School’s out for Mary as she bids farewell to St Senan’s NS
THERE ARE certain faces which have become completely synonymous with St Senan’s School over the years.
One of those is Mary Morris who has taught there for a whopping 38 years. However, the end of an era is well and truly dawning now as Mary calls time on a wonderful career which has seen her oversee the education of a couple of generations of students.
St Senan’s school was started up in 1978 and just a year later, Mary was brought on board by the board of management which included Fr Ffrench, along with fellow school stalwart Henry Goff. They were drastically different times and over the past 38 years, Mary has seen a lot of change to both the education system and the school.
‘ There were only 12 teachers when I started,’ she recalls. ‘Now I think there’s around 38 or 39 teachers in total. Pupils only went up to fourth class and classes used to contain around 40. There was no such thing as learning support or anything in those days, you really just had to get on with it.’
Significant progress has been made in intervening years and, thanks to people like Mary, St Senan’s is now a state of the art school for generations to come. She must have made a significant impact on some of her past pupils, as several of them followed her into the teaching profession and 10 of the current staff are past pupils of hers.
Mary will now be sorely missed by her colleagues, who threw her a farewell party at The Riverside last week along with an assembly in the school where she was presented with gifts from the Board of Management, Staff and Parent’s Council, along with a bouqet of flowers from Elaine Marsh, who would have been in her very first class.
As for the future? ‘I don’t know really,’ Mary smiled. ‘I won’t take on anything for the moment. I’ll just take some time to myself now and see what the future holds.’