Whole swarms of children and teenagers in their prime school age, that struck some residents as strange at the end of last week. The many children should have been in school at that time, and this old farm near Deutelhausen in the municipality of Schachen, which was abandoned for a long time, is certainly not a school – at least not a school that is run by the state itself or approved as a private school. There is suspicion in the room that people from the lateral thinker milieu have set up their own school there – far away from state supervision. On Wednesday, the government of Upper Bavaria and the district of Rosenheim banned this school from operating with immediate effect.
According to the government, the notices are directed against “a private association” and against a person who is no longer allowed to act as a teacher and head of this school. The owners and tenants of the farm also received notices, because the secret school operations on the ailing property also violated building law.
The government of Upper Bavaria and the Rosenheim District Office currently assume that a total of around 50 children and young people who would be in the first to ninth grade, depending on their age, have been taught on the site.
Private schools require government approval, the statement said. This approval depends, among other things, on whether the school “corresponds in its teaching objectives, its facilities and the training of its teachers to the public schools”. The blown underground school in Schachen could not have been approved, nor was there a corresponding application at all.
The fact that the many children on the farm weren’t in a proper school during normal school hours shouldn’t have meant anything in itself. Because parents who do not want to expose their children to the regular corona tests in school or who reject the mask requirement that initially applies until October 1st can still cancel their offspring from classroom lessons. These children would then have to complete compulsory schooling via distance learning as an alternative.
At first, it was not clear to the district office either, according to its own statements, whether only a private study group met for simultaneous distance learning on the farm in Deutelhausen or whether parents had set up some form of joint childcare. A resident wants according to that Upper Bavarian Volksblatt but had a conversation with an adult from the farm in which there was talk of dissatisfaction with “the system” and the establishment of a school of their own.
The environment for such a foundation definitely exists in the Rosenheim area. Lateral thinker demonstrations there have been very popular over the past few months. The vaccine skepticism, which is typical for many lateral thinkers, is also widespread in the region. Even before the pandemic, the district was always in last place for many vaccinations across Bavaria.