'Cure our vandal nightmare with a new school'
DRUNKEN rampages by teenage vandals have caused an estimated £10,000 damage in a year at a Moston primary school.
New Moston Junior School's headteacher says facing up to anti-social behaviour is part of everyday life, with vandals smashing windows and roofs, and leaving condoms, drug packets and broken glass in play areas.
Over the summer the school had to replace a dozen double glazed window units due to vandals. Then it fell victim to the blight of lead flashing thefts from roofs, which led some parents to withdraw their children from classes due to water leaking into corridors.
Headteacher Claire Berry has insisted she would close the school if it were unsafe, but admits the existing school building, which is over 70 years old, needs replacing.
She said: "The situation in our school is that the building is past its sell-by date and desperately needs replacing. We have got big maintenance problems because of the old building, compounded by the fact our school is suffering from a lot of anti-social behaviour."
The grounds of the Moston Lane East school border Nuthurst Park and teachers believe this is part of the school's security problem.
She added: "The average person would be absolutely horrified by the amount of damage we have in our school. At any one time there will be large groups of teenagers drinking on our premises. They're rampaging around the grounds. We found all sorts of things in the nursery area - condoms, drug packets. On one occasion in the nursery gardens somebody had broken a bottle and stuck it in the ground with the shards upwards, ready to cut a child to pieces. It's totally demoralising because we are getting complaints from parents but we are really working our socks off to keep our school safe for our children."
New Moston Juniors is on a target list of city's schools to be replaced with Building Schools for the Future money, but the first wave is secondary schools only.
And local councillor and New Moston Juniors governor Cllr Henry Cooper has admitted that schools in worse condition will have to be prioritised first.
He added: "It's because the school is one-tier. That's where the problem arises - we want double tier schools to stop them getting on the roof. Everyone would like a new school, but a new school is not going to stop vandalism."
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