Children who want to attend a secondary school in Straubing have to go to a single-sex school or, for example, to a district school. This is set to change from the 2025/26 school year. Both the state-run Jakob Sandtner secondary school for boys (JSR) and the private Ursuline secondary school for girls will then also accept children of the other gender. The topic will soon be on the agenda of the Straubing city council. The relevant applications must then be submitted to the Ministry of Education, a spokesperson said.
After the city’s school committee had already discussed the boys’ secondary school’s wish to open last December, it was the girls’ secondary school, which is privately run by the Ursuline School Foundation – where, unlike the state-run JSR, school fees must be paid – that was next. Because, as the foundation’s managing director Wolfgang Ernst explained, the ministry had required the two Straubing secondary schools to coordinate with each other.
If one school wants to open, the other must at least agree to it. The board of trustees has unanimously decided not to stand in the way of the boys’ secondary school and, in addition, to accept boys at the Ursuline secondary school in the future. This decision was first discussed by the Straubinger Tagblatt reported.
Mayor Markus Pannermayr (CSU) described the opening on Instagram as an “important and far-reaching decision”. For the Jakob Sandtner secondary school, this will make a long-held wish come true. Regarding the Ursuline secondary school, the mayor said: “A remarkable, even historic step, after 333 years of girls’ education in Straubing!” The topic was discussed in depth and seriously. “I am deeply impressed by the attitude that the convent of the Ursuline sisters has taken on this very difficult issue for them.”
According to JSR director Regina Houben Straubinger Tagblatt In December, the school committee cited falling student numbers as one of the reasons for the desire for co-education. Since the Angela Fraundorfer Secondary School in the nearby municipality of Aiterhofen, which was originally reserved for girls only, opened to boys in the 2014/15 school year, the JSR has lost many students.
Wolfgang Ernst of the Ursulines said that the decision had been discussed by the staff and parents’ council of the Ursulines secondary school. There was concern that if they stuck with girls-only education, students would move to the JSR. In addition, mixed-gender schools are in keeping with the times, was the general consensus. Unlike the secondary school, however, the Ursulines girls’ high school will remain single-sex.
With the opening, the two secondary schools are in line with the trend, as a look at the statistics shows: According to the Ministry of Education, in the 2023/2024 school year there will be 60 girls’ schools and eleven boys’ schools among the approximately 4,600 general education schools. In the 2010/2011 school year, however, there were still a total of 93 girls’ schools in the general education sector.
The ministry pointed out that the term girls’ or boys’ schools refers to schools that have at least 95 percent of the respective gender. In exceptional cases, children of the other gender can also be admitted to single-sex schools.