Start of the New School Year in Eastern Austria

For more than half a million students in Vienna, Lower Austria, and Burgenland, the new academic year began on Monday. Among them are also 41,000 first graders who are taking their seats in a classroom for the first time. Although the staffing shortage has eased compared to previous years, 183 teaching positions nationwide were still unfilled at the start of the school year in the east, as the Ministry of Education announced on Monday.

"Situation is fortunately easing significantly"

This corresponds to 0.15 percent of all teaching positions and "the school year in western Austria hasn't even started yet," said Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr (NEOS) confidently, expressing hope that many more positions could be filled by next week. "The teacher shortage still exists in various areas, but the situation is fortunately easing significantly," Wiederkehr said at a media event in a high school in Klosterneuburg on Monday morning.

In the new school year, language promotion is the focus, "because German is the entry ticket to our society," said the Education Minister. In addition to expanding German language support, the school year brings, among other things, an increased offering of school psychology services, and for the first time, school social work is available at federal schools (AHS, vocational middle and higher schools/BMHS). For children with disabilities, more modern curricula are being gradually introduced, and at the Economic Secondary Schools (WIKU), a new subject "Economy, Innovation, and Sustainability" is being introduced autonomously. Schools are to be relieved by the newly created pedagogical-administrative specialists and fewer ministerial decrees.

FPÖ: "Not a normal school start"

The FPÖ had nothing good to say about the education policy of the three-party coalition and the previous turquoise-green government on Monday. "What we are experiencing is not a normal start to the school year, but the beginning of another year in organized chaos. The government has allowed our schools to deteriorate into social hotspots and integration ruins," said the FPÖ education spokesperson Hermann Brückl in a statement. He spoke of an "educational emergency" in view of the high number of children with non-German colloquial language.

The Greens, on the other hand, accused the Minister of Education of "lack of planning" and inactivity regarding the teacher shortage. "Parents have to send their children to schools where there is simply a lack of staff - this is an untenable situation," said the Green education spokesperson Sigrid Maurer according to a statement. Once again, she accused Wiederkehr of achieving the announced increase in German support by 750 positions only through relabeling existing positions.

The Federal Youth Representation (BJV) called for a faster modernization of the curricula at the start of the school year. Political education and the teaching of media competence should be expanded to align schools more closely with the reality of young people's lives, according to the BJV.

School Start in the West Still Pending

While school already started in the east on Monday, the 660,000 children and adolescents in the other six federal states still have one more week of vacation.

(APA/Red)

This article has been automatically translated, read the original article here.