classes have to cross the yard in hail, rain and snow to access specialist teaching a few times a week.

For older students, accessing the school hall or the computer room means a march across the yard into the main school building, which is nowhere near the appropriate size for Ennis National School’s 670 pupils.

Since 1999, the school community has been seeking a new building and following the breakdown of negotiations to move onto the grounds of one of the town’s second-level schools, a five-acre site was made available by Catholic Bishop of Killaloe Willie Walsh.

However, that was not before the staff came close to striking over conditions in 2004, which was only averted when the Department of Education agreed to give €200,000 to bring the school up to proper health and safety standards.

Board of management chairman David Casey describes this funding as just “sticking plaster”. The school had to borrow €93,000 from the bishop in the same year for four prefabs to accommodate 120 pupils, money the department refused to reimburse it because it had not sanctioned the purchases.

The school has paid out €10,000 to repair water leaks in the past year alone, and pipes running through the school are so regularly blocked that dampness and bad smells are an almost constant feature in the main building.

For principal Garry Stack, it is frustrating that no progress has been made since being told in late 2006 that the project for a 32-classroom school could move to the architectural planning stage of the Department of Education school building programme.

It was last January before an ad was placed for tenders to find a design team to bring the project through the planning process. But the four boxes of tender documents have been gathering dust in an office since just after the February closing date, when the department told the school authorities not to proceed.

“The staff, the parents and the children are all waiting for years, we have been through public meetings and protests. After it looked like things were moving, now everybody’s been told that it’s stalled again,” said Mr Stack.

“The frustration is that nobody’s getting any information back from the Department of Education,” he said.

Clare Connolly, chairwoman of the parents’ association, said the use of so many prefabs has financial and personal costs to the children and the school.

“It’s totally unsatisfactory to have children crossing the yards in the rain to access the main school building for different activities, and there are break-ins almost every week because of all the prefabs,” she said.

The security and vandalism concerns have forced the school to pay more than €30,000 to install CCTV cameras around the school grounds.

Mr Stack explains that some of the teachers have never worked in a classroom and some of the children will spend more than half their days at primary school in prefabs. The school was cleared to appoint two teachers in February but it still has no accommodation for them and has received no reply from the department on whether it will provide an extra prefab next September.

“This school is a monument to institutionalised neglect for the past decade. There is no cost involved in allowing the project proceed to tender stage,” the principal said.

“The Taoiseach should be very careful when he’s invoking the memory of former Clare TD, Education Minister and President of Ireland Paddy Hillery, because there’s a danger that Paddy’s Investment in Education document could be with him in his grave,” he said.

Mr Stack is due to retire in a few years, but recalls the plight of Moses in the Bible, when he thinks of the work that could be done on the site just half a mile away.

“The new school is like the Promised Land, I might see it but I’ll probably never enter it, at least not when I’m still working,” he said.