Pupils from the St Therese and Poole RC Pri­ma­ry Schools will both be housed at the down­stairs lev­el of the St Therese RC Pri­ma­ry School in Rio Claro, un­til re­pairs are com­plete.

The chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Catholic Ed­u­ca­tion Board of Man­age­ment (CBM) Sharon Man­groo re­vealed this yes­ter­day. How­ev­er, the de­ci­sion does not sit well with the Par­ent Teacher As­so­ci­a­tion (PTA) pres­i­dent of the St Therese School.

“We are not budg­ing and we are de­mand­ing the right to oc­cu­py our school,” charged St Therese PTA pres­i­dent Eliz­a­beth Cor­ban dur­ing a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day.

In 2019, fol­low­ing struc­tur­al is­sues with the Poole RC Pri­ma­ry School, 88 pupils were re­lo­cat­ed to the ground floor of the St Therese School while 76 St Therese pupils were moved to the up­per floor.

The St Therese par­ent body was told then that it was just a three month arrange­ment.

How­ev­er, a ter­mite in­fes­ta­tion led to the di­lap­i­da­tion of the floor, walls and fur­ni­ture. An elec­tri­cal is­sue last No­vem­ber re­sult­ed in St Therese par­ents keep­ing their chil­dren home. How­ev­er, class­es for Poole RC pupils con­tin­ued.

When school re­opened on Tues­day, St Therese’s par­ents protest­ed what they said were the un­safe con­di­tions at the up­per floor of the school, and Cor­ban de­mand­ed their pupils oc­cu­py the ground floor alone.

Cor­ban in­sist­ed all the 164 pupils would not be able to fit com­fort­ably, and it was al­so a safe­ty con­cern.

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Man­groo said elec­tri­cal works were on­go­ing and she was in the process of get­ting the da­ta on the ma­te­r­i­al need­ed to do the work on the floor­ing.

“We will be very will­ing to ac­cept do­na­tions if any­body wants to as­sist with that and we are work­ing along­side the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to get the floor­ing changed,” she said.

Man­groo added a meet­ing was held on Tues­day and un­der the di­rec­tive of the school su­per­vi­sor it was agreed that pupils from both schools would oc­cu­py the ground floor.

Re­spond­ing to Cor­ban’s ob­jec­tions, Man­groo said there is no oth­er op­tion at this time.

“We do not have an­oth­er prop­er­ty to of­fer so both schools are lo­cat­ed in the build­ing and we are do­ing the best that we can for both sets of stu­dents. The stu­dents of Poole are as en­ti­tled to school­ing as the chil­dren of St Therese.”