National school disgrace: It's time to stop the rot

Olivia Kelly reports from two schools where substandard conditions are making the lives of their pupils and their teachers a misery, and finds out how we are failing to cherish our children equally

The cold is the first thing to hit me when I walk into Bellewstown National School in Co Meath just before 9 a.m. Principal Frank Reidy gets the boiler going straight away, but two hours later, as I'm about to leave, I still haven't taken my coat off.

"Today isn't actually as bad, but in this week alone we've had floods, snow and winds that would knock you down," says Elaine Heeney, the third- and fourth-class teacher.

There's no room for Heeney and her pupils in the cramped little school building, all 32 of them are in a prefab on what used to be the playground.

"There are holes in the walls. They get filled temporarily, but it's one of the ways the mice get in. The leaky roof has been repaired, but repairs only last so long in a prefab. There are bits gone out of the floor and the childrens' chairs get stuck in them." The worst thing, she says, are the extremes of temperature. It's too hot in the summer and on a bleak winter's day, like today, it's bitterly cold.

"The water temperature in the school is bad enough, but it's even worse out here. You're saying 'wash your hands after you go to the toilet' and they come in and they're just red raw from the cold. You feel so sorry for them," she says.

Back in the main building, Reidy shows me around. It doesn't take long - the school is absolutely tiny.

Bellewstown National School opened in 1959 as a three-teacher school. It now has four class teachers, a shared learning support teacher and a shared resource teacher, both of whom are based at the school. There are now 97 pupils packed into the classrooms. There is no general-purpose room and the eight foot by 10 foot staffroom also serves as a storeroom, principal's office, meeting room and the learning-support teacher's room.

There is no hot water in the school and no running water in the classrooms to implement the art curriculum that there isn't any space for anyway. Fittings in the toilets are rusting, the tiles are broken and the boys all share one communal steel urinal.

"The space is just too small," Reidy says. "The heating system requires root-and-branch change. The sanitary facilities are terrible, both in the number of toilets and their condition. It's a health risk and certainly not what these children come from at home. The corridor is damp and, because of the lack of space, it also has to be used for computer work. The prefab leaks hopelessly. It's 13 years old and is showing its age - the walls, floors windows and doors are all damaged."

The list goes on. This school is obviously in urgent need of major work and the Department of Education have accepted this. In fact, they accepted it almost 20 years ago when they first gave permission for a new school.

"In 1983 we were finally given sanction for upgrading. We were to get four additional classrooms and the original school was to be knocked through to make a general-purpose room. At the time, we were so restricted for space that fourth class were in the stand house of the racecourse half a mile away, so in 1983 a prefab was added, as a stop gap, at local expense.

After intensive lobbying, the plans finally arrived in 1986. "We were ready to apply for planning permission and of course everyone was thrilled. But then, in late 1986, we got a letter saying building progress had to be halted and we accepted that - things were bad everywhere at the time - but we took it on the basis that we would be high in the pecking order once things got moving again.

"In 1989 we revived our case. We were given another prefab and a ball court. We were given the impression that we were lucky and not to come back looking for more." There were minor repairs in the 1990s, but, Reidy says, "it was drip-feeding when we were looking for major upgrading."

The worst news was yet to come however. "The most galling thing happened on June 22nd, 2001, when were told that the Department would have to redo the plans and we were back to square one."

Last term Reidy was told that the Department was "not ready to go to the design team" for the school building and, despite many phonecalls and visits to the Department's planning office in Tullamore, Co Offaly he has received no response since.

Littleton National School, Co Tipperary, faces many of the same problems as Bellewstown - a chronic lack of space, primitive toilet conditions, no hot water - all within an old, damp and crumbling school building. In Littleton, however, their battle for upgrading has, for the last 15 years, been running hand-in-hand with their campaign for disadvantaged status. The two are inextricably linked, says principal Christy Clancy.

"Our full-time resource teacher for special needs, our resource teacher for Travellers and our shared resource teacher for special needs are all in the one room. These children need one-to-one attention. We need the extra funding for disadvantage and the extra resources for the school building to give these children a fair chance."

Littleton has 130 pupils, six mainstream teachers, one full-time resource teacher and one shared resource teacher for special needs, one full-time and one shared resource teacher for Travellers and a shared learning resource teacher. Of the two resource teachers not sharing a room, one uses what was the girls' cloakroom, while the other is in a cordoned-off section of the rundown general purpose room.

The school "meets all the criteria for disadvantaged status", says Clancy. The school has received letters of support for its campaign from the local gardaí, Barnardos, the St Vincent de Paul, social workers, public health nurses and FÁS.

FRUSTRATED by the lack of response to their campaign, the school called a strike last June. Two days before the proposed strike, they received a fax granting the retention of a fifth assistant teacher, which, Clancy says, they would only have been entitled to as a disadvantaged school. Last week they received notice that they are losing this teacher in the summer. "The final nail in the coffin came in December when we were told we were back under consideration with everyone else."

The main school building has not been altered since it was built in 1957, says Clancy. Much of the school is flat-roofed and in places the ceilings are caving in with the damp and rot. In the corridor, which now doubles as a cloakroom, the walls are very badly damaged, with some cracks running right through to the outside. The school has major problems with vandalism, from people outside the school, and windows are constantly being replaced or just patched up. Clancy says the Minister Dr Woods's recent announcement of €20 million, Statewide, in minor-works grants is "just annoying".

"The grant is so small that it would be a struggle to cover the general maintenance. Added to that, the ongoing problem of vandalism means constant repairs to windows. We can't counteract that until we get a new building. Putting an alarm in a building like this would be a farcical, futile exercise."

The teachers and parents in Littleton are tired of waiting for a response to their problems. Reluctantly they have set a new strike date for this Thursday.

Littleton and Bellewstown are both on the INTO list of substandard primary schools, where they join 93 other schools. Each school has its particular problems, but the central theme is wearying familiar - the schools made their applications, waited for inspections, for surveys, for plans, then suddenly last term, regardless of what stage of the process they were at, everything stopped.

"Nothing has moved since last September," says John Carr, general secretary designate of the INTO. "Schools were ringing up saying the Department was not able to give them a response about whether or not the process was moving."

The INTO is calling on the Minister to publish a complete list of all national school building and refurbishment projects and clarify what stage these various applications are at. Woods refuses to publish this list, Carr says.

"The frustration we and our members have is that these are teachers doing a fantastic job in difficult circumstances, creating, to the best of their ability, good learning environments for the children. At least if they knew that in six months or a year's time something would be done about their school, it would give them the motivation to keep going.

"The perception now is that because the building programme has slowed down, they're going to slip further down the list."

Minister Woods says he has not instructed his Department to stop processing school-building projects. However, he has yet to say when he will publish the priority list.