Welcome to our first Build Blog! We are building a new school to extend and develop our much loved existing school building and this blog will document our journey. Our school is housed in the old Dunally school, an old national Schoolhouse and Schoolmaster’s house originally built in 1858. Our democratic school for self-directed education was founded in 2017, and has gone from strength to strength ever since. Our numbers have increased from 15 to 80 over the past five years and we have many more students on a waiting list for future years. Due to this growth and the high demand for this unique educational environment we now need to develop our site and increase the footprint of our school buildings so that we can accommodate more students and become a centre for excellence for self directed education, where policy makers, educators, and learners may experience the potential of self direction.
As I write this we are getting ready to embark on PHASE 2 of our BUILD project. Phase One was mostly about land acquisition and securing funds and appropriate zoning for our new school extension. This was completed by the end of 2022. During this phase we managed to raise 165k in gifts and donations, secure 175k in a low interest short-term loan, purchase a 3 acre field to the rear of school, purchase a 2 acre site and cottage adjacent to the school and secure change of use planning permission for our newly acquired lands and building.
Phase Two is our BUILD phase and we are almost ready to submit our planning application. We expect a decision in August and at that point the architects will commence on the detailed design. By November we will be ready to go to tender and by February 2025 we plan to turn the first sod and start construction with a view to having the new building handed over and ready for use in September of 2025.
The design phase has been ongoing over the past few years and has included great inputs from the students, parents and staff here at school, our architects, Dougal & Deirdre at LID and 5 Masters of Architecture students, along with their supervisor Brian from the School of Architecture, Building and Environment in the Technological University in Dublin. It was a huge privilege and a great benefit to have the inputs of Gabriella, Claire, Finbarr, Sasha and Cormac. They each visited our school and listened to the students brief them on our needs and wants for the new spaces. The Masters students sketched and photographed the site. They were particularly interested in the school’s educational philosophy, how that manifests itself in the daily routines of the school in the existing buildings and grounds, and how the community thinks it might be expressed in the architecture of the new school. After several months of design work they then returned to present their ideas, some of which have been incorporated into the final design. Participating in this process was a real inspiration for our community. Finbarr created a 3D wooden scale model of our school site and buildings, complete with movable trees and ponds. He kindly left this model with us for a few months and during that time staff and students played with the model and moved buildings and landscape features into different locations. Our final design was very much inspired by this process.
Tomorrow we will welcome on site again our brilliant digger driver Willie and Engineers Cathal and Leo. Willie will be digging trial holes for site assessments for upgrading our septic and percolation systems and for the foundations for the new build. This, along with some final reports and plans from various engineers will complete the information required for our planning submission.
If you or anyone you know might be in a position to help us to build our new school and do your bit to revolutionise education please donate to our cause here. We are looking for major donors and benefactors who can give up to 100k to “build a room” in our new school and we are also looking for people to give a little by giving the cost of a coffee or as much as they can afford.
We will be giving weekly updates on our BUILD project from now until we open our “new” doors. Please get in touch if you want to share your own similar experiences or you have any questions or comments about the work we do!
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!