Schools spent up to €7k applying for cut grants

ALMOST 400 schools in nine counties have been left up to €7,000 out of pocket after submitting reports with applications for a building grants scheme that was cancelled by the Government.

The total paid was about €317,000, suggesting school boards and parents have wasted up to €1 million nationally, based on the fact that at least 1,200 schools applied for funding under the Summer Works Scheme (SWS) last September.

The scheme was set up in 2004 to allow schools carry out non-urgent repairs and maintenance to buildings during the holiday months.

But former education minister Mary Hanafin announced in December that there would be no scheme this year because of economic constraints.

More than 1,100 schools received funding under the SWS last year, around half of those which applied. The application process requires schools to supply reports from architects or contractors setting out the proposed works, but the fees are normally reimbursed as part of the grant payment to successful applicants.

The Irish Examiner sought the details of how much each school that applied for the 2008 scheme had paid in fees for these reports, in a freedom of information request to the Department of Education.

About 70 of the 450 schools for which details have so far been received did not indicate any fee on their application.

But 380 of them in Carlow, Dublin, Kilkenny, Laois, Longford, Offaly, Tipperary South, Waterford and Westmeath, paid €316,984 for reports. The average fee was €834, but 36 schools outside Dublin and 57 in the capital forked out more than €1,000 each, including more than a dozen with bills of over €3,000. St Louis High School, a 600-girls secondary school in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines, faces an architect’s fee of €7,050 for the report it submitted to the Department of Education last September.

“We were thankful to benefit in previous years to refurbish toilets and our science labs, and we applied for this year to refurbish our home economics kitchens and art rooms. We’re hopeful that the scheme will be reinstated and that the fee will be refunded then,” said principal Mary Morgan.

The Joint Managerial Body (JMB), which represents the boards of about 400 secondary schools, called on the department to reimburse schools with the fees and for Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe to reinstate the scheme for 2009.

“Principals, board members and other school staff spent long hours and weeks preparing these applications, only for the Government to cancel what has been a very successful and important scheme,” said JMB president Noel Merrick. “It would only be proper, now that it has been cancelled, that the money be repaid so schools can use it for other vital education services,” he said.