The Berlin CDU parliamentary group sees education senator Astrid-Sabine Busse (SPD) as a “complete failure” and therefore wants to submit a motion for disapproval in next week’s plenum. This was announced by education policy spokeswoman Katharina Günther-Wünsch on Thursday. The Christian Democrats accuse buses of not doing enough to counter the shortage of teachers and classrooms and of not responding adequately to crises.
For Günther-Wünsch, the latter includes the fact that schools and districts do not receive enough support for the schooling of Ukrainian children and their accommodation. Furthermore, the districts did not have enough help in finding places for the future seventh graders. In order to remedy this in the future, the CDU calls for a container reserve. The time-saving construction of type schools in underserved neighborhoods must also be examined. Adequate funding for the Berlin School Building Campaign (BSO) is essential.
As reported, the lack of school space has taken on a new dimension: Despite multiple attempts to find additional capacity in large district groups, around 170 future seventh graders were still unprovided for on Thursday, as State Secretary for Education Alexander Slotty (SPD) announced in the Education Committee when asked by the CDU .
If no remedy can be found by this Friday, the children concerned must receive notifications in which no school name is mentioned: it is legally mandatory that the notifications must be sent out on June 3rd. Slotty named June 22 as the new target date for the last school place certificates and confirmed that, out of necessity, centrally managed and elite schools should now also give up rooms.
[We report weekly from the twelve districts of Berlin in our People newsletter. Free and compact: leute.tagesspiegel.de]
A comparable event has not been handed down for the past decades, not even after the arrival of the refugees from Syria. The tightening is probably not only due to the more than 4,000 students from Ukraine, but also to the fact that the school construction offensive is not progressing as quickly as it should: In addition to the corona-related delays, there is a shortage of skilled workers and building materials.
In addition, there are problems with the organization of the Berlin school building offensive: The billion dollar project is still considered a challenge, which is why experts advised buses to grant a third state secretary for the school building. The SPD state leaders Franziska Giffey and Raed Saleh decided differently: only two state secretaries were given buses, who are also just as inexperienced in administrative matters as they are.
In addition to the problems with the sluggish school construction offensive, the districts and the CDU also complain that the Senate played a counterproductive role in spontaneously gaining space for the refugees. For example, the education administration has set up high hurdles when the school authorities want to accommodate the welcome students in community rooms because of the shortage of classrooms: so much was included in a “checklist” including installing the window fittings (“easily accessible at a height of 85 to 90 cm”) stipulated that hardly any rooms could be generated if one kept to this “checklist”.
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The Marzahn-Hellersdorf education councilor Torsten Kühne (CDU) said when asked that he had “only acknowledged the “copied” paper from Busse’s house “with a mild smile”. It was “that kind of ‘help’ that nobody needs”.
Despite the acute shortage of teachers and space, the CDU failed on Thursday with its application to have these problems dealt with in the education committee as a separate item on the agenda. The coalition preferred to only talk about the shortage of day care centers. Therefore, only the current quarter of an hour was left for urgent school questions.
