Electrostatic cleaning and perspex screens: Ursulines prepare to welcome students back

Miriam Clifford, school secretary sorting out the PPE and signage at Ursuline secondary school, Blackrock, Cork. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

Clearing out classrooms to make sure there is enough room for social distancing has led to a new conundrum for schools: what to do with the associated desks and debris?

“We’ve lots of desks stacked up at the back of our PE hall after we cleared out the rooms,” Patrick McBeth, the principal of Ursuline Secondary School in Blackrock, Cork told the Irish Examiner. 

“We were considering getting one of those 40-foot containers, the ones you’d see on ships, but I couldn’t get over how fast they sold out.

“About three weeks ago, when I first made contact with the company in Cork here that sells them, they had heaps of them. When I rang them last week, they had one left. They can’t keep up with the demand for containers, schools are buying them up.”

The school also considered buying a steel shed but was met with a "four to five-month waiting list" due to the surge in working from home.

Ursuline Secondary School, an all-girls DEIS school, has 245 students, which is on the smaller size in terms of pupil numbers. Mr McBeth believes this has been to its advantage when it came to getting the school ready for reopening.

“It’s been hard work nonetheless," he said. 

"To be honest, we are probably in a better position than some of the larger schools, in terms of space. It's just been busy, a lot of work getting everything together. We’ve hired a couple of lads to come in and help us, we’ve spent the last week and a half clearing out classrooms. 

We’re fortunate, actually, that our campus is quite big here. We haven’t had to use the PE hall here for classrooms but we have repurposed some rooms.

To reduce traffic around the school, first, second, and third-year students will be assigned ‘base classrooms’ - permanent rooms their class will stay in for the majority of the day and teachers will come to them.

“The only time they will move is when they are doing subjects like science or home ec," Mr McBeth explained. 

Patrick McBeth, principal at Ursuline secondary school, Blackrock, Cork. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

"We’ve been able to spread out the desks and give them enough space to make social distancing work. The rest of the school will move around the school but we are changing the timetables so there are more double classes.

“If a student had five or six single classes in a day, and a couple of doubles, now they are likely to have mostly doubles and a couple of single classes to reduce the traffic around the school.” 

While sixth, fifth, and transition year students will have access to socially-distanced lockers, the students in the junior classes will be asked to bring their books into school in trundle bags. 

"We feel we can manage, if the girls bring their books in those wheelie bags, they can set them beside their desks and keep their books there," Mr McBeth said. 

We are also trying to create pods and hubs for different year groups. The sixth years have an area where their lockers are spaced out, and some spaced out tables, likewise for the transition years and the fifth year students. We think we can manage it at the moment.

Windows in each class will also be opened to allow the ventilation through. 

“That’s okay now while it's warm but I do wonder how it'll work as we go through into winter, it could be trickier," he added. 

The school is also employing a company to visit twice weekly for ‘electrostatic cleaning’, to be carried out in the evenings when everyone has gone home.

“It's like a fogging machine,” Mr McBeth explained. 

“It leaves a layer on everything in the room which should zap any Covid-19.” 

The school is also considering perspex screens for classrooms like the science lab where it could be harder to keep two metres apart.

Parents' questions have mainly been around books and lockers, Mr McBeth added. 

Peter Mclaughlin, working on installing on projectors at Ursuline secondary school, Blackrock, Cork.Picture: Eddie O'Hare

“We’ve been sending out briefing emails to parents and posting information on our website. As questions come in, we’ve been updating them almost like a Q&A document on the website," he said. 

"Staff have been brilliant, very supportive, and the parents too, offering to help wherever they can. The staff are just taking it bit by bit, and they are interested in how we manage to keep the social distancing for all the year groups. Staff realise that everybody is learning as we are going on, and that not all the information is really clear yet.

There's a sense we are working through this as a team. They are keen to make it work. I am really appreciative of that, they've worked really hard. They've been brilliant, as have the parents.

"I would imagine most students would prefer to be back at school, rather than having their lessons online. They engaged very well but a lot of them miss their friends and miss their teachers. And the teachers miss their students too.

"There probably is a bit of anxiety there, probably for everybody. I'd say the students are excited about getting back to learning in the class again but equally conscious of the fact they have a responsibility to be safe. I think they will be very conscious of that."