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Renovate or build a new one?
Sports hall in need of renovation at a school in Darmstadt (archive image)
Photo: Uwe Anspach / picture alliance / Uwe Anspach / d
The Federal Schoolchildren Conference demands massive investments in school buildings in Germany from the coming federal government.
Ten billion euros for school renovations are necessary in a first step, it is said in the as yet unpublished election test stones of the nationwide student council - "without any conditions and without a municipal share."
Many schools are in a dilapidated structural condition, it says in the paper.
They urgently need to be renovated or even rebuilt.
"The total renovation requirement is even estimated at 50 billion euros - our program would only cover a fifth of the necessary investments and can therefore only be a starting shot," said Dario Schramm, General Secretary of the Federal Student Council, SPIEGEL.
It must become standard that pupils are included in the planning of schools: "Pupils spend a large part of their youth in these four walls and can therefore best judge their learning environment themselves," it says Requirements catalog.
Too often, their needs are "only considered as a marginal factor in the municipal development plans".
The election test stones for the federal election in September include a total of 13 points that the student representatives want to discuss with the top candidates of the parties in the coming weeks.
A selection:
The corona crisis has increased inequalities in the education system, write the students.
Programs to promote equity in
education
should be launched to counter this development.
"The current aid programs to achieve educational equality were in no way sufficient in the crisis situation and not enough in the focus of politics," says the paper.
In addition, the accessibility of school buildings and classrooms must become a matter of course in order to promote
inclusion
and joint learning.
Especially in older school buildings there is a lot of catching up to do in this regard;
In order to enable renovation and reconstruction, the federal government is asked to provide funding.
The Federal Schoolchildren's Conference also calls for better quality, but also cheaper
meals
for children and young people
at schools
.
It is incomprehensible that school lunches are subject to three different VAT rates nationwide.
The federal
student council considers the
fact that in some federal states
examination tasks
- for example for the Abitur or the secondary school leaving certificate - are not freely visible afterwards, but are sold by publishers, to be unfair: »The aim must be that every pupil is able to take the examination tasks of the previous years without having to pay additional high costs for exam trainers, for example. "
Further demands of the election test stones relate to a faster digitization of the education system, the expansion of democracy education and the support of anti-racism projects.
The requirement to include
school social work
in the catalog of benefits in the Social Security Code
is exceptional
. The federal government would thus be able to pay the specialist staff for social work directly and thus participate in the financing of multi-professional teams at the schools - a clever circumvention of the prohibition of cooperation that previously stipulated the state responsibility for the education system.