School Buildings 21/6/08

Opinion Piece by John Carr, INTO General Secretary, on School Buildings

21 June 2008

Penny-pinching returns schools to dilapidated past

Scrapping the Summer Works Scheme will mean more leaky roofs and rotting windows, says John Carr.

THE opening line of LP Hartley's novel The Go-Between, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", has over the years become something of a proverb. It is generally used by those anxious to create distance between the way things were done in the past and how things are done today.

But, when it comes to school buildings there is very little distance between the past and the present.

Those of us who lived through pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland know well when and how the seeds of today's school building problems were sown. Low-cost, poor quality school buildings were the order of the day as scarce resources were stretched to the limit. Quantity, not quality was the order of the day.

Many examples of these buildings can be identified in all parts of the country. Most have flat roofs which hide Olympic-size swimming pools after a good shower of rain, and which drain into the classrooms below. Others can be identified by prefabs which circle the original building, showing how in some cases the planners got the local demographics spectacularly wrong. But one of the main causes of today's school building problem is less obvious to the general public. It is the simple fact that for years not a red cent was invested in the on-going repair and upkeep of the buildings. There was no financial provision for paint to maintain window frames. Even had there been a little spare cash for paint, there was no financial provision for a school caretaker to do the painting.

The same can be said in almost every area of school maintenance, from the electricity supply to the plumbing system. Just as the windows were allowed to rot, so too were water pipes left to corrode. Electricity supplies were allowed to become museum pieces, breaching all modern health and safety legislation.

All requests for help had to be made to the Department of Education which responded as best it could to emergencies. But in general terms the logic was that money could be saved by doing nothing.

A welcome change came about with the introduction of small annual grants for a caretaking service and to undertake routine maintenance.

A second more significant development was the introduction of the Summer Works Scheme. At long last money was available to tackle the inevitable result of years of neglect. Rotting windows were replaced. Clapped out boilers were upgraded. Dangerous electricity supplies were made safe. Leaking roofs were repaired.

It is fair to say that in many schools the improvements are obvious. Yet such was the backlog, the best that can be said is that a good start was made. The fact that hundreds of schools made applications for the scheme this year shows the extent of unfinished business.

Now at the first sign of economic change one of the first things to be cut is the Summer Works Scheme. The logic is that the Department will save money by not repairing leaking roofs and replacing rotting windows. This is a return to the past and is as short-sighted now as it was then.

There is no doubt that the economic downturn caused by unregulated corporate greed in the US banking/housing market, rocketing fuel prices and soaring food costs is impacting on all of us. Hard choices have to be made by many, not just governments.

But what house owner would deem it prudent not to spend money to fix a leaking roof? Very few is the answer.

Fewer still would take such a decision having already invested a lot of money in making plans to do such work. A sixth class child could see that this is simply a waste of current resources for no long-term good.

Yet this is exactly what government has done by cancelling the Summer Works Scheme. Today we see clearly how hundreds of thousands of euro have been wasted by the decision to scrap the scheme at short notice.

Cash-strapped primary schools have to find the money to pay for expert advice used in the preparation of applications for money under the scheme.

How many school computers could have been bought with this money? How many library books would this money have funded? How many junior infant classes could have been equipped for this amount? The net result is that in many schools, parents and local communities will have to dig deeper into their pockets. Already subsidising primary schools through voluntary contributions and fundraising to make good government under-investment, now parents will have to pay for these wasted reports.

At the same time we will see a return to times past, where increased costs in the future will be the price of the failure to tackle urgently needed building works.

Sadly, the past isn't such a foreign country after all.

Ends.