Facilities
Ours is a 2 storey building with lift access for those with impaired movement. We have extremely well-equipped rooms for the practical subjects, which have a seperate annex to the rear of the main building. The room allocation is two to both Metalwork and Woodwork, and one to Technical Graphics. There are 5 exits off these specialist rooms. Other specialist rooms on the ground floor include : an Art room, 2 Music rooms, a Prayer room and the Chaplains room.
There are 4 general classrooms downstairs and all of the administrative offices. In addition the school has a large General Purpose Area (with a convertible stage), a canteen, a staffroom along with toilets and cloakrooms. The Career Guidance office and the Programmes Co-ordinator’s office are also located on this floor. There are 5 exits from the building.
Upstairs we have 6 general classrooms, 2 Home Economics rooms, 3 Science laboratories, a Demonstration Room and a Geography room. A stairway occupies either end of the building in addition to the main central stairs. Our Home Economics kitchen and the Demonstration Room have been renovated over the past number years to ensure that our facilities are always up-to-date.
Adjacent to the main building are 2 sets of prefab buildings, housing 7 classrooms in total. Our Sports Complex is located less than 2 minutes walk away and we enjoy the use of a football pitch, athletics area and all-weather basketball courts on our own grounds.
Current I.C.T. provision:
Carrick-on-Shannon Community School was one of the first schools in the country to purchase a computer. We continue this tradition of being a leader in the area of ICT through our unique partnership with Cloudschool, an SME based in Co. Meath.
This year we became the first school in the world to use Kangaroo PC’s in one of our computer rooms. The Kangaroo PC is considered to be the world’s smallest desktop computer and requires only one fiftieth of the electricity needed to run a traditional desktop computer.
Carrick-on-Shannon Community School is also the first school in the world to employ a system which allows our Computer Aided Design software to be shared by all computers on our internal network.
Other things you should know about ICT in our school include:
- Three fully equipped Computer Labs
- All classrooms equipped with a Data Projector and a networked PC – providing access to the school’s administration database, the internet, and curriculum materials (both locally and externally developed)
- All computers have Microsoft Office Professional
- All students have a Microsoft 365 school email address and access to the full Microsoft Office suite. This can be downloaded to up to five devices.
- Software for a range of subjects,in addition to curriculum materials researched/developed by staff and available via the school’s network for teaching and learning.
MEDIA STUDIES
Our school is fully equipped with a radio studio that enables students to record advertisements and short programmes, as well as facilitating broadcasts around the school. Our Transition Year students have streamed broadcasts on the internet over the last number of years.
Facilities in the studio include: a full mixing desk, media player, news recorders, a computer with modern recording software, and a phone line for live sports updates.