THE BUS pulls up at the terminus. Next stop the Dublin Mountains. Nestled in a trough at the foot of the mountains students file through the gates for the beginning of another school day. It's only after you visit Ballinteer Community School that you realise that the mountains, which provide such an impressive background, also serve well to illustrate the huge challenges that staff and pupils at the school have conquered.

The school opened in 1974 as the twelfth community school in the State. It celebrated its 21st birthday last year. Built on an ample 12 acre site, BCS stands at the confluence of several bus routes. Students travel from around the local area as well as the inner city to attend.

Dr Austin Corcoran has been at the helm for four years now and his staff of 45 teachers along with a 660 strong student body are not afraid to embrace all abilities and disabilities. The school is one of only three in the country to have an especially designated unit for physically disabled students.

Catering for up to 30 students with physical disabilities each year, the school has achieved international recognition for its specialist approach to physical disability.

The success of an integration programme means that for students there is no distinction made between being able bodied and being disabled.

The catchment area for students with physical disabilities incorporates the entire south side of Dublin. One of the two resource teachers working in the unit for physically disabled students, Deirdre Walsh, says the students are integrated for all subjects, except when a subject is inadvisable.

"Students are withdrawn from class for some of the more practical subjects such as wood work or metal work," says Walsh. "These subjects are inadvisable for students with spina bifida, cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy."

Extensive use of information technology in the unit is fostered by resource teacher Orlaith O'Brien and they are now on the internet at 205bcs.iol.ie.

The school also has an education unit for students with Specialist Speech and Language Disorder (SSLD), the only unit of its kind at any second level school. Teacher Caroline Lynch and speech and language therapist, Mary Connor, work with five pupils in this unit. Although the demand is there for more units of this kind, says Lynch, the provision is not.

THE innovative philosophy at BCS is obvious in the area of computers where three computer whizzkids were at pains to demonstrate their skills for E&L. David Hickey, Gavin Segrave and Christopher Maypother are all second year students. They recently won a competition organised by TEASTAS, the national certification authority, to represent Ireland in the Multimedia Project for European Year of Lifelong Learning under the aegis of the European Commission.

With the help of their coordinating teacher, Michael Brennan, the three entered their computer project entitled "Science for the Young" and came out winners. Based on the traditional family tree model, the project looks at some fundamental aspects of the three branches of science, introducing concepts of biology, chemistry and physics.

The school is installing a multi media centre which will be up and running by early 1997. Denis O'Connor, who is in charge of computer studies at BCS, said that the centre will be revolutionary in terms of teaching practices.

A process the school hopes to adopt, O'Connor explains, allows a teacher to project a computer screen image onto a larger screen which all the class can see. "You can imagine what this will do for the teaching of processes such as plate tectonics and glaciation in geography or the human skeleton in biology," says O'Connor, who fully subscribes to the view that the image is worth a thousand words.

AN ANNUAL musical bug bites Ballinteer taxing the energies of up to 80 students involved. This year's lavish production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has been ambitiously undertaken by Transition Year students following earlier successes with Philadelphia Here I Come and West Side Story.

The school is also building up something of a reputation for launching rockets. Some 12 Ballinteer students were involved in the launching of a 10 foot rocket in the Dublin Mountains last August. There are now plans to launch another one early this year.