THE community of Fivemiletown is “outraged” by a Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS) proposal to close St Mary’s Primary School by 2016, according to its principal.

On Monday night representatives from the managing authority told the school’s key stakeholders they had four weeks to respond to their proposal for closure.

Speaking to the Impartial Reporter the next day, principal, Marian Boyle said the school community would be contesting the proposal all the way.

Although no actual decision has been made yet, Mrs Boyle said parents have “a great many concerns and are very angry”.

“The closest Catholic Maintained schools are, on average, six miles away,” she explained, “Therefore many pupils would be expected to travel more than six miles to their nearest maintained school. This is completely unacceptable for primary aged children. Already, children who travel here, as their nearest school, are on a bus for more than the recommended maximum of thirty minutes, as conceded by those representatives of CCMS present on the night.” The criterion chosen for closure is the school’s enrolment number, which is believed to be currently in the mid to high 30s.

The Fivemiletown community is taking issue with this however, believing that this alone should not be reason enough to close the school.

Louise Stewart’s son, Dara, is in P2 at St Mary’s Primary.

“St Mary’s has only fallen short on one of the criteria,” she submitted, “Everything else is fine -- a good budget, good standard of teaching, good strong leadership from the principal.

“I have no qualms.

“There are two in Dara’s class -- I do take that on board. But he gets a lot of one to one teaching and the standard of education he is getting there is really good. He is coming on so well and he has friends in the school. He has learned to interact with older children as well as ones his age. All the children are very well adjusted and they all look out for each other -- it’s like a big family.

“That school is a credit to the teachers.” Mrs. Stewart said parents had come away from Monday night’s meeting feeling positive about their school’s prospects.

“We all came out of the meeting feeling a lot better than we had anticipated -- a lot of their facts and figures were not correct.

“Figures on the budget were not correct. The school will now, during the consultation, highlight the mistakes made and that may make a difference to the outcome of all of this.” During the meeting, parents and staff pointed out that the current enrolment in Fivemiletown is representative of the size of the Catholic community there.

“It is widely acknowledged that a small Catholic community resides harmoniously within a much larger non-Catholic community in Fivemiletown,” Mrs. Boyle explained, “Given the strategic importance of maintaining an isolated Catholic school within quite a large centre of population, and the amount of support received from our politicians and the wider community already, we are confident that the school can and will remain open.” But as a current parent of the school, Mrs. Stewart said she believed the timing of the proposal would impact on any potential enrolments for next September.

“We were told at the meeting that we have until November 28 to make comments. After that CCMS will take two months then to consider and make their recommendation to the Education Board. But their decision will not be made in time for parents considering whether to send their children here next year,” she explained, “The cut off for them is usually the end of December or beginning of January. People feel the timing of this is unfair.” The concerned parent said the school had met on three occasions prior to Monday night’s meeting with CCMS.

“We will meet again in the next week to discuss how we can steer the consultation process forward,” she added, “A lot of people in Fivemiletown are asking why is the school in this process when it has only fallen short on one of the criteria, and when other schools are falling short in more than one.

“CCMS couldn’t wholeheartedly answer that question on Monday night.” A spokesman for CCMS told the Impartial Reporter: “Like any of our consultations, we held three meetings on the one day to present our proposal the the key stakeholders.

“These meetings occurred on Monday, October 27 with staff, governors and school parents “CCMS presented its proposals for the future provision of primary education in the area to all stakeholders.

“There is now a period of four weeks consultation for all of those stakeholders to share with CCMS their views on our presentation.” To feed into the consultation, contact CCMS via post or email, consultation.stmarysps@ccmsschools.com.