Some rural schools will lose full-time teacher
SMALL rural schools are facing the loss of a permanent staff member if the proposal to separate learning support hours and resource hours goes ahead. Currently, many schools can combine the hours, to offer a full-time post to one staff member. Now, the learning support and resource teachers will be forced to travel between schools to complete their hours.
Critics of the move say that valuable teaching time will be lost unnecessarily because small schools, i.e. those with four mainstream teachers or fewer, will be required to share two different teachers, one to cover the learning support hours and another to cover the resource hours.
They say that working in a small school it would appear to be a much more logical solution to combine these hours to make one full-time post based in school, rather than two part-time posts. The change would also mean increased costs for the Department in terms of travelling expenses to be paid to two or more travelling teachers.
Lorraine Dempsey of Ballyoughter NS said they had hoped to have a permanent learning support/resource teacher next year, but with the proposed changes, they won't.
'It will mean we have a teacher who travels to another school to complete his or her hours, while someone else would come here to do the remaining hours,' she said. 'Resource teachers and learning support teachers need to be left as they are. The model they had was working, and they are an invaluable support to the school. I know of other schools that are in the same position. Financially it doesn't make sense.'
