Principal forced to use school toilet as an office
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Saturday December 05 2009
A PRINCIPAL has been forced to use a staff toilet as his office because of overcrowding at a primary school.
Killimor National School in Balinasloe, Co Galway was promised a new building 14 years ago.
The Department of Education has spent over €650,000 on a site and planning for the new building -- but can give no time as to when it will be built.
Two years ago, the 117-pupil school was at the top of the department's priority list for schools. Everything was in place to start construction. But, within weeks, the department suspended the project.
Now it has slumped closer to the bottom of the list and is one of about 350 schools vying for funds in a lower category. Its original planning permission has expired.
Principal Gerard Murray says they can not understand how a project that was at such an advanced stage could be wiped out "at the stroke of a pen". He says: "We are not one bit nearer having a proper school building than we were 14 years ago."
Mr Murray says conditions are severely cramped and junior classes, special needs and resource teaching took place in prefabs.
Pupils have to cross the yard to toilets in the main building. Their desks are so old they incorporate inkwells, and more modern desks would not fit in the classrooms.
For his administrative work, Mr Murray converts one of the two staff toilets into an office.
The saga began in the early 1990s when the school applied for an extension, but department officials deemed the location on a busy road unsuitable and said they should have a new building. The project for a new school limped its way through the building programme until June 2007 -- by which time it was on its third design -- when it got the go-ahead to tender.
Some weeks later they received a letter from the department stating that after a reassessment, they would be getting an eight-classroom school, using a new standard design.
"Nothing has moved since. How can we have gone from being top priority to down the list?" says Mr Murray.
Fine Gael deputy Ulick Burke said there was "no justification" for the delay.
- Katherine Donnelly
Irish Independent
