This article is from page 2 of the 2008-07-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 2 JPG
THE Chairman of the Board of Man- agement of Ennis National School has said that the Government has closed its eyes on overcrowding at the school by putting on hold a new building for the 664 children and 52 EIGER ‘At the start of the school year we applied for and got funding for two teachers – one for resource and one for language,” said David Casey. “We applied for accommodation for those two teachers and our ap- plication for funding was refused. We were told by the department in May that we hadn’t shown we had
an accommodation need for them,” ntemcy- Bee
“Now look around and you will see 16 prefabs, which to me look like an accommodation need,’ he told parents as, in protest, they took their children from the school to the streets of Ennis last Wednesday.
Mr Casey said that junior education minister Sean Haughey had argued that the teachers should either use the library or the hall. Now the library has for the last eight years been used as a full time class room for special needs, and the halla is in constant use between the classes, the choir, and the school teams. It shows complete ignorance and lack of understanding
and arrogance for anyone to tell any- one in Ennis National School to use the halla to teach your children,’ said Mr Casey.
The head of the Irish National Teachers Organisation, Declan Kel- leher, told the protest that it was “in- excusable” that the Department of Education had failed to live up to a basic responsibility.
“Nine years ago the department acknowledged that a new 24 teacher school needed to be built. Nine years later the junior infants of that era have finished their first year in post primary schools. That generation of children have been let down by a process that simply devalues primary
education and promotes the concept that these are only children between four and 12 and that they don’t really count,” said Mr Kelleher, who previ- ously taught at the school.
“Even from an economic point of view the scandal of wasting funds on short term economics by providing totally unsuitable wooden boxes for classrooms are a form of madness. It’s certainly understandable that if a school has short term accommoda- tion needs then a prefab may answer the demands for a year or so, but the provision of 16 prefabs over a nine year period and longer is testament to total state neglect as well as a complete lack of forward planning.”