St. Anne's Needs Your Help

This appeal is being made on behalf of St. Anne’s School and is a request for you to support us to raise money to enhance the educational experience of our pupils and their learning environment.

We provide education for children who have been assessed as having general learning disabilities in either the moderate or severe range between the ages of five and eighteen years. Some of our pupils have physical or sensory impairments and some have a diagnosis of autism. All of our children are amazing and fun to be with and always do their very best. Their learning will progress with the experiences we provide for them.

To do this effectively we need a large variety and vast amount of resources to cater for the very individual needs of our pupils to enable them to access the curriculum

As a primary school we follow the curriculum for Children with General Learning Disabilities. However fifty per cent of our pupils are of post primary age and are completing the Junior Cycle Learning Programmes at Levels 1 and 2. Because of the variety of needs and age groups across the school, providing resources is very costly as we endeavour to cover everything that we are required to within both curricula. Most of our resources are custom made for each pupil, for those that are not we have to make several copies as our pupils can no longer share within current restrictions.

We also have access to sensory rooms to provide therapeutic supports, sensory diets or sometimes just fun for our pupils. We need to access a variety of sensory toys and equipment to provide for individual needs and likes. Repairs and replacement of these can be very costly.

As a result of Covid – 19 we have separated our classes into bubbles for play times. Breaks are organised according to age groups and as you can imagine this has stretched the few items of play equipment we already have, to the limit as they can no longer be shared easily.

We do receive grants from the Department of Education but these do cover the basic costs of running our school most of the time, not to mention the nicer things in life such as play equipment or sensory toys.

Our fund raising initiative which was to be held in March 2020 was cancelled and already we are struggling financially.

We need your help now.

What will we buy? These are the items we have identified that our children will benefit most from:

€20,000 will:

-  Enable us to make additional specialist resources e.g.                                                                 cover costs of photocopying and additional paper/ink                                                               required laminators and printers for every class

 - Repair/provide laptop for every class that does not have                                                         one

 - Replace and improve supply of all curriculum based                                                                     resources and equipment and enough PE gear to provide                                                         separately to all classes

 - Provide portable barriers to divide play areas for                                                                          bubbles/ social  distancing

 - Provide outdoor sensory panels, magnetic dry white                                                                   boards with magnetic shapes, letters etc.

 - Provide indoor activities for wet weather break times e.g.                                                       games consoles, tabletop games/activities, CD players 

 - Go towards and help to alleviate high heating and                                                                        electrical costs. We are a relatively small special school but                                                    have similar number of classes to heat as a school with a                                                          much larger pupil population 

€50,000 will get us all the above plus:

 - Sensory room equipment e.g. .bubble tubes, projectors,                                                           music system, sound to light interactive toys, interactive                                                         panels

 - Funds to service and clean existing sensory room equipment

 - Purchasing specialist kitchen equipment for the Home                                                              Economics Room e.g. slow cooker, soup maker, food                                                                    processor/mixer, cooker etc.

 - Provide interactive white board for a classroom plus                                                                   software/installation

 - Large outdoor play equipment e.g. slide/swing/climbing                                                            frame etc.

 - Ride on toys (bikes, pedal cars, snickers) for  play areas

 - Install wheelchair swings

 - Provide adequate PE equipment

 - Pay ongoing annual subscription for Boardmaker                                                                          communication system (€170  minimum annually.

€70,000 and over will get us all the above plus

 - Resurfacing play area, replacing grass with resilient surfacing

 - Awning to cover play area to protect the children from the                                                    weather

 - Outdoor sensory panels, music panels, bench games

 - Purchase two additional interactive white boards plus                                                               software and installation

 - Fix roof leaks (for which funding was refused by DES as we                                                     will be getting a new building in a couple of years time)

 - Continue to support additional heating/electrical costs

We depend very much on fundraising to provide additional educational resources as described and any help we can get is very much appreciated. Thank you for considering our cause and please support it by donating even the smallest amount to us.