When it comes to first days at school it is often the parents’ anxiety that requires most attention, says school principal Sinead O’Meara.
Moments beforehand, 50 new junior infants spilled into two classrooms at the Educate Together national school in Belmayne, north Dublin.
As parents watched on, they filed around their tiny desks, laden with assorted toys and learning materials. There were a few tears but, as Ms O’Meara knows well, most of the nerves were among the adults.
At the doorway, a mother flapped air in her face: “Someone take me away,” she said half-jokingly.
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On the way in, John McWilliams watched his five-year-old daughter, Darcy, prepare for her first day.
“It’s kind of a moment of pride I guess,” he says. “It’s a transition in life, you feel like you are preparing them the best you can and now it’s over to them.”
He has articulated what many on this Friday morning are feeling: the pride, possibly a reluctance to let them go etched in their faces.
Isla (5) settles into her table. Her father, Stephen, says she was up earlier today than on Christmas morning. “It’s her first day but she is doing great, which is calming me down,” her mother, Emer, adds. “She seems relaxed and excited.”
‘If someone was taking my [pulse] it would be like 200 bumps per seconds. It is what it is’
Belmayne Educate Together has 430 students. It opened in 2008 but recently moved from prefabs to a new building, itself surrounded by emerging housing estates and apartment buildings. Outside its perimeter, diggers and construction trucks carve up the ground – there is a palpable sense of new beginnings.
Malgorzata Feola’s little boy, Daniele, was also beginning his journey into education.
“If someone was taking my [pulse] it would be like 200 bumps per second,” she says. “It is what it is. In Poland kids start a little bit later when they are six or seven. Here they are so little.”
Chair of the board of management but also a mother of one of the 50 new pupils, Carol Norton is a little calmer; she knows the advance work staff have put in.
“He was prepared for it,” she says of her son, Elliot (4). “I think the pre-school years really helped; he was ready.”
It is the first day in three years that parents could settle their children in the classroom. Now that Covid restrictions have eased, they loiter, look on and then move to an adjoining room where members of the parents council serve tea and coffee.
Ms O’Meara explains that during the summer break parents are well briefed on how the process will work – if a child is upset, parents will still have to leave the room with everyone else. But they are close by. Trust and communication is the ethos here, she says.
“I think the class is more inclusive and the parent body is more inclusive,” she says of the difference in first days from previous generations. “We don’t just have white Irish Catholics anymore. I think it’s more easy for the children.”
Outside, in the room next door Marija Blagojevic settles into a chair. She is shaking a bit, she says, having left her son Stefan (5) on the other side. He is fine though.
“We were trying not to act very chaotic because of Stefan,” she says, smiling, of the morning’s preparations. “But I think my husband and I were very chaotic.”
Stefan is dressed entirely in Spider-Man regalia which lend him “special powers”. Their friends travelled over from the UK just to see him off on his first day and they will be at the gate when he finishes. “It’s going to be a special day for him,” Marija says.
