The Palmerston Residents Association with Its Chairman, Vice Chairman, Youth Worker, Drink and Drugs awareness worker and the representative of the East Belfast Community Development Agency, met with the Assistant Senior Education Officer (Youth)on Friday 17 Oct 2008 the meeting was to establish the views of the Education Board in regard to Youth Provision in Sydenham East Belfast.
We wanted to raise with him the Associations concerns that an audit in the area would need to be carried out to establish the needs of the youth in the area. We also raised concerns regarding suicide in the area and the lack of facilities that are now in the area for youth who slip through the net of the local churches known as detached Youth.
The Association has felt for some time now that the need to try and give the youth in the area a sense of belonging in the community was needed, to help them restore confidence in the area and to try and bring about change of attitudes in the local youth. We have felt for some time that the youth provision in the area was none existent or that it is so much out dated that the local youth cannot identify with it.
The association believes that an audit should have been carried out in the area to establish the needs of the youth in the area, and also establish the feelings of the youth regarding the use of local church as a venue for a youth club, the disabled and mental health community would also have to be taken into account where programs would have to be improved to meet their needs.
We have felt for some time that if we want to have full inclusion of all the youth in the area it would have to be carried out under section 75, equality screening to enable the Education Board to reach the different nationalities that are now living in the area, also the disabled community and people suffering from mental health issue. We feel this would be the only way the Education Board could identify the needs of the area.
The Association attended this meeting to raise its concerns with the Education Board and attempt work with the Education Board to bring about change in the Sydenham area. We as an association felt that the Education Board would have been interested in our local youth and the problems they have, we assumed they would have been interested in finding out any problems they were having and work with the association on how they could be solved.
The association felt the Education Board would have been interested resolving the issue of an audit in the area and become aware of the needs of our community, some of which are disabilities, suicide and mental health. I as Chairman of the Residents Association have attended countless meetings with MLA's and other official bodies, and I have never experienced such a lack of interest as I found in the Education Board. In fact we had to remind the Youth officer that it was our children and other peoples children that we were talking about.
If this education officer represents the official thinking of the Education Board and represents the face of the Education Board then we are in serious trouble and the youth are in even bigger trouble. We now ask the Education Board to review the training of their officers in how to conduct themselves at a meeting of concerned residents. We would also question the training of the officer in attendance at the residents meeting he failed in many ways to grasp what the meeting was about or how to resolve issues that were raised,we would strongly advise the Education Board to issue this officer the basic tree structure of the board to give him some idea where the different departments are managed and who directs them.
The association is sorry to say that because of how the officer conducted himself at this meeting and the lack of respect he held for our community and its views, we felt there was no other action we could take but to close the meeting with the officer, we are sorry we had to take this action but we felt there was no alternative.
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