History of the school
The school opened in 1982. It is built on land that was originally owned by Killinarden House. Peter McArdle was the first principal and the five junior infant classes were housed in Knockmore Senior National School.
In September 1983 the new school building opened. It was built as a 16 teacher shared area school. During the 1980’s the school reached a capacity of over 600 children. Then numbers diminished and with some empty classes, the school began to share its premises with Scoil Chaitlin Maude until 2016.
In 1995 the school became part of the Breaking the Cycle Programme with an average class size of 15. This meant 6-7 extra teachers and the classrooms were sub-divided to fit the new, smaller classes.
Peter Mc Ardle retired in 2009 and was succeeded by Chris Meehan, who was the principal until 2016 (have a look at our history-themed videos in an interview with Chris about the school). Chris had taught in the school since its opening. Dearbhla Byrne took over the principalship in September 2016.
The school has two ASD units, which opened in 2015 and 2016. The pupil-teacher ratio is 1:6, with 2 SNA’S. There is also a state-of-the-art multi-sensory room to cater to the whole school.
The school currently has 12 mainstream teachers, an administrative principal (Dearbhla Byrne), four resource/learning support teachers, a support teacher, and a home school liaison teacher. Currently, there are ten SNA’s are on staff.