McKeon Group Staff Initiative: Upgrade of Sensory Room at St. Finian’s School

25/11/2020

2020 marks the 70th year in business for McKeon Group; you can catch up on earlier celebratory initiatives here: https://mckeon.ie/mckeon-group-celebrates-70-years-in-the-industry/

As part of the anniversary celebrations, we collaborated with Ashbourne & District Lions Club to search for local heroes through the www.AshbourneHeroes.ie community campaign. This theme of giving back continues as the Group, through its dedicated team are committed to a series of initiatives and voluntary construction projects.

Earlier this month, members of the McKeon team gave up their weekend to carry out a much-needed upgrade and total refurbishment of the sensory room at Saint Finian’s National School in Finglas. This room had been under-utilised for some time and, by bringing it back into use, SNA’s can now use the space to work with their students.

This particular project emanated from the McKeon in-house Innovation Boost Team and, after an initial meeting with Maria O’Connell, Principal at St. Finian’s, this space was identified as a well-deserving project. Typical of this industry, when our team reached out to a few of our suppliers, they were willing to provide the help needed to deliver this project.

In terms of the works carried out, the team commenced on Friday evening, stripping out all of the old furnishings, carpet and cabling, and giving the walls a fresh coat of paint. Saturday was a long day, with a new floor being laid and the team set about building wall units to close in all the open rack shelving. After another coat of paint and a final clean up, the room was ready!

Principal O’Connell expressed her gratitude to our team members Anthony Deane, Ruaidhri O’Connor, Shane Gargan, Lukasz Bromblik, Marcin Grabarczuk Donal Ryan, Sarah Giles, Chelsea Hanley, Veronica Lavelle and Aidan Doyle, who were supported behind the scenes (away from the real work!) by Aidan McEnroe and Sean O’Reilly. Also, a special note of thanks to a number of our subcontractors who supported the fitout of this important endeavour, including KPRO, Noyeks, John Doyle and NAC Flooring.

“… a heartfelt thanks from all here at Saint Finian’s National School on such an amazing transformation to our old, outdated and cluttered ICT room. For years this room has not been in use to its full potential. With Covid the need for our children to have a sensory room was personified…I kept it a little secret from the staff and on the Monday morning after returning from the Halloween midterm I invited the staff up to see the transformation. I cannot describe the response (especially from the SNA’S), they were overcome with emotion that you would do something like this for our school. It really means so much. The most vulnerable of our school community will have a space to process their sensory, social and emotional needs….We are forever grateful, it is only with support like this that our school is the school it is….”