Mags GarganMags Gargan visits a primary school in Co. Limerick which has an innovative approach to answering the needs of children living in a disadvantaged community
When you hear the name Moyross, certain associations immediately jump to mind – shootings, stabbings, gang feuds and perhaps untethered horses roaming around bleak housing estates. While the days of high level street violence are over, the effects of that violence and other social problems are still being felt by the people of Moyross, no less so than by the young people whose childhoods were blighted by it.
However, walking along the bright, colourful corridors of Corpus Christi primary school it is hard to believe that there was such pain and terror outside these walls for so many years. Here you will find a thoroughly modern school equipped not only with white boards, a library, a good sized gym and a computer room, but with a fully equipped kitchen, a mindfulness room for meditation and a woodwork room where a life-size boat looks almost ready to set sail.
“On a daily basis we had shootings, petrol bombs, you name it,” says school principal Tiernan O’Neill as we tour the school. “We’ve had the whole regeneration process, which has had its own positives and negatives, but it has definitely dealt with the more overt criminality.
“You don’t hear Moyross so much in the news, but it hasn’t dealt with the social issues that underpinned all that, the alcohol abuse, the drug abuse etc.”
Tiernan has been working with the school for 15 years – five as a teacher, five as a home school community liaison co-ordinator and five as school principal – and says that it is “a fantastic community to work in”.
“They are fantastic kids and the vast majority of the parents are amazing, just in terms of resilience. They all want their kids to do well, but their lives are so blighted by the social ills that are out there, that it makes it very difficult to happen without the necessary support.”
Fr Tony O’Riordan SJ, the parish priest and chair of the board of management, says that by necessity the school has to offer more than just the State curriculum and has developed a holistic approach to the needs of local families.
“The children of Moyross have experienced poverty, trauma, violence and a legacy of violence in a community that was almost at civil war levels. They come with all that baggage and as a school we acknowledge that. We try to address those barriers and issues as part of delivering a curriculum. So we roll out, in school and after school, a whole range of things that we think are helpful, to help the kids process things a little bit and feel they are in a safe environment.”
Many of the classes in Corpus Christi are divided into stations or small groups where the children receive more one-to-one attention. The school also offers more therapeutic programmes such as mindfulness, equine-assisted therapy and a woodwork programme where the children open up about their lives while building a boat.
“Our woodwork teacher Toby has this amazing ability to engage with the kids,” Fr Tony says. “So while they are doing woodwork, they could be taking about novels or life, he gets them talking about things, they trust him and it has become a very successful therapy for the kids.”
Programme
By example Tiernan mentions one eight-year-old boy who had huge emotional issues who has been helped through the programme. “He had severely assaulted a number of family members to a level where there were multiple fractures and regular hospital visits. Nothing else was working so we decided to give Toby’s class a go.
“At this stage there was talk of institutionalising the child, which would probably have cost the State something like €100,000 a year. We engaged him in the woodwork programme and it was like he flipped a switch. He was absolutely gifted with his hands and it is incredible how engaging with the woodwork programme also enabled him to engage in the school.
“It was a release for him, to a level where he is now functioning 100% within the education system. So we have no problem getting €100,000 to institutionalise an eight-year-old, but it’s impossible to get €10,000 to run the woodwork programme that is enabling not just that child, but 40-50 others a week to access the curriculum.”
Last year Moyross parish once again hit the headlines in the media, not as a result of the violence of gang warfare, but because Fr Tony was forced to make an appeal for donations to pay the salary of a teacher in the school after the Department of Education had withdrawn funding.
Tiernan says the school was facing having 34 junior infants in one class “in one of the most disadvantaged communities in the country” when the “least they deserve is a small pupil-teacher ratio”.
“When you talk about early intervention, realistically a teacher would cost you about €30,000 a year and that intervention allows you to meaningfully engage with four and five-year-olds. If that is not done, when the kids are 17 or 18 they could be in care, heading for juvenile detention centres, into prison, into addiction services.
“We have kids who have cost the State hundreds of thousands, but if you invested in that child at four or five, none of that would have been necessary,” he says.
The school won’t know until the end of this month if they will have to fundraise for the teaching position again, on top of all the other extra-curricular activities that are only made possible by donations.
“We have been very lucky that we have been able to access support from other communities and generous benefactors who see we are trying to make a difference in these kids’ lives. At the end of the day everything we do here is underpinned by the fact that education leads to opportunities. That is what you are trying to do – to break that cycle of disadvantage and make sure these kids get to go on and be the best that they can be,” Tiernan says.
“Unfortunately the reality for us is that at a national level there is no recognition of the emotional and metal traumas that kids in communities all around the country are facing on a daily basis. There is no resourcing of therapeutic interventions.
Fundraising
“Everything we do in that regard is through fundraising. Without that, the academic gains wouldn’t be happening, because unless you deal with the emotional baggage and the psychological issues, you can’t enable them to access the curriculum. How can you when they are coming from homes where parents are strung out on heroin or there is domestic violence? They are the core issues that need to be tackled both in terms of working with the parents and the kids.”
The school offers adult education programmes both during the day and in the evenings, with everything from keep fit and cookery to self-esteem programmes on offer in an effort to help parents, but also to build relationships. “It’s that old saying that it takes a village to raise a child. So it is not just the school working in isolation – it’s the school, the community and the parents working together to maximise life opportunities for the kids,” Tiernan says.
“The solution to educational disadvantage and social exclusion is not rocket science. A lot of it is built around having a relationship with the families and community that you are working with. At the end of the day it is just about caring – that Christian message of care, love and warmth.”