Alarm bells sound again about school housing: ‘Are our children not important enough?’ | Interior

Henk Zielstra is just not ashamed, but there are plenty of times when the director of the Zeeland school umbrella organization Archipel is scratching his head. This concerns the housing of the eighteen schools in Middelburg, Vlissingen and the rest of Walcheren that fall under Archipel.

“We have had a building that has been nominated for renovation for 22 years. Then you are talking about completely different generations of students who had to wait for the new building. We have another building, where we keep having leaks. And I know of another school building, which does not belong to our group, where the students are still single glazed, in poorly ventilated rooms. 200 meters away, the town hall is full of officials, full of so-called climate control being worked. We throw our children to death with sustainability, they will have to deal with that for the rest of their lives, but apparently we don’t think it’s important enough to get education accommodation in order.”

Zielstra continues: ,,It is not always about the old school buildings. Sometimes a new school building is completed, so I have my doubts. Then the children play on a patio, an inner courtyard, which is then in the burning sun.”

At the beginning of May, a teacher and student at a Rotterdam school for special primary education got the fright of their lives when a piece of concrete dropped from the ceiling above them. No one was injured, but Minister De Jonge then ordered all school buildings built using the same construction method to be inspected and repaired if necessary. Sticking plasters is what the Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG), the PO council and the VO council – sector organizations for primary and secondary education – call this in an open letter they are sending today to the new outgoing education minister Mariëlle Paul. ‘It is time for the next cabinet to focus on the only solution that really offers a solution.’

And that solution is money, a lot of money. The problem of ramshackle school buildings is huge, the letter writers calculate. ‘It has been clear for many years that the central government must release a lot of extra resources to renovate and renew all Dutch school buildings before 2050. Due to inflation, this amount has risen from 730 million euros per year to 1.2 billion euros per year,’ the parties write in their letter, which mainly reads as a kick-off for negotiations with the new cabinet, which will take office after the elections on 22 November and subsequent coalition negotiations.

“We never succeeded in getting the subject properly on the agenda,” admits Helmond alderman Cathalijne Dortmans, chair of the VNG committee on care, youth and education. “And we are also talking about huge amounts of money. I do not expect the cabinet in caretaker status to suddenly release a lot of money for this. But I do hope that Minister Paul will have a good conversation with us, in preparation for a new government term. As a VVD member of parliament, she said at the end of last year that, in her opinion, educational accommodation had been postponed for too long. We hope she can still remember her own statements.”

Dortmans and school administrator Zielstra share his amazement about why most offices in the Netherlands are in tip-top order, but many school buildings are too old and not sustainable and show all kinds of other defects. “Obviously other lobbies are more successful. Within the VNG we have sometimes said: maybe we should let children drive onto the Malieveld in toy tractors.”

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