Munich – day care center in the Olympic village is looking for educators – Munich

The yellow wagon is known in the Olympic village. The Olytolli children use the multi-seater to move from playground to playground almost every day. 13 children belong to the parent-child initiative, which has existed for 31 years and is housed in a studio apartment at Nadistraße 16. How the daycare center will continue is uncertain. If she doesn’t find new carers quickly, the crèche has to close in autumn. Then parents and children are on the street. A fate that the families in the Olympic Village share with numerous others in Munich, although the municipality and state repeatedly emphasize how important early childhood support is to them and that they have invested billions in recent years. Obviously, money alone is not enough.

“Due to a chain of different circumstances, our entire staff resigned within six months,” says Susanne Habersbrunner, whose two-year-old child goes to the Olytolli crèche. This staff once consisted of a kindergarten teacher who ran the crèche and two nannies who supported them. Since the manager quit, the pressure on the nurses, who are already heavily strained, has increased. Looking after a toddler alone is a challenge. To do justice to boys and girls as part-time workers is an enormous effort. In the past few months, the two women have used up their reserves and finally decided together to go to the end of the daycare year.

A great loss for the parents in the Olympic Village. “6000 people live here,” says Olytolli member Habersbrunner, “it would be bad if another daycare center was threatened with closure”. Only recently, the House for Children “Peace of Christ”, a public institution sponsored by the Catholic Church, was able to reactivate its group for the youngest children. Despite great demand, the facility was unable to offer places for children under the age of three for a long time because there were neither carers nor educators.

If a daycare center closes, the parents have a problem because the north of Munich is already undersupplied when it comes to childcare facilities. There are a total of 56 day-care centers in the Milbertshofen-Am Hart district, 21 of which are municipal and the other 35 are run by an independent organization. There are places there for after-school care, kindergarten and crèche children. Places for the latter are particularly rare. While the relatively young quarters north of Frankfurter Ring with a supply rate of 60 percent are in the urban average, in southern Milbertshofen there is only a daycare place for 27 percent of the parents of under-three-year-olds. The Department for Urban Planning and Building Regulations presented these figures in the “Sociodemographic Study” for Milbertshofen-Am Hart in April.

The childcare situation is not only tense in the north of the city, there is a lack of educators for crèches, kindergartens and after-school care centers all over Munich. There are currently at least 1,000 vacancies in the municipal buildings, which means that every tenth position remains vacant. A total of 6,000 educators, nannies and social pedagogues work in the 450 municipal care facilities. In addition, according to the Department for Education and Sport (RBS), there are around 1050 other daycare centers and kindergartens managed by charities or private companies. With a campaign launched in spring, the city wants to attract new employees for childcare. Among other things, she advertises daycare jobs on Instagram. Only the next few years will tell whether the concept will achieve the right people. In any case, no city or city-funded daycare center will be closed completely due to a lack of staff, says RBS spokeswoman Ursula Oberhuber. “However, it can happen that care times have to be temporarily restricted because there is a shortage of personnel,” she admits. In the case of new buildings, commissioning could also be delayed for this reason.

The city is making progress with the expansion of the daycare center, which was subsidized with an additional 188 million euros in 2019. At the start of the 2020/2021 daycare year, it completed 23 new facilities, and 26 more were under construction. In 2000 there were just 4,360 childcare places in Munich for children under three years of age. Today there are five times as many at 23,850. But these are still not sufficient. At the end of 2020, 48,425 children under the age of three were living in Munich. If 68 percent of parents want to have their child looked after – this is the rate the city expects – 9,000 places are missing across the city.

Therefore, parents can sometimes have to walk a long way to the day care center. The RBS considers the duration of 30 minutes for a one-way trip in public transport to be acceptable, and some courts have now confirmed this view. “However, the majority of parents get a place in the area,” says Oberhuber. The others have to gondola halfway through the city. It could be the same for the parents of a private daycare center in Sendling. In mid-June the notice of termination came by mail: You couldn’t find any staff, so the Kunterbunt day care center (KiKu), the wildlife park on Lipowskystraße, will have to close at the end of September. Parents should look for another childcare place for their children. There are negotiations with a carrier called Seepferdchen Kita GmbH, which has the intention of opening a new facility in the premises, it said in the letter. The seahorses are self-sufficient, but like the Kunterbunt children’s centers, they belong to the Klett school book publishing group.

Almost 40 children were affected. The termination of the childcare contracts came completely unexpectedly for the parents, and some children had only just got used to it. A solution is now emerging. The Seepferdchen Kita GmbH has announced that it wants to take over the kindergarten, the rooms and the staff. The crib will have to close, it was said. Christina Just, second chairwoman of the nursery parents’ council, says that the porter is helping to find a place in the nursery, albeit on a large scale, she has received an offer in Giesing. “I work in the south, I live in the south and should my son drive to Giesing now?”

In the case of the crib in the Olympic village, everything is open. Although there have been job interviews, no one has signed a contract yet. Some parents have already started looking for a new childcare place, says Susanne Habersbrunner. Since the regular deadline for the allocation of seats by the central office of the city expired in March, there is great concern that nothing will be found by autumn. “We hope and fear that things will continue in the Olympic Village,” she says. Lately, however, there have been more and more discussions about “how the whole thing can be handled”.