A CLARE PRINCIPAL has publicly backed school secretaries and caretakers in their efforts to secure pension parity and access to sick and bereavement leave equivalent to their colleagues in the education sector.
Industrial action is about to enter its first full week in Clare and across the county as secretaries and caretakers continue their fight to be classified as public servants by the Department of Education.
With secretaries and caretakers marked as lathair from their duties it has increased the workload and pressures on principals.
At certain locations across the county, principals have joined their colleagues on the picket line in an act of solidarity but principal of Inch NS, Conor McKenna has gone a step further with his public backing for their cause and has highlighted that secretaries such as Carole Linnane in trying to keep services running smoothly due to under-funding from the Department of Education.
He said, “Everybody plays their part, we view the staff here as a team, it is a collective effort, the success of the school is built on the effort of all the team members, Carole is a very important member of that, part of me feels it is an indication of the under-funding that has gone on in schools in recent years. Carole spends her days scrimping and scraping trying to find pennys in everything we buy and order into the school, she does untold work papering over the cracks from underfunding at Department level, if anybody deserves a bit more money from the Department and the Government it is Carole and her colleagues”.
All staff are fully behind Carole in her actions, he confirmed. “We fully support Carole in her action and the other secretaries, Carole in many ways is the first voice for people on the phone, she is the first face people see during the school day when they come to the door, she is well-deserving of anything they are campaigning for”.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, the Miltown Malbay man noted that the return to school is always challenging but it has been more difficult with a strike thrown into the equation. “The first four days of school are generally busy anyway but this brings an extra layer of a challenge added to the mix, we’ve managed fine but it is the little things that are adding up, communication and communication with parents, if something arises during the day you’re having to leave class or come down to the office to make a phone call. I’m a teaching principal so what is greeting me at the end of the day is an inbox of emails that have gone unanswered, calls that have to be returned, small things like that add up to make the burden of September a little bit greater”.
Maintaining levels of communication with parents and guardians is impacted when there is no secretary in the office, he flagged. “We even had an incident today of a child falling in the yard, we’d give a phonecall home to update the parents, if the parents miss the call you go back to class, they return the call and it goes unanswered, there is a lag in the communication whereas if Carole was here that communication is much more streamlined and efficient”.
Value of school secretaries in education settings will become more and more obvious, the longer the strike continues, Conor outlined. “There are certain things that out of support for Carole we can leave undone but the school has to function, the children have to learn, they are non-negotiable, the kids can’t be collateral damage in an industrial action but at the same time there’s certain things that only Carole does and that are her responsibility, the longer they go on the more people affected such as suppliers or orders being unpaid, there is a wider web of people that are going to be impacted by this, it is only as this web spreads out from the school that the cries will get louder”.
McKenna continued, “Trying to keep things going without somebody who you work so closely with and you have such a good working relationship with and who you know you can leave certain tasks to them, there is going to be a backlog is the number one thing, when Carole comes back and this is resolved in the hopefully not too distant future, she will have to catch up on her things and there will be bits that is left undone in the meantime”.
A dozen schools in Clare are no longer part of the Hot School Meals Scheme but Inch remains on the scheme, however their secretary Carole is tasked with organising the distribution of lunches. “Even today we had an issue with the delivery of lunches where we were left short with a few, they are experiencing their own technical difficulties but Carole wasn’t in the office to contact them to correct it so it went unnoticed until 12:20 when the kids were waiting to collect their lunches, it is those little things crop up during the day that Carole can pick up the phone which is what her time is for addressing those kind of issues, it is very difficult for anyone else on the staff to do the little things like that”.
