A radical plan to end 'white flight' from urban schools throughout the country has been put forward by the Catholic education authorities. The Catholic Primary School Management Association accused some parents of bypassing their local school because they do not want their children to be educated alongside ethnic minorities.
CPSMA Secretary Monsignor Dan O'Connor criticised the minority of schools that told parents whose first language was not English that schools elsewhere had language support services.
Equally, some schools were suggesting to parents of special needs children that they take them elsewhere, he said.
The proposal follows comments by Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, who in April publicly criticised "good Catholic parents" -- who made decisions with their feet or with their "four-wheel drives" to opt out of diversity in schools.
Dr Martin disclosed recently that he had received racist and quasi-racist mail after he announced a decision to reserve places in two Dublin schools for children of immigrants.
The CPSMA submission to Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe says parents in some areas are sending their children to schools in rural areas rather than urban areas. Often these schools are in the same parish.
The practice is putting pressure on schools that have a positive, welcoming policy on integration of the travelling community, children whose families do not speak English as a mother tongue and those with special needs.
"This leads to empty spaces in some schools and requests for extensions in other schools under the same patronage and within the same parish boundaries" says the Catholic Primary School Management Association (CPSMA) . . . thus, the local parish finds itself with empty classrooms.
The submission suggests that a 'common enrolment' policy for denominational schools in an area would be helpful. This would mean that pupils would automatically enrol in their nearest school or in the school where their siblings were already enrolled. If that were not possible, they would then go to the next nearest school.
Committees
Enrolment committees would be set up comprising representatives of the parish schools involved. Parents would be notified and submit details of their children's names, date of birth etc to these committees.
The children would be assigned to their nearest parish school or to one where their siblings were already enrolled.
The submission says that these common enrolment policies are already operated in a number of areas where schools were oversubscribed, such as Navan, Co Meath, Celbridge, Co Kildare, Shankill, Co Dublin and Letterkenny, Co Donegal.
The Association's submission suggests that the Department of Education and Science should not allocate extensions to schools under the same patronage and within the same parish boundaries until all the available space in the existing schools under the same patronage was filled. This was the official policy position up to 1990, but seems to have since lapsed, according to Msgr O'Connor.
He rejected suggestions the suggested policy would amount to social engineering, saying it would promote integration and better use of resources.
The submission says that all schools should have a positive welcoming policy for children of the travelling community and that the needs of children with special educational needs should be met by the local school where possible.
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