The two women are standing next to each other in the future school building on the grounds of the Schwabing hospital and they get enthusiastic. These wide, beautiful corridors, this high ceiling, the lots of light in the south-facing rooms, these large old windows with wooden frames – project manager Helga Engel from the Munich spatial development company is always enthusiastic when she is here. Headmistress Angelika Moosburger is also happy. “These bright, airy rooms will do the kids good,” she says. But it will be several years before the school for the sick moves into a new school building.
The listed house 9 on the grounds of the Schwabing hospital is more than a hundred years old. The city council decided in July that it should be the new home of the school for the sick. The school is currently housed in other rooms on the hospital grounds. But they are needed elsewhere, and the school also needs more space: the department for child and adolescent psychosomatics at the Schwabing Clinic is growing, and the school for the sick must also grow with it. It’s not children with broken legs or appendicitis that go there, but children with depression or eating disorders.
Special education teacher Angelika Moosburger heads the school for the sick in Munich.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
Angelika Moosburger has been working at this special school for ten years, for four years as headmistress. The school has 100 places, half of them for children from child and youth psychosomatics, the other places for children from other wards such as oncology or surgery. A total of 170 children and young people learn at ten other locations in Munich. The school for the sick in Schwabing will soon be relocating, first to a three-storey container building in the summer and then to the converted house 9, probably in 2029.
A day-care center is planned on the ground floor of the house, and the first floor is intended for the school for the sick. In the new building, students will have more space, they will have rooms that are tailored to their needs, bright and modern, a staff room and an outdoor area for breaks.
Before that, however, it has to be rebuilt: the windows with the wooden frames, for example, are processed, says project manager Helga Engel. The panes are removed, the grout too, the old paint has to be removed, then it’s repainted, the panes are put back in place and new grouted. And that for every single window. Some of the pipes in the house date back to 1908, they have to be replaced, walls torn down and rebuilt.
The old high windows will be preserved, but first have to be prepared.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
The new school building is older than the school itself, which was founded in 1984 for the municipal clinics. If it is foreseeable that a child will remain in the hospital for six weeks or longer, then it should attend the hospital school – if the state of health allows it. “The children usually like going to school here,” says Angelika Moosburger. “It distracts them from the examinations and everyday hospital life. School is a piece of normality for them.”
Ten students sit in a classroom and are given assignments in German, math and the foreign languages. A lot is the same as in other schools: you do group work, art projects and trips to the zoo or the German Museum. But some things are also different: Children from all types of school learn at the school for the sick, from the first to the twelfth grade. Each child has an individual curriculum, there are no grades. Unless children urgently need a grade in a school year to move up a grade, then they sometimes write a homework assignment at the school for the sick. Some also write their Abitur or high school diploma here.
Special educators and vocational school teachers, special education teachers, teachers from elementary and middle school, junior high school and high school teach at the school. The teaching can hardly be compared to that at the other schools. Because the students here are also patients. Children and young people who have cancer or are waiting for a donor organ do not come into the classroom, the teachers come to them in the sick room. Nurses train the teachers how to infiltrate patients whose immune systems are not working, what they can and cannot take into the rooms.
The most important thing: always pay attention to how resilient a child is
An important prerequisite for being able to work at the school for the sick: flexibility. “We always have to coordinate with the medical staff to know how resilient a child is,” says Moosburger. “Medical treatment has priority, we’re trying to fit in.” Some children are only allowed to be taught while lying down, others have an IV stand that sometimes beeps during class.
For some, a fixed timetable is not possible because the teachers are on the ward all day and always teach when there are no ward rounds, no X-rays are due, no treatment. Again and again doctors offer medical training for the teachers.
Ulrike Kalmes is a primary school teacher and has been working at the School for the Sick in Munich for 16 years.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
The lessons at the school for the sick are more than German and math, says teacher Ulrike Kalmes: “We philosophize, think about life, about happiness, about hospitals.” Often it is also about strengthening the self-confidence of the children. They do yoga, practice giving presentations in front of a group or rehearse how best to explain to their classmates in the old class that they have diabetes and what it means.
The teachers are also in contact with the children’s actual school, they coordinate the content of the lessons and discuss the transition back to the old class. Because that’s always the goal, says headmistress Moosburger: “In many cases it works. And it’s very important for the children to have this perspective. That supports healing.”
The children attend the school for the sick for an average of three months, some much longer. Not all children can be healed. It happens again and again that a student dies, says Moosburger. Every teacher at the school experiences that. That too is one of the very special challenges at this school.