Update from Principal May 18th
Update from Principal
18th May 2020
Dear Parents and Pupils,
I hope this message finds you all well and in good form. I’m sure that you all, like ourselves, have some ups and downs in these strange times. We can all just continue to try do our best, keep up our hygiene routines, socially distance when we need to, get a bit of exercise and be kind to each other at home.
Today sees a little relaxing of lockdown rules. One of these allows our teachers to access the school building as necessary and many schools are taking this opportunity to return books to children that have been sitting in classrooms since March 12th. We too, are planning to organize the return of books and book boxes. With a large number of families in our school, we decided at our recent staff meeting that it would be easier and safer to return books by delivering them to you, rather than try to allow people come to the school building. (If we were to allow every family just a five-minute window to come into the school, we would need over 13 hours!)
Therefore, we plan to organize all the books over the next few days in school. Then on Wednesday and/or Thursday we will deliver them to everyone. We will give you notice of when and where we will deliver to your area. (Depending on how quickly the organization goes!) In many parts of the town, we will arrive at a set time and families can come to the car/van delivering the books to collect them. For families in the country areas, we are organizing to do a delivery run on Wednesday and/or Thursday afternoon to your doors. Our thanks to Shane Ahern of Ahern Fuels who is going to assist in these deliveries. We will have a timetable which we will email to you and put on the website to make what we hope will be a smooth return of your schoolbooks. Please keep an eye out for our texts.
As you know, a certain number of the schoolbooks that the children use are from the school book rental scheme and will need to be returned to the school for next year. Therefore, we are proposing that in the week starting June 15th, we will organize for you to return these books to the school. Hopefully, with a run of nice weather, we should be able to organize this without people having to enter the school building. More to follow on this later.
This brings me to the final message from the staff meeting for you. When school comes towards its normal end in June, books get finished and teachers will do different topics to end the year. These topics are often more relaxed and enjoyable as classes celebrate a good year’s work. Our children are entering their eighth week of distance learning and we feel that it would not be possible for them to continue with the volume of work that is presently being suggested until the end of June. Therefore, we plan that from the week beginning 8th of June, teachers will start to change the amount and the feel of the work for children, replacing the more formal learning with project work, free reading and life skills, just as we would do if we were in school. We would ask that in the three weeks until June 8th, children would do their best with the work programmes set out and we will do our best to enjoy the last three weeks then.
Thank you for your time in reading this message. We miss having our school open and we miss working with the children every day. Keep up your communication with the teachers and myself. It is great to get feedback and to have contact, however remote. Most of all, keep safe and look forward to the time we will be back together again!
Dermot Dunphy,
Principal
