Where Our Children Went to School – Experiences in Rich Bavaria.

On this picture, you can see the school building where my daughter Maresa graduated from high-school after having spent the last two years of her eight-year stunt there. Like all our children, she went to the Ottobrunn Grammar School.

Consequently, between 1990 and 2015, we always had children in our family who attended this grammar school. In one year, we even had one child in every uneven grade (5th, 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th). That means we are a rather experienced “customer” of the educational institution “grammar school”. The same is true for the “primary school” – and I think I have earned the right to actually discuss schools in this country.

We selected Ottobrunn Grammar School because the way from our home in the Waldparkstraße Ottobrunn was only a little less than one kilometre. We had moved there in 1990, early enough for the start of the new school year. Since we did not wish to impose a long daily journey to school on our children, the distance and the way to school were our primary criteria.

The subjects taught in Ottobrunn were also to our liking: they offered languages still spoken today and mathematics. They even had a memorial stone in the schoolyard reminding people of the importance of “Love and Peace”. I rather liked that and found it adequate, because the school building did not really look that old, either.

As time went by, the school expanded in quantity, but not in quality. Like many grammar schools, the development was towards a de-personalized learning factory. But this is for another article.

Today, I would like to discuss the building, which slid deeper and deeper into a state of disrepair. Even worse: they found out that there was contamination by asbestos or other poisonous substances. Consequently, they had to tear down the Ottobrunn school building and build a new one.

What a nice coincidence that they already had a container school in Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn! Originally, it had probably been built as an interim solution for their grammar school. I assumed that it would no longer be needed when the Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn grammar school was finished.

Wrong! Because the Neubiberg (that is a neighbour of Ottobrunn) school had suffered the same destiny as the Ottobrunn school building. Consequently, the children in Neubiberg were the first to be transferred and they had to travel to Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn for quite some time.

As soon as the new Neubiberg Grammar School building was finished, the Neubiberg children were allowed to come back and the Ottobrunn children had to travel. Now they had to move to the interim solution and travel to Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn on all school days. Where they were taught in the container school building.

The Ottobrunn Grammar School building was mostly demolished, because they plan to build a new one at the same location. They said that renovation/restoration work is not economically sensible.

For my daughter, this meant that her daily way to school increased from one kilometre to about eight kilometres (or an S-Bahn train travel).

Basically, I find this rather outrageous, because, after all, we had chosen Ottobrunn for the closeness of the school. And then they move Ottobrunn – at least as far as schools are concerned –ten kilometres to the south.

Yet this is not all of it, either! What tops it all is that the children from Ottobrunn were a lot happier with their container interim solution than the children in the pretty and newly finished building in Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn at the opposite side of the street. They will probably still be happier when they move back to their new grammar school buildings in Neubiberg and Ottobrunn.

The reason is that you cannot or must not open the windows in the new building. Because, naturally, this building has been designed according to the latest building-isolation regulations – and the least expensive offer probably again got the contract. However, a good climate in “modern” buildings is an expensive thing. You can easily start getting a headache or worse after two hours spent in the building. Mind you, we are talking this phenomenon in our upcoming age of all-day schools. For me, this would have been a reason to go crazy when I was a child. …

The teachers, too, perceive the building culture in the new building as rather inconvenient. They are happy about every single lesson they can teach in the container school. I wanted to test it myself and also went to the new building. So far, we can still enter German schools without wearing a special badge or identification. For safety reasons, this will probably also soon be a thing of the past in our future all-day schools.

Doing my inspection – or rather my “feeling around” – I did not have a very good feeling.
Currently, they are busy doing construction work in Ottobrunn, too. Around the mid-term of next year, the children now being taught in Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn will return to breathing Ottobrunn air. But they say that in the new building in Ottobrunn, you cannot open the windows, either. And I am sure in Ottobrunn, too, the least expensive bidder was given the contract. Why can’t they at least again build houses with windows you can (and may) actually open?

Also, I am quite curious to see how long the new buildings in Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn, Neubiberg and Ottobrunn will last. I think this is another area where the half-life gets ever shorter.

RMD
(Translated by EG)

P.S.

Allegedly, they have a rule in Switzerland: 
As soon as the bidding process is finished, the least expensive bid is automatically removed.