Mom fears for daughter’s safety
Aging school grounds at junior high dangerous, she says
“It’s getting harder and harder. We’ve been fighting for seven years now, I’d rather not fight any more about it.” Amanda Lawlor
Twelve-year-old Mairin Lawlor of Dartmouth is looking forward to stepping up to junior high school when she starts Grade 7 in the fall, but her mother Amanda Lawlor is concerned about the dangerous conditions of the school grounds.
Mairin has hemiparetic cerebral palsy, and no functional vision in her right eye, and her mother says that the broken, pothole-ridden pavement around Caledonia Junior High School means an accident waiting to happen. For the last three years, she's been asking the province and the Halifax Regional Council for Education to take steps to make the uneven school grounds safer for students with mobility issues.
“They told me they'd look into it, the operations guy kind of laughed about it and said ‘They call it Baghdad here, because it looks like it's been bombed,' ” said Lawlor. “It's one of the worst locations around, and he didn't think they'd give him the money to fix it, but said we'll talk about it.”
So far, the school board's solution has been to create a five-foot-wide paved path across the parking lot to the wheelchair-accessible entrance on the side, with a plan to repave a 25-by-100-foot patch of the schoolyard. Lawlor says that's not enough.
“While the rest of the students have the run of the whole grounds all the way around the building, she'll be restricted to one small little area,” says Lawlor, on the grounds of the school, which opened in 1963. “That's the only place that's safe for her to be, and that's not fair. If they want to try and keep these 50- and 60-year-old buildings in operation, they need to make them safe for all the students.”
Lawlor first asked HRCE about repairs to the crumbling paved area around Caledonia three years ago, while Mairin was still in elementary school, knowing that someday she'd have to navigate them to get to class. She also contacted the province's Minister of Education Derek Mombourquette and the premier, Iain Rankin, with no response to date.
She says she has the support of staff at the school, and her MLA, Tim Halman, who's talked to officials in authority on her behalf, without much in the way of results.
For Mairin, having accessible facilities at her schools has been a struggle since she started her education at neighbouring Ian Forsyth Elementary School, and her hopes for experiencing new classes and making new friends in the fall are tempered by her fear of what might happen on her way to the entrance.
“I'm excited, but I'm not excited for the fact that the parking lot is a disaster zone,” she says. “I've been wanting to go to this school for a long time, and now with a parking lot like this, it's hard to want to come here because of the huge amounts of holes and ditches in the ground.
“It's getting harder and harder. We've been fighting for seven years now, I'd rather not fight any more about it.”
With a provincial election underway, Amanda Lawlor says she's waiting to hear what candidates have to say about improving conditions at Nova Scotia schools with aging infrastructure, and improved accessibility in the province.
Until any changes take place, she'll continue to press on for improvements to the safety of her daughter's school.
“It's not safe for her, she will get hurt. And it's my job as her mom to do everything I can to fix that for her. So that's what I'm trying to do, that's what I've been fighting for.”