School forced to hold classes in the corridor

Pupils with special educational needs have to be taught in a corridor – surrounded by empty classrooms – because of a delay in securing a decision on the amalgamation of other schools in the town.

Accommodation is so cramped that the 100 students must share just four toilets between them. If things remain as they are, incoming junior infants will have no classroom, throwing next year’s enrolment into doubt.

Yet half of the school building where they are housed is unoccupied.

Tuam Educate Together had been allocated four classrooms in the old St Patrick’s College – formerly known as Tuam CBS – owned by the Tuam Archdiocese when it opened in 2015.

It was meant to have been a temporary arrangement for a year pending the amalgamation of other Catholic schools in the town. Educate Together would then move to a permanent home in one of the vacant school buildings.

However, the amalgamations never took place.

Educate Together shares part of the CBS building with St Pat’s Boys School. Elsewhere in the town the Mercy and the Presentation National Schools are mixed until first class and then girls only from second to sixth classes.

At a meeting last October, school principal Nuala Bourke said she pleaded with representatives of the Archdiocese to be allowed to move into other empty classrooms in the short-term to overcome their accommodation crisis.

They have 40 children who want to begin next September, which means they require two more rooms as well as a classroom for special education.

See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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