School delighted to benefit from hot meal programme
By Hayden Moore
STRONG activism across the Killinarden community bore fruit this week with the confirmation that Knockmore Junior School will benefit from the Hot School Meals Programme when they return in September.
Knockmore JNS will benefit from a redistribution of the resources allocated to the pilot initiative and they are thrilled with the news, which brings an end to their months long campaign.
Pupils wrote to the Minister in May asking for hot lunches
“We’re delighted that our kids will be getting the hot school meals, it’s been rolled out in the rest of the community the last number of weeks and it has gone really well,” Principal of Knockmore JNS, Dearbhla Byrne, tells The Echo.
“When the children come back in September, they will be walking into new class rooms in their new state of the art school, which is a refurbishment of the current building, and then the icing on the cake is that they will also be getting the hot school meals.
“I really felt that the community came together to get behind this, we had great help from politicians as well who were doing a lot of work in the background.
“We lead a full campaign and children in the other schools here in Killinarden, the big brothers and sisters of our kids, even made their own postcards to the Minister.
“It was a full Killinarden wide campaign, and that’s community power right there.”
The Hot School Meals Programme is a pilot initiative which was set up to provide regular nutritious meals to children to enable them to take full advantage of the education provided to them.
But for Knockmore Junior School, a recognised DEIS school, they were initially not allocated the meals despite Cnoc Mhuire Senior School receiving them on the very same campus in Killinarden.
The school started campaigning because of the disparity between the schools, which have families split across them at the different ages – creating an imbalance for young families.
Pupils wrote and designed postcards, parents wrote letters and the community signed a petition asking Minister for Social Protection, Heather Humphreys TD, to reconsider the decision.
189 schools were selected for the pilot programme, including Sacred Heart Junior and Senior Schools and Cnoc Mhuire Senior School, and now Knockmore JNS will be joining them.
In a statement to The Echo, Minister Colm Brophy welcomed the announcement.
He said: “This is really great news for the children, parents and staff at Knockmore Junior School and I’m delighted that the school will benefit from the trial Hot Meals Programme from September – it is an optimistic note to finish out what has been a very challenging year for all our schools.”
