The online petition “Gymnasium Poing NOW” has set itself the goal of starting construction of the fifth grammar school in the district of Ebersberg in 2022. As of November 1st, 1760 people have signed. With their core demand, the authors have now failed in the Ebersberg district council. The elected officials have passed a resolution according to which parents, students and teachers have to be patient before a grammar school is built and opened in Poing. Significantly longer than requested in the petition.
The initiators argue that Poing is “one of the communities with the largest number of children in Germany” and that it would already “fill a high school”. It is “neither ecologically nor economically sensible that all students have to commute to the overcrowded grammar schools in the surrounding area every day”. In 2018, the project in Poing was approved by the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, and construction started in 2020 before the pandemic hit. The building plot for the high school is now fallow. The authors of the petition now fear “rapidly rising construction costs the longer the start of construction is delayed”.
In the Ebersberg district assembly, the crucial question was: Will the Poingen grammar school remain on the committee’s so-called waiting list – or will it be on the acute to-do list? Veronika Neu from the interest group Gymnasium Poing Now appealed to the district councils at the beginning of the meeting to remove the project from the waiting list. An intense debate followed in the district council. The SPD and ÖDP urged a faster approach; The CSU, Greens and FDP advocated the thesis that the project was urgent, but had to wait due to the financial situation of the district, which was not least due to the corona. The prognosis of the district administrator from the first planning to the opening: Experience shows that it cannot be done under four years.
The committee finally came to a resolution with a large majority, according to which the core requirement of the initiative remains unfulfilled: The Poing high school remains on the waiting list. However, a partial requirement of the petition is met: The Poingen high school will be included in the district budget for the year 2022 as requested. “Up to 1.35 million euros from remaining budget in 2021”, according to the decision, will be available for the planning of the school next year. It was also determined that another consultation should take place in October 2022.
The decision amounts to a compromise. Part of the responsibility for this was the SPD parliamentary group leader Albert Hingerl from Poing, who had appealed to the committee. The message must be: “Today we start planning and draw up a schedule,” said Hingerl. CSU district councilor Christa Stewens, also Poingerin, expressed doubts about the arguments formulated in the petition. “The fact that hundreds of children have to drive two hours to school lacks any objectivity,” said the former Bavarian Minister of Social Affairs, who stated that twelve of her grandchildren went to school in Poing, Markt Schwaben and Munich.
District Administrator Robert Niedergesäß (CSU) summarized the current situation from his point of view: For personal reasons, it is currently impossible to create and fill new engineering positions. But there is no other way to manage a project such as a new grammar school. According to the district administrator, “that there is no student on the street with us” speaks against an acute urgency. The Franz-Marc-Gymnasium Markt Schwaben could still accept students. He recalled that there is no legal right to have a high school in a community.
According to reports, the interest group is not dissatisfied with the decision in the district council. Even though the project was not removed from the waiting list as requested, a first step towards concrete implementation has been taken, according to the initiators. The vocational school, which has been planned for a long time, will probably be on the waiting list for much longer. This is to be built in Grafing-Bahnhof. In the district council meeting it became clear, however, that this project is of lower priority than the Poingen grammar school.