Teachers vote for strike over 'decade of neglect' at school

Teaching staff at an Ennis primary school yesterday voted for strike action in protest at what they claim is "a decade of institutionalised neglect of the school".

School principal Mr Gary Stack said yesterday the Department of Education could no longer get away with sentencing schoolchildren to four, six and eight years in the prefabs on the school grounds.

The school, which has 706 pupils, currently has over 200 children in 11 prefabs as plans to relocate the school to an alternative site have stalled over the past four years.

Mr Stack said the school's 34 teachers would strike for one day, on October 7th, and warned that further action would be taken unless the Department acted.

A health and safety report commissioned by the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) earlier this year found 23 instances of "intolerable conditions" at the school.

Mr Stack said the hardest task he had this year was deciding who went into the prefabs.

"We had made an initial promise six years ago that the students would only spend one year in the prefabs.

"I had a delegation of three nine-year-old girls in my office reminding me that they had been two years in the prefabs and when I was allocating them this year would I remember that."

The school was built in the 1970s and Mr Stack said there was dampness in the building and students went home each day smelling of damp.

Since 2000, the school had been seeking a new building to cope with growing student numbers. Since then it had spent €93,000 on providing three new prefabs.

The school is now seeking €93,000 from the Department to allow it to upgrade three of the prefabs until the school is relocated to another site in Ennis.

Mr Stack said the only remedy for the school was to knock it down. He said the Department would gain €5.5 million from the sale of the current school site, which was designated a special development zone in the Ennis Development Plan.

INTO regional representative Mr Declan Kelleher yesterday backed the school's decision to strike.

He said the absence of any response by the Department was a breach of the Sustaining Progress agreement, which stated that employers would co-operate with ongoing change.