Educate Together Greystones

Back in May, just after this year’s election, a post by Damien Mulley really hit home (Probably because I was doing a fair bit of moaning about the results myself). The gist of what he was saying was that rather than sit back and whinge about things why not get up and actually do something constructive. It percolated away at the back of my mind…I just didn’t know what I could do to put it into practice. Then an opportunity presented itself:

One of the things that I really wasn’t happy about was the school situation in Ireland and places for kids and in particular how it affects those of us who are not members of the Catholic Church or the Church of Ireland. As it stands now in Ireland, schools are set up by a patron, traditionally this has been the Bishop or other member of the clergy, and they then set the conditions by which they accept children into their schools. This means that they can have policies whereby they accept children of their own faith first before allowing children of other denominations or no religion at all. Once upon a time, when Ireland was 99% Catholic that was all fine and dandy. These days however, although about 98% of schools are still either Catholic or Anglican, this is no longer representative of Ireland.

OK, take my town of Greystones as an example. People living here have 5 local primary schools to choose from (5 if you’re willing to go a little ways out of town to Kilcoole)…Saint Anthonys, Saint Brigids, Saint Kevins, Saint Laurences and Saint Patricks…notice a trend? These aren’t huge schools either, Brigids for example, one of the larger ones has only 350 pupils. All of them operate a system of categorisation of applicants…first preference to local members of their church and on down to the last category…those with no faith or not members of a specific parish (that’s where Eve would be since although I’m a Christian, I’m not a member of a parish and Matt isn’t a member of a parish either) so for Church of Ireland school St Patrick’s for example, that puts Eve in their Category 8, the very bottom of the pile. With Greystones bursting at the seams with children, just like so many other towns in Ireland, this means that the competition for places is desperate. People have taken to baptising their children into a church just to secure them a place in a local school, and, although I don’t agree with it, I can sympathise with parents who feel they have no other choice.

So what to do? Well, ever since my brother went to an Educate Together school that is what I have wanted for Eve. She has been down on the waiting list for a couple of Educate Together schools since the day she was born (they are in such high demand that is what you have to do). They are multi-denominational, co-educational and democratically run schools that operate a first-come first-served policy and will accept children from anywhere in the country. Sadly there are none near us and if she did go to the nearest ones it would mean a long commute to get her there every day. So…in the spirit of actually doing something, I went on the internet and started looking for how to get an Educate Together school for Greystones. Almost immediately I found a post on boards.ie from another mother, Jessica, who was doing the same thing. She’d actually been in touch with Educate Together and was looking for help so I got in touch with her and we arranged to meet for coffee. We didn’t really know what to do or how to go about it and we didn’t know how we were going to pull it off. That was back in August, but we started making phone calls, talking to politicians and local parents, putting up posters and dropping flyers. Slowly we found more and more parents wanting to help and we formed a committee. We had our first public meeting and almost 100 people came along, then, last weekend at 10:30 am we had our pre-enrolment and we nervously waited to find out just how many parents might want this for Greystones. On the day, over 230 children were pre-enrolled! Some parents had been queueing in the cold since 7am so they would be first on the list. Of course I took my camera along and you can see the photos on my Flickr page, here are just a couple from the day:

In the photo below you can see Sarah, another of our group of parents that make up the committee, answering questions. As our pre-enrolment officer she worked so hard and did a brilliant job:

At one point it was wall-to-wall:

So now it’s down to the Department of Education to decide if we get our school. We’re all really excited because we feel that after the response we got on Saturday how could they turn us down? Jessica will be on RTE radio today at 1pm, and if you have the inclination to do something yourself, how about writing a letter to Mary Hanafin, our minister of education? You can find a letter to send to her here. Or why not blog about it? I know there are a lot of parents who don’t know that they might not find it so easy to get a place in a school for their child when the time comes.

**Update: We now have a website and blog for the school…it’s at www.greystoneset.ie and you can download a copy of the pre-enrolment form from the FAQ page.