“NO ONE should have to beg for their children.”
Those were the stark words from parents at a primary school in Limerick City, where a vice principal has been doing just that to try to get promised resources for a facility where seven in 10 pupils are traumatised and in need of special supports.
After €6million was pumped into a new campus for Le Chéile National School in Rathbane, parents and teachers were promised a wrap-around support service with child mental health and diagnostics, medical clinics with a dedicated nurse and doctor, and play therapy and family supports, hand-in-hand with classroom supports including special needs teachers, all on site in a one stop shop.
The school building was opened in a blaze of publicity nine years ago “and then everyone just walked away”, said vice principal Shane Donoghue.
“The promises never materialised. The school was promised the kind of services that sounded like the stuff of fantasy. These services are needed in the second most deprived area in the country – not in Limerick, not in the region – the second most deprived in the entire State.
“All we have is an empty block where all this was supposed to happen. And this for children many of whom have come from homes where there is every kind of social problem imaginable. Stark poverty, substance abuse, sexual and domestic violence. Children who have witnessed family members overdosing. Every horror you can think of a child experiencing, we have children here who are living with it”.
“The staff here are working all out for these children. They go way above duty every single day but we’re not being supported.”
That is the dark synopsis the frustrated vice principal laid out for the Limerick Post.
When the school was first proposed, staff and parents in a number of smaller national schools in the area, including Southill and Galvone National schools, were persuaded to move from their smaller schools to the new facility, which today has up to 200 pupils.
“We’re the forgotten. Shane spends his time begging for us from anywhere he can,” Anita Mc Donagh, a parent and member of the school’s governing board told the Limerick Post.
“Our school is not a charity and our children are not a charity. No one should have to beg. Our children have the right to a decent education and the supports they need.”
‘Sometimes I just lose it’
Tracy Savage, Home School Community Liaison worker said that when children come to the school in the morning “we have to feed them, make sure they’re dressed and warm, then we have to try to deal with their issues, and only then can we even begin to try to teach them”.
“A huge number of them come from homes where parents are lone parenting, many parents are trying to deal with addiction and chaotic lives, many of them have had little or no education themselves. Their families are lurching from one crisis to another and we’re fire-fighting every day for the children.”
Tracy is angry that authorities appear to have no conception of and make no allowance for the circumstances in which the families are struggling to cope and get supports for their children.
“One mother who has five children left her youngest at the door of the school in his pyjamas because she had to run home and try to deal with a situation where the Gardaí had arrived to take her teenage son to a young offenders facility.
“That same woman is trying to divide herself between all her children. Her phone regularly gets broken by a child who has massive behavioural problems and she can’t afford to keep replacing it.
“Meanwhile her youngest child needs to be assessed for special needs and the people doing the assessment say the mother didn’t answer the phone when they rang to make the appointment.
“They’re willing to cut that child off and leave him drift because his mother is drowning trying to deal with it all on her own. Sometimes I just lose it.”
Natasha Lyons, a parent of one of the children at Le Chéile, said that after the experience she had spending four and a half years trying top get a diagnosis for her son’s special needs, she is certain that the wrap-around support services are vital for the school.
“There are a serious amount of kids in the school with special needs and education difficulties. The space is there, it’s already built. That money has already been invested – we were promised these services that just disappeared”.
‘We don’t need a three-month project, we need a three-year one’
Limerick Sinn Fein TD Maurice Quinlivan raised the issue of the promises made to the school at length in a recent Dáil sitting.
On behalf of the school, he called for a pilot project to be rolled out in the Limerick school to tackle the social issues preventing the children from getting an education and a chance at a life.
He quoted a school inspector who visited the school numerous times and described the situation as a “crisis heading for disaster”.
The Education Minster promised to look into the matter and revert back.
“I have been constantly sending emails to everyone to ask where these supports are and when will we see them. There’s no written record of any of these promises. They were made at meetings involving the (education) department, the council, the diocese, the HSE – all the stakeholders but there are no minutes of it anywhere,” vice principal Shane Donoghue said.
“When we try to find out who signed off on any part of it, those people have vanished.
“I’m glad that Deputy Quinlivan has taken up our cause and the Minister has at last promised to revert back, but we don’t need a three-month project, we need a three-year project, with all of the wraparounds, to even begin to make a dent in the problems.”
