Dear Parents,
On the 22 January 2014, together with over 200 of you, we welcomed the members of the European School Frankfurt Admin Board to our school for their meeting and expressed our displeasure with regards to the unsatisfactory capacity / infrastructure issues at the ESF. At the end of this meeting we believed that a solution had been agreed by all parties and that only the final details of ”who pays what” needed to be agreed / approved by the relevant stakeholders.
However, more than two months of valuable time has passed with no concrete solution agreed by all parties. While there have been many declarations of intent, press releases, announcements, letters and e-mail exchanges and even a solution proposed with the construction of a temporary childminding building financed by the ECB on the site of the Ernst-Reuter-school. Unfortunately, today we are no closer to a solution than we were on 22 January !. It is already clear that the proposed temporary child minding building, even if it was to be constructed (financed by whomever), will not be ready to be handed over to the school and the parents' association before November 2014 i.e. at least two months later than the start of the 2014/15 school year.
On 25 March 2014 an Extraordinary Administration Board Meeting was held at the European School Frankfurt School to discuss the situation and agree on the enrolment policy for this coming school year. At this meeting, all enrolment applications that have been received by the school up to the 18 March were discussed. It was clear from these figures, to everyone at meeting that the ESF cannot cater for the number of applications already received within the existing infrastructure. In addition it was stated at the meeting that these figures do not include the applications of the new potential SSM employees.
No representative from the German authority was present at this meeting and no excuse was provided. The Secretary-General of the European Schools, Mr. Kari Kivinen, is obviously overwhelmed with the situation and requested permission from the Admin Board to re -discuss the issue again directly with Germany. If no agreement is reached by the 8 April 2014 he plans to escalate the Frankfurt situation to the highest decision-making level of the European schools system, the Board of Governors, as there has never been a case in the past 60 years of the European School system where a student entitled to admission to a European School has been rejected. This governing body of the European Schools is composed of the Ministers of Education from each of the Union's member countries together with the representative of the EU Commission and the representative of the European Patent Office. A representative from the Staff Committee (from among the teaching staff) and a representative of the parents designated by Interparents who represents the Parents’ Associations of the 14 European schools are also members of the Board of Governors.
It is expected to have more certainty on the ESF infrastructure for the 2014 /15 school year following the Board of Governors’ meeting which takes place in Sofia on 8-10 April. Following which the ESF management will be able to inform parents about available capacity for the next academic year and finalise enrolments in late April.
Based on our experience so far, we have our doubts about this! We might be more positive if we saw some signs that the temporary child minding building planned by the City of Frankfurt and paid by the ECB would materialise soon. However, there has been little progress since before the spring break in the middle February. As long as there are no construction works going ahead we have to accept that we are running out of time to find any acceptable temporary solution. All these delays continue to create serious issues for the school in terms of planning for new teachers and increased student enrolment.
We know that some of you have seen a press release by the City of Frankfurt, dated 20 March 2014 which gave the impression that everything had been sorted, however, this article was incorrect on a number of the points, in particular it gave the impression that the ESF is a private school! This plot of land provided by the City of Frankfurt as mentioned in this press release is far too small to solve the long term needs of our school. As a permanent solution we would need a site that is expandable to cater for the increase number of students over a number of years and not just the 2014/15 intake.
The Board of the Parents Association