Clubs take care of the children

Created: 2022-06-02 06:18

By: Stefanie Zipfer

The children of refugees from Ukraine also have to be cared for (symbolic picture).

© dpa

Daycare places are particularly rare in Dachau and Karlsfeld.

And now there is a new task for the municipalities: the accommodation of children from the Ukraine.

Dachau/Karlsfeld – In Dachau and Karlsfeld, daycare and kindergarten places have been scarce for years.

Nevertheless, the municipalities must also ensure that Ukrainian children are looked after.

The solution is now so-called low-threshold offers, in which the children are primarily to be prepared for school enrollment.

In the state capital and the surrounding towns, day care places have been in short supply for years.

While the influx into the region remains at a high level, the municipalities are finding it difficult to find staff for their care offers.

The result can also be observed in Dachau and Karlsfeld: Parents have to worry about finding a childcare place for their offspring.

The utilization of day-care centers and kindergartens is constantly at 100 percent.

Those responsible in the town halls were all the less pleased when the federal government reorganized the care of Ukrainian refugees last month.

As reported several times, the provisions of the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act no longer apply since June 1, but the Hartz IV rules of the Social Code.

This means that the municipalities should not only take care of the childcare of the refugees, but now also of the accommodation of the families.

An almost hopeless undertaking in the highly competitive housing and skilled labor market in the Munich metropolitan region.

However, being aware of the precarious staffing situation in the day-care centers, the Free State has proved to be so accommodating that the Ukrainian children do not necessarily have to be admitted to the regular facilities.

Instead, “low-threshold care offers” are sufficient.

You can find more current news from the district of Dachau at Merkur.de/Dachau.

The Dachau city council therefore decided on Tuesday to award this support service to the Bonauer Academy and the Rubiki association, a Russian-speaking association for education, culture and integration.

The Bonauer Academy, in cooperation with the district youth council, had developed a concept for preparing Ukrainian preschool children well before school started in September.

The city council is providing 20,560 euros for the financing.

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The Rubiki concept envisages different teaching elements, for example German and painting lessons as well as movement and dance lessons, which are led by specially trained teachers.

6800 euros are available from the city.

The city council saw the two offers as a first step towards the integration of the Ukrainian children.

According to city councilor Sophie Kyriakidou, they contribute “to the emotional stability” of the refugees and would promote “friendship between peoples”.

In Karlsfeld, Mayor Stefan Kolbe is less euphoric.

As in Dachau, there are "long waiting lists" for the community care facilities: He considers it almost impossible to accommodate the children of the Ukrainian refugees in the standard facilities.

Like Markus Haberl, Head of Social Welfare Office at Dachau, he cannot yet put an exact figure on how many places are missing in the day-care centers and kindergartens in Karlsfeld.

One thing is certain: in Karlsfeld, too, the low-threshold offers, for example in cooperation with the sports club, will be the solution, at least in the short to medium term.

Kolbe emphasizes that in the context of this care "the preschool children are most important", the second priority is then given to children whose parents work - where it is "about livelihoods".

Basically, however, he sticks to the criticism he expressed weeks ago that the municipalities are being expected to do too much when it comes to looking after refugees.

With the change of legal regime on June 1, the Ukrainians should “now be able to move freely.

When they're gone, they're gone."

In contrast to the asylum seekers in the wave of refugees seven years ago, nobody would know how long the Ukrainians stayed in Germany today.

“These are mainly mothers with children, the husbands are fighting somewhere in Ukraine.” These people, Kolbe says, “have other problems than a place in kindergarten”.

Like Haberl in the Dachau town hall, who in the coming weeks will also have to fill a gap in the need for 271 childcare places for non-refugee children, Kolbe still assumes "that we'll manage somehow."

In preparation for the coming kindergarten year in September, department head Haberl is currently comparing the number of daycare registrations with the number of registrations for Ukrainian refugees in the residents' registration office and hopes "that we will eventually get closer to a number" that "could be reliable" for the autumn.

Speaking of getting closer: Karlsfeld's Mayor Kolbe would like politicians from Berlin or Munich to "simply work at a key point in a town hall".

Then such unreal decisions might not be made in the future.

At the moment, "politics are just too far away from the real thing"!