© dpa
According to the Senate, investments in school construction in Berlin have reached an all-time high.
Last year, around 653 million euros were spent on this, as the Berlin education administration announced on Tuesday. Expenditure thus increased by 4.5 per cent compared to the previous year. Since the start of Berlin's school construction campaign in 2016, 21,840 new school places have been created, said Franziska Giffey (SPD), Berlin's mayor.
"This is a good success, but of course things must continue accordingly," Giffey emphasised. Above all, the Senate must take into account the increasing numbers of Ukrainian pupils in Berlin. "We will also have additional school place requirements there."
In some districts of Berlin, there are already complaints about the lack of school rooms for Ukrainian children and youths. In Mitte, the space capacities in the schools have been exhausted for the time being, said school city councillor Stefanie Remlinger (Greens). Almost 500 children from Ukraine are currently attending classes in the district, and 27 welcome classes have been set up there so far. The plan is now to teach three of the welcome classes in a music school and two in a youth club in the coming week. Remlinger assumed that there were 700 to 1000 children in the district who were not yet attending school and needed to be cared for.
The education administration has just sent the districts a checklist of which public spaces outside schools would be suitable for Ukrainian pupils, according to a spokesperson for the education administration. In addition, there is an exchange with the Senate Finance Administration about the financing of the additional needs. According to a report in the Tagesspiegel, problems similar to those in Mitte also exist in Pankow and Marzahn-Hellersdorf. In Tempelhof-Schöneberg, too, capacities for the 196 Ukrainian children are running short, according to a spokesperson. In the long term, only the construction of new schools is a solution.
More than 3,000 Ukrainian children and young people now attend school in Berlin. There are 319 applications for teachers for welcome classes that have already been examined, said Giffey. Of these, 72 had been hired, 20 of whom were of Ukrainian nationality.