Exciting update: We secured the last seminar available! See our Events page for details. Joseph is coming back to our school!!!

Joseph Driessen came to our school to deliver a seminar last year. Feedback from the session was positive and parents reported that it helped them in their parenting.

Unfortunately, Joseph does not have time to visit our school on this visit but he will be presenting a seminar in Dublin West Education Centre. This is a great opportunity to consider parenting strategies and get the perspective of an experienced professional in this area. Please consider attending. Places are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis so contact the Education Centre soon to secure your place.

We have received complaints from concerned members of our community about the road safety of our pedestrian families. Please remember, teach your children and most importantly role-model for your children - they learn from what you do so much more than from what you say!

• Cross the road at lights or designated crossings only - never jaywalk! This includes coming from the LUAS - always cross at the lights!
• Wear a high-vis jacket to make it easier for drivers to see you.
• When walking near cars, adults should be between the children and the cars.
• Cars, trucks and buses have large blind spots - you can fit 62 children behind a standard family car, all unseen by the driver! So keep your distance from all vehicles.

This building lark is a bit of a rollercoaster! We think rooms are ready and then they're not. We think we are staying put and then we're moving. We think we are moving in and then we're not. It has been a very interesting start to the new school year!

Five of our new rooms were certified safe and ready yesterday and so ​this weekend, we finally have the movers in! On Monday morning, we will move into 5 new rooms and we hope that we can move into the other three rooms next weekend.

​Tadhg's 2nd class and Bobby's 2nd class will move into the rooms they will be in for the full school year. Kidorama will move into their 2nd room that will be theirs for the full school year. Our support teachers will move into one of the rooms that will be theirs for the full school year.

​Julie Ann's class will eventually move into one of the three rooms we are getting next week but for this week, they are getting our favourite room in the school! This is the lovely room at the end of the block with wrap-around windows on it. 

​For this week, the builders need to hold on to the corridor outside the new rooms and so access to the new rooms will be from the outside only.

We have been waiting for this for the last 5 years. As the school grew organically, we were effectively a junior school and, while we have been practicing skills and were very lucky to have Coach Peter come in each year to give GAA skills training to classes from 1st class up, we have not before had children old enough to create a team.

​Shane will be talking with children in 3rd, 4th and 5th classes this week about setting up team training sessions, which will start at break times and may develop to taking place before school as we get closer to playing against other schools.

​The league is for children in 5th and 6th classes so this year we will be organising our own blitzes with local schools so that we are ready for next year when we will have a 5th and a 6th class and can hopefully enter a team. As we will have so few children in those classes next year, we hope that we may be allowed to pull in some 4th class children and so we are welcoming our current 3rd class to train with the team, just in case!

​This is very exciting for our school. Thanks to Shane for giving up his lunch break to work with the children on this. Watch this space for more about how its going!

We were very busy all summer on various projects. One very special project was the multi-sensory room in the suite of rooms that Leonie's class uses. This is top-of-the-range, specialised equipment made specifically for us based on the needs and talents of the children in our school as well as the shape and size of the room.

​We were very fortunate to have one family run a fundraiser over the summer, raising 1600 euro for our school, which went towards the cost of this equipment. Thank you so much to that family for their quiet work and determination on behalf of our school.

​Quite a number of children have been fortunate enough to visit this very special room. One little man has dubbed it "The Magic Room" and we think its quite fitting!

​The room includes a bubble tube with floating fish and lights with changing colours, a ball pit, flooring with various textures, large mirrors, robust foam frames suitable for climbing on, a projector showing a moving lava image and soft music. It is so blissful for all of the senses and we know it will bring joy to lots of people for many years to come.

​Massive thanks in particular to teacher Leonie who designed the room and put significant work in throughout the summer in making sure the room was ready for the new school year.

August/September 2017 has been our most successful start to a school year yet. Not only is it the first year since outgrowing our initial section of the building that building work will be completed in September (It took until November in 2015 and until October in 2016) but the retention of pupils and arrival of new pupils has been record-breaking for us.

We now have 350 pupils across 15 classes - three mainstream classes each of Junior Infants and Senior Infants, two mainstream classes each of 1st class, 2nd class and 3rd class, one mainstream class each of 4th class and 5th class and one junior class for children with autism, where we have children attending at Junior Infant level, Senior Infant level, 1st class level and 2nd class level. All classes are full, apart from mainstream 2nd class and 3rd class, where we have limited places available.

​We welcomed 10 new members of staff - Laura M, Ruth, Laura B, Tadhg, Stephen, Siobhan N, Hannah, Shane, Lindsey and Louise.

​As well as the 66 children who joined our school in Junior Infants, we were delighted to welcome 2 new children to 2nd class, 2 new children to 3rd class, 5 new children to 4th class, 3 new children to 5th class and 2 new children to Leonie's class. So a total of 80 new children in 78 new families. 

​Our staff have rolled out a new induction programme for our new staff members, which will hopefully have them feeling at home in no time! We are thrilled to see our Student Council take on welcoming our new pupils - they plan to meet the new pupils (those in older classes) this week and talk with them about how they can best make them feel welcome. We sincerely hope that parents are welcoming new parents to our community in a similar fashion - sometimes all it takes is a smile and a "Hello!" to change someone's day. And starting a conversation could be the start of a brilliant friendship! Go on, be brave, give it a try!

​We have just completed the creation of an amazing multi-sensory room, as part of the suite of rooms in the wing for Leonie's class. The room was partly paid for by a massive donation of 1600 euros from a fundraiser organised by one of our families over the summer. Indeed, some members of staff have been found barefoot and chilled out in this amazing room before and after school! Children in mainstream classes in need of sensory breaks benefit from this room also, which in turn makes all classrooms calmer and learning-centred.

​In the coming fortnight, we will enjoy an additional 8 rooms for learning in. This is unprecedented in our history. Indeed, there can't be too many schools that have ever filled 8 new rooms in one school year.

​It is a very exciting time to be part of the Citywest ETNS community. Thank you for being a part of it!

This Monday evening, 4th September 2017, we move out of the second floor of our school building and, we expect, will never again be a school over three storeys. Its the end of an era!

In September 2014, we moved up into the top floor of the building, occupying three rooms. Initially the rooms served as a 1st class room, a 2nd class room and a PE Hall, given that we had outgrown our previous Hall and built a school office in one corner of it - does anyone remember the first two years when the school office was in the small Junior Infant classroom where Orla is now teaching?!

​We had some fun carrying all the gym equipment up those stairs - this was back in the days before we had a functioning lift so it was all people power! And who remembers when we cable-tied numerous IWB rostra to make a stage and created paper stage curtains for the winter concert up there?!

We will never forget bringing our little Junior Infants (who are now big 2nd class pupils!) all the way up for their PE lessons - it would take so long to get up and down the stairs on their little legs!

It took us some time too to get used to the dormer wall - sure each of us only bumped our head once and we learned after that to stop a few feet from the edge of the room!

​It was a funny situation having a PE Hall on the 2nd floor of the building but we felt very lucky to have a PE Hall at all. Not too many schools in temporary accommodation have that privilege.

​We were so lucky to get an even better, new-and-improved PE Hall the following year, in November 2015, when we moved out into the front of the building, and the room that had been our PE Hall became a very large classroom for two years - Mary taught our current 5th class there when they were in 3rd class and she taught Eldon's current 3rd class there when they were in 2nd class. It was some task to fill those endless walls with displays but Mary and her pupils were always up to the challenge!

​As we graduate out into the front of the school, we are so pleased with the high spec of the new classrooms and relieved to once again, as we were 4 years ago when we had under 100 pupils, have only one storey of stairs to climb numerous times a day.

Nevertheless, we leave behind some very special memories from years that have been historical for our school. We wish Citywest and Saggart CNS just as many good and happy memories in the rooms and hope they enjoy the quirky spaces as much as we did.