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Education Campus Naumburg: Another Symptom of the Repressed Demographic Catastrophe and Centralist School Policy in Saxony-AnhaltOn June 29, 2026, the district council of the Burgenlandkreis voted on the application for a five-year "school pilot project" for the Naumburg Education Campus after a longer discussion. The resolution was passed with many yes votes, zero no votes, and 14 abstentions (AfD) "unanimously" – a remarkable interpretation of unanimity, in which critical voices were apparently pushed into abstention or absence. What at first glance sounds like a progressive education project turns out, upon closer inspection, to be a typical product of decades of misguided policies by the established parties: treating symptoms instead of fighting causes, vague promises, and the creeping centralization of school locations at the expense of rural areas. Vague Promises and Rhetorical Maneuvers by the District AdministratorDistrict Administrator Götz Ulrich (CDU) and Jörg Riemer (CDU) passionately promoted the project in the meeting. Ulrich emphasized that it was not about a comprehensive school, but about preserving the special needs school branch in the western Burgenlandkreis, flexible transitions, and better career orientation. They did not want to send students to Weißenfels and wanted to enable special needs students to obtain qualifications. Riemer spoke of "preserving educational pathways" and a "sign of confidence".Yet the statements remain strikingly vague. Ulrich "cannot guarantee you that there will never be any more school closures", but sees "no connection" to the campus. The pilot project initially runs for only five years (from 2027/28 to 2032/33) and must first be approved by the state. Whether the application would be approved as such was unclear at the time of the district council vote. These are deviations from existing requirements regarding the separate management of school types, teacher allocation, allocation procedures of the state school authority, and all-day regulations. A "pilot project" – that sounds like experimental spirit, but also like a lack of certainty that it will work or have permanent status. What happens after five years if demographic development continues to exert pressure? Will the campus remain or will further locations be "optimized" (closed)? The AfD faction around Juliane and Lothar Waehler rightly pointed to the demographic catastrophe, which cannot be solved by softening structures. It is a consequence of the family- and employee-hostile policies of the old parties since reunification. The AfD faction fears a creeping comprehensive school and closures in rural areas – a fear that Ulrich & Co. could not really dispel. Cause Analysis: Who Has Governed Since Reunification?Since reunification, Saxony-Anhalt has been shaped predominantly by CDU-led governments – often in coalition with the SPD, occasionally with the Greens or FDP. Reiner Haseloff (CDU) governed for a long time; currently, Sven Schulze (CDU) leads a CDU-SPD-FDP coalition. Götz Ulrich (CDU) has been district administrator in the Burgenlandkreis since 2014. The demographic shrinkage – massive decline in births, emigration of young people, aging – is not a natural event, but the result of decades of policy: deindustrialization after reunification, lack of economic prospects in rural areas, family-unfriendly conditions, neglect of birth promotion, and the politically mandated structural change due to the phase-out of lignite power generation.The consequence: drastically falling student numbers. Forecasts show a sharp decline in the young population in the Burgenlandkreis. Instead of tackling the causes (economy, family, infrastructure), those responsible react with "efficiency gains" through centralization. Minimum Student Numbers, State School Authority, and the Power of the StateWho defines the minimum student numbers? The state of Saxony-Anhalt through school development planning and regulations. For special needs schools, the minimum number is often 90 students. Falling below it creates pressure for closure. The State School Authority centrally allocates teachers. Even if a district wants to keep a school: nothing works without staff from the state. The districts submit to the state's requirements – structurally dependent and often without real resistance.The campus in Naumburg is intended to save precisely the special needs school branch that would otherwise be endangered due to low numbers. At the same time, a joint pool enables more flexible staff utilization – an admission of the chronic teacher shortage, which is also home-made (lack of attractiveness of the teaching profession, bureaucracy, poor pay compared to other federal states). Critics see this as the entry point into larger complexes that make rural locations superfluous. Ulrich assures that no catchment areas in rural regions will be changed – but what weight does an oral assurance in a district council meeting carry against long-term demographic and financial constraints? "What is once closed usually stays closed", the AfD rightly warned. An Experiment at the Expense of the Children?The "school pilot project" with flexible transitions, cross-branch staff pools, and campus-wide all-day programs sounds innovative, but carries risks of leveling. The AfD warns of the "weakest link" principle instead of individual support through clear structures. Instead of proven separate school types (secondary and special needs school), they are experimenting – limited to five years, with uncertain outcome.In times of falling student numbers, building large complexes and celebrating synergies while small schools in the surrounding area come under pressure: This is not a future solution, but crisis management by those who helped cause the crisis. Instead of short distances for short legs (rural schools), they rely on central "lighthouses". Parents and children in rural areas pay the price with longer journeys and fewer choices. The district council waved through the application with a majority. However, the abstentions and the AfD's position show that not everyone is buying the rosy rhetoric. As long as the old parties do not take the demographic reality as an opportunity for a radical change in family, economic, and education policy, such "pilot projects" will remain only expensive band-aids on a deep wound. The Naumburg Education Campus may be a gain for Naumburg – for the entire district and especially the rural area, it carries the risk of further centralization and structural dismantling. The future of the children deserves more than five-year experiments and vague promises. It deserves a policy that fights causes instead of managing symptoms. Transcript of the Discussion in the District Council on June 29, 2026:District Council Chairman Andy Haugk: Agenda item 10 is the application for the Naumburg Education Campus school pilot project. There were also preliminary consultations in the Education, Culture, and Sports Committee. The resolution was unanimously recommended there. Likewise in the District Committee. Does anyone wish to speak on this proposed resolution? Ms. Waehler, please. Juliane Waehler (AfD): Yes, my faction will not agree to this proposed resolution for the Naumburg Education Campus. And to avoid speculation by the press and other factions, we naturally want to explain why. The demographic catastrophe in our country is unfortunately a home-made problem created by the old parties, and the core of the problem is not being addressed. Instead, symptoms are being fixed with approaches that may increasingly worsen the development. Missing children and ongoing teacher shortages are the result of family- and employee-hostile policies. Of course, solutions are needed; the present resolution appears suitable at first glance, but probably only appears so. Our party is known for not only thinking in terms of legislative periods, but for ensuring a sensible and livable future in the long term, especially when it comes to our children. The Education Campus is another step towards a comprehensive school. Softening structures cannot lead to securing individual educational pathways. Rather, the old saying will apply here: A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Our party pursues the goal at the state level of splitting up secondary schools again, returning to proven structures, and enabling one qualification per institution. Furthermore, there is the risk that with the establishment of the Education Campus, schools in rural areas will gradually close. What kind of child-friendly program would that be under the motto: short distances for short legs. And what is once closed usually stays closed. In times of a demographic catastrophe, building a school complex that unites virtually all educational pathways can only mean that more is behind it, and by that I mean precisely the closure of schools in rural areas. Parents will be deprived of the opportunity to possibly submit guest student applications, as there will no longer be a school landscape. Whether this type of school and student merging is really beneficial, I strongly doubt. And I have to say quite honestly that I hope I do not have to send my daughters to this kind of school complex. This makes the topic of education obligation instead of school compulsion all the more important in the future. The application will be passed in this house anyway with the usual uncritical votes. We will then see in the next 5 to 10 years where this school pilot project leads. Thank you very much. District Council Chairman Andy Haugk: Mr. Riemer, please. Jörg Riemer (CDU, District Council Member, Head of Vocational Schools Burgenlandkreis): First of all, I am surprised at what ignorance is emerging here, especially since the discussion in the education committee was also attended by members of your faction, and it was clearly stated that it is exactly about something else. It would have been easy to found an integrated comprehensive school here. Then what you prophesy might have happened. But the approach of establishing this Education Campus here and bringing together several educational pathways is precisely about preserving the individual educational pathways. The goal, and this has been discussed for a very long time, is also to preserve the special needs school pathway for the city of Naumburg and the western Burgenlandkreis, where student numbers are problematic. And the Education Campus is exactly the opposite. It enables the preservation of this educational pathway and thus respects the right of choice of individual parents who, in consultation with pedagogical advice, can ensure the best possible support for their child. The same applies to the secondary school pathway. No new school is being opened here that takes students away from others; it is the existing Albert Schweitzer Secondary School, which is housed in spatially limited buildings. And individual classes from the Humboldt Secondary School will, through reorganization of school catchment areas, for the first time receive better educational conditions. No other secondary school in the rural area is affected by this, because with the establishment of the Education Campus there will be no reorganization of school catchment areas into the rural area. Thirdly, the area of the pre-vocational training year. This now covers that as well and does not draw other students accordingly, so that the Education Campus is the first school new build in the Burgenlandkreis in over 20 years and thus a sign of confidence, development, and courage for our district, because we are showing that we are not writing off this district, we are not talking it down like individual political actors, but are investing in the future. We are focusing on modern facilities for the education of our children where they can learn under the best possible conditions. And this is where this school pilot project comes in: wanting to use the opportunities of having three different educational pathways under one roof without mixing them. The individual points focus on cooperation and not on creating a uniform school and thus abolishing other schools. I will just take the example of this joint staff pool. This precisely means that educational pathways can be maintained even in tense staffing situations and, for example, it makes it easy for a teacher from one school to teach two rooms away in the other school, without the previously necessary secondment procedures involving the state school authority and district staff council. So this is about the new building and the signal of a new beginning, that education is important to us in the Burgenlandkreis, also filling it with content and not abolishing or endangering other schools. Anyone who expresses something like that here is at least negligent or wants to unsettle citizens completely without reason. That is exactly not what it is about. It is about securing high-quality education in good buildings here in the Burgenlandkreis. That is why I urge you to approve the application. District Council Chairman Andy Haugk: Thank you very much, Mr. Riemer. Mr. District Administrator, please. District Administrator Götz Ulrich (CDU): Ms. Waehler, I don't understand what you... well, I do understand what you are doing here, but this is something I have not experienced in the district council before, at least not in my memory, that things are simply asserted in order to possibly stir up unrest, although I think you know better. I find that regrettable, but Mr. Riemer has already clarified some things. I want to try again. Because you are twisting the facts, so to speak, in order to be able to vote no. Because if you dealt with the facts in more detail, you would come to the same conclusion as your faction members in the education and district committees. And it is precisely not about us organizing joint teaching for everyone and all children having to go to a kind of comprehensive school, but about the entire western Burgenlandkreis having a special needs school for students with learning support needs, which already has far too few students. 90 is the minimum number of students there, and this school would no longer have a future if the state's school development planning were consistently implemented. That means these students would have to go to the special needs school in Weißenfels if they were not to go into joint teaching. The journey from Lossa to Weißenfels is very, very long. And that is exactly where the school pilot project comes in and says we want to maintain a reliable support branch so that parents who are against joint teaching have the opportunity to have their child reliably taught in this special needs branch from primary school through to leaving. And the second point is that there are also children and young people among the special needs students who are capable and some also want to achieve a secondary school leaving certificate. This is not possible at the special needs school at the moment. But to give these children the opportunity within the same construct, within this campus they are familiar with, where they have been going for years, and to tell them that because they can do it and trust themselves to do it, they can now switch to the main school pathway and still obtain the school leaving certificate there. We should give this chance to our special needs students, and they do not have it here in Naumburg at the moment. That is a shame. And the third point is this career orientation that comes with the integration of the workshops of the vocational school, i.e. dealing with manual things at an early stage and not only realizing at the end of school that I have skills there. This is something that can benefit all students of all three school types: secondary modern school, main school, special needs school. So I believe that what you actually say you want would be very well implementable with this construct and that we are doing the opposite of what you might fear. Of course, we cannot decide definitively today that this school pilot project will be approved one-to-one as we apply for it. But what we are applying for is, I believe, correct and provides very helpful support structures for the rural area west of Naumburg. What should the alternative be then? What content, what pedagogical content do you want to apply for instead? That is what I ask myself. You have not answered that yourself either. So I am trying once again to appeal to you to think again about giving this campus a chance and that we all get behind it as much as possible, because what we do not need is another dispute about whether these approaches are right or not, because I believe they represent a great opportunity for the rural area. District Council Chairman Andy Haugk: Ms. Waehler, please. Juliane Waehler (AfD): Basically, I am not pulling this out of thin air or looking for some reason to reject something. We did agree to the whole thing in the district committee after consulting with our members from the education committee. But we discussed it again at the state level and took the proposed resolution with us and discussed it thoroughly. But you are telling me now that this Education Campus, which is also being built in Weißenfels and perhaps in the future in Zeitz, will not affect the school landscape in rural areas, that no schools will be closed there because the Education Campus will then provide the offer. District Administrator Götz Ulrich (CDU): The construction of the Education Campus in Weißenfels is completely different. It is about the grammar school, adult education center, and music school and the expansion of the educational offer for students who are allowed to use these offers free of charge. So it has nothing to do with this construction here. The offer in Zeitz is again different. It is about whether we expand the special needs focuses at the current Pestalozzi School Zeitz and also bring other students with other special needs focuses into such a campus situation. I cannot, to stay with Naumburg for now, I cannot see any connection at all between student numbers in rural areas and the campus, because as Mr. Riemer has correctly explained, the school catchment areas that now exist in Naumburg can be shifted among these two schools, because there are far too many students in the Humboldt School for the small school building, but it is not intended that more students from the Wethau Valley, from the Unstrut Valley or from the Finne should go to Naumburg. These school catchment areas remain completely unaffected. Unfortunately, there are already no special needs students in this rural area. Well, there are special needs students, but there is no special needs school anymore. This is the special needs school for the rural area in the western Burgenlandkreis. And that is, I believe, the most important point. It must be stabilized, because if it collapses, we will only have one special needs school in Zeitz and one in Weißenfels left. And since the children who have the hardest time already have such long journeys, we cannot expect them to travel even further. Of course, I cannot guarantee you that there will never be any more school closures, but I am against any school closure. But I can tell you that there is no connection between the Education Campus and the decline in student numbers. To address the others, Zeitz and Weißenfels are not the right topic for today's district council meeting, I believe, but we are happy to explain in more detail what the content of the campus approaches is, because in every town it is actually about a different topic. District Council Chairman Andy Haugk: Thank you very much, Mr. District Administrator. Are there any further requests to speak? Mr. Thyen, please. Jan Thyen (District Council Member, The Left): Yes, perhaps the colleagues from the AfD should have listened to the local representatives in their justification of the application instead of the state politicians. In the justification of the application or the rejection of the application, the quite typical things of the AfD have been mentioned for me. A party that wants to abolish compulsory schooling in Saxony-Anhalt and then brings arguments in its justification like a traditional family image and, well, I am so upset about this rejection, traditional family image and yes, excluding the weaker ones and so on and so forth. That is nothing new from this party. Thank you. District Council Chairman Andy Haugk: Mr. Waehler, please. Lothar Waehler (AfD, District Council Member): Yes, we completely reject such an argumentation. That is not the case at all. And if you had read our program correctly, it does not mean that we want to abolish compulsory schooling, but that we want to introduce an education obligation. That does not mean that we abolish compulsory schooling and that you are trying to defame us here or drag us down in this esteemed house, I find that very sad, I have to say quite honestly. And I also do not know what this has to do with the state parliament now. We are deciding here as district councilors. I wanted to pass that on to you, when such argumentation is constantly put forward here. And to Mr. Ulrich I really want to say, you have justified this well now. I am actually inclined to understand the justification in exactly the same way, but it is simply the case that we had consulted and we found the argumentation not sufficient to pass it that way. The arguments you have put forward again are good and correct, but we were still of the opinion that this standardization of schools will not be expedient. Because we are afraid that school closures will occur, especially in rural areas. And that is exactly what we see as the big problem that we do not want. For Naumburg here it is of course a different matter, but if this then spreads generally through such education campuses, we see the danger in it and that is the topic we wanted to shed a bit of light on and bring up again. And that is exactly what I want to say to Mr. Riemer, that has nothing to do with us as the AfD. And of course we have a different view and a different opinion on other things than the CDU. The CDU could have done everything much better in the last 30 years. Why is it the way it is? That is not because of us. We have not been in charge yet. So that has to be said quite clearly and distinctly here. Now they are tinkering around and making something new everywhere and then we are reinventing the wheel. And that has to be said quite clearly. And of course we do not agree with everything, although I would like to go along with you on such things if they were expedient, but we simply do not know all that yet. And that is why we say yes, the old traditional things that have proven themselves should stay. And that was our opinion on it. We are not generally against future orientation or progress orientation. That is complete nonsense, what the gentleman said here again. So I reject that. It is really outrageous to bring such words into a district council like this. Thank you very much. District Council Chairman Andy Haugk: Mr. Schumann has asked to speak. Henrik Schumann (non-attached): Dear Ms. Waehler, Mr. Waehler, this school campus has been occupying us in Naumburg for, I don't know, felt 15 years. A replacement new build for the Albert Schweitzer School was already an issue in 2011/12. And the fact that the district has decided to centrally locate the expanded education and the education of disadvantaged students there also has something to do with the fact that we want to and must leverage synergies – constructionally, structurally, financially above all, and also in terms of personnel. And at this point, this school campus is actually the right step into the future. And if we place it the same way in Zeitz and Weißenfels, then these are simply the constraints under which we now have to live socially and to which we have to react. These are precisely that we lack staff and that we can unite it much more centrally there. And these short distances and these changes that the students can make, as the district administrator justified, that is simply the model of the future. It will come and at this point it is also the right procedure and the right step. District Council Chairman Andy Haugk: Thank you very much, Mr. Schumann. Mr. Jähnig, I saw your request to speak, but two motions on procedural matters are coming from your faction. First Ms. Waehler and Mr. Poppe. Who would like to go first? You both raised your hands. Juliane Waehler (AfD): I would like to request a suspension of the meeting so that we can consult briefly. 10 minutes. 5 minutes. Andy Haugk: So, I will now vote on the procedural motion. The procedural motion is to suspend the meeting for 5 minutes. I ask who can vote yes on this to please raise their voting card. Uh, ballot papers. Exactly. Thank you very much. That was a majority. Then we will suspend the meeting, Ms. Waehler. 5 minutes. Then we will continue the meeting at 25, Ms. Waehler. We continue at 25. Andy Haugk: So, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you again to take your seats so that we can continue the meeting. With that, I reopen the meeting and ask for further requests to speak. I cannot see any. Then we now come to the vote on the application for the Naumburg Education Campus school pilot project. The resolution text is available to you. If you want to vote yes, please raise your voting card. That is a lot. Thank you very much. The no votes: none. Abstentions? That is 14 abstentions. With that, the resolution has been passed unanimously. Author: AI-Translation - АИИ | |
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