Saving is now the priority in school construction in Munich: according to a spokesperson for the education department, €180 million has been saved on the ongoing projects of the school construction offensive, as the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports. This means the required saving of ten per cent of construction costs has been achieved without touching the core of the pedagogical areas and qualities for pupils and teachers.
The current status of the offensive was presented to the city council last week. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung further reports, the savings were achieved, among other things, through renegotiations in ongoing projects and through cutbacks in parking spaces as well as in roof and façade greening. These and other proposals were made by a cross-party working group that worked from 2024 on making construction in Munich cheaper.
Flagship projects such as the Wilhelm-Hausenstein-Gymnasium in Bogenhausen, which cost €128 million and has been attended by 1400 pupils since September 2024, are unlikely to be repeated in the coming years and probably decades, according to the newspaper’s assessment. Calculated, the €180 million corresponds to about one and a half times the cost of this grammar school.
The city’s multi-billion-euro school construction offensive is now ten years old and is being continued because Munich is growing. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 school and nine childcare construction projects worth €4 billion are currently being planned or built, such as a new large grammar school with a school swimming pool in Obermenzing and a converted school centre in Pasing. The projects newly included last week are considerably less spectacular: six pavilions, most of them for kitchens and canteens at primary schools, in order to meet the legal entitlement to all-day care.
In the six school construction programmes of the past ten years to date, Munich has approved 110 construction projects, including new buildings and renovations such as at the Oskar-von-Miller-Gymnasium. At the same time, the city is also responsible for maintaining more than 2000 school and childcare buildings by now. Many buildings from the 1950s to the 1970s are in need of renovation, according to the decision proposal for the education construction offensive; because of the precarious budget situation, only the most urgent cases could be implemented “promptly”.
The Green group stated that the city continues to realise high-quality educational buildings and invests in the future of Munich’s children; savings potential would be tapped where it does not impair pedagogical success. The CSU declared that it supports the education construction offensive, but that parking spaces should be examined on a case-by-case basis instead of prescribing a uniform solution.
