Saint Moninna's community make classroom dreams a reality

PROVING that if you wish to turn your dreams into reality it is best to take matters into your own hands are Saint Moninna’s Primary School who have raised the £40,000 needed to have a bespoke special needs mobile installed on their site.

The unit , which is now fully operational on the school premises located on Chancellors Road, comprises three rooms including a sensory room, facilities to accommodate for special needs support visitors and a room for dedicated use by Saint Moninna’s own special needs teacher.

Being an outworking of over seven months of intensive fundraising on the part of the students, teachers, parents and past pupils of Saint Moninna’s as well as the generosity of a multitude of local businesses according to school Principal Isobel Temple says the new facility will help to service the needs of the ever increasing number of children with special needs who the school have taken into their care.

Special Facility

“The classroom is finished, it came on site in June. Over the summer the electricity, heating and wifi was installed whilst the school was closed because we had to cut across the playground.

“Come September 1 it was fully functioning and is now being used by the children on a daily basis.

“It is a three room mobile at the back of the school. One of the rooms is a sensory room for either individual children or small groups of children with sensory needs. A parent kindly bought us plenty of sensory equipment for this room.

“ It is up and running and the children are out their everyday. A classroom assistant will take one, two or three children out their throughout the day and it is time tabled for this.

“The middle room of the three rooms is used by people who come into the school to work with individual children. This could be an occupational therapist, speech therapist , tutors for various things. It can also be used by teachers as a quiet working space. The third room is used by our special needs teacher. We have a full-time special needs teacher and she has set up a room in the mobile. She takes withdrawal classes out there. These children are in mainstream classes but she takes them out for 30 minute lessons in literacy and numeracy.

“The special needs area had previously been in a resource area within the school and this resource area is now being used by the primary 1 and 2 children for play. They have lots of large play activities that they were not able to avail of whenever the special needs was happening out there. This has opened it up for all of the primary one and two children who we could not use it before.”

“We currently have 482 children in the school, with 16 children in our new special needs classes. In addition to that we also have special needs throughout the school in every class. There are varying degrees of special needs. There are children who have statements of special needs and on top of this you have children with very mild needs. There are increasing numbers.”

£40’000 price tag

Whilst the new mobile facilities will prove invaluable in enriching the educational experiences of those children at Saint Moninna’s who need an extra helping hand with their education, what also proved to be invaluable was the help and support administered by all those who had a hand to play in making Saint Moninna’s dreams of having a bespoke special needs classroom on site a reality.

“We raised around £40'000 through our various fundraising activities. This has paid for the mobile. We costed for an additional £10'000 to accommodate for fittings and furniture but this has all been donated by other people or through other means. So we were hoping for £50'000, but we got £40'000 and this has covered for the full cost.

“We kicked it of at the very start with a Smarties challenge where every child in school got a box of Smarties and they had to fill it with either pound coins or 20ps. This was our kick off and this brought in over £5000. We also set up a GoFundMe page. We got around £2000 on this. We also had a Saint Patrick's Day Disco, we raised around £1500 with this and a small Easter raffle of about £1000. We had buckets on the counters of lots of local businesses's. We also approached lots of businesses's about the mobile and 32 businesses in the locality made donations to us. The amount donated from this ranged from £20 to £1000.

“We also had a good amount of donations from families. One family decided not to do Christmas presents among the extended family last year and decided to give the money to us. Other families came in and made contributions which was lovely. These were families who generations of them have been through the school. Roughly £2000 was donated this way.

“We also had a lot of children who decided to make bracelets or little things to sell. We had children spontaneously saying "can I do some fundraising? " So we then had a market day were children sold things that they made but they were making these in their own time. These were bracelets, bits and pieces as well as preloved jersey's. This made around £2000.

“The company that we worked with in providing the classroom was an L.E Haslett from Clogher County Tyrone. We bought the classroom of them. They worked with us in terms of the design, layout, and on site visits. The whole thing was very smooth even in terms of payment. They worked with us which was brilliant. They didn't require a down payment because they knew that we were fundraising. We also had support from ReGen, particularly in relation to structural work. They provided the base and steps.

“We want to send our sincerest thanks to those who donated as the whole school community came behind us. There was a lovely feeling of people buying into this, literally. When the classroom came on site people felt an ownership of it because they had made a very real contribution to getting it to Saint Moninna's.

“It was very moving for everyone when they actually saw the building arrive. It had to drive through Newry on three different lorries. This was a big occasion for us because it was the fruit of all the work that had gone into getting this.

“In addition to the unit we have acquired a new special needs classroom from the Education Authority for special needs children.

“With these two special needs units the hope is that we will be able to provide for them in our school community rather than these children having to go to special schools elsewhere.”