Ain't No Mountain High Enough For Belmont

Hi my name is Anne Burke I am the principal of Belmont Nursery School in Derry, Northern Ireland and we need help!!

I would love to claim that we are fundraising for something exciting and innovative but our cause couldn't be any further from that. We are fundraising for space.

We need dry, clean, pest-free space where we can store our play and learning resources.

We said goodbye to one of our stores in the new year as the roof was beyond repair. The consequence of that was that the resources in this store then had to be piled into another store which was already at capacity, this store itself is not fit for purpose – it is damp, mouldy and has pest control issues. Even at that, we didn’t have enough room to store everything, approximately 40% of our resources are now stored off-site in another school, with some also being stored in one of my bedrooms at home!

Changing over play/teaching resources is now a mountainous task. Staff cannot safely access the resources due to the haphazard manner in which they are stored, with many resources also being unavailable as they are stored off-site. The children are suffering as they are not being afforded the same play experiences (both indoors and outdoors) as previous year groups did. This is just not fair!

The Education Authority are fully aware that we are now without 1 store, with the remaining store being close to condemnation also. Health and Safety from the Education Authority have declared that the current storage arrangements are not safe due to over storage and the unstable manner in which boxes are stacked on top of each other. However due to funding issues the Education Authority will not be replacing the store.

The staff and I want to continue giving the children in our nursery, the fun, enriching learning journey that they deserve. We are not prepared to let them suffer due to budget cuts.

As a school, we got our heads together to try and come up with a plan. We have come up with a challenge, in the hope that we can raise the estimated £10,000 we need to resolve our storage dilemma. This £10,000 should cover the removal and disposal of the condemned store as well as the purchase and installation of a new store.

So what is the challenge I hear you say? The challenge involves a number of staff from the nursery and myself taking part in a 7 sisters peaks challenge. We plan to climb the Seven Sisters, seven mountains including Muckish and Errigal in the Derryveigh Mountain range all in one day which will take approximately 12 hours. We are currently in training and our planned date for the challenge is Saturday the 3rd of June. This may not seem like a big challenge to many of you but for my colleagues and myself, it is a pretty substantial feat as hill walking/climbing is not something that we do regularly. We really hope that you can contribute in any way possible to this fundraiser. It would mean a lot to the children and staff of Belmont Nursery School.