Parents, teachers and students discussed for months - now the Berlin Senate has decided: private schools have the right to free choice of their students. The decision of a Waldorf school in Berlin to reject the child of an AfD politician is thus legally in the opinion of the Senate in legal terms.
At the Waldorf School has been raging for months a heated debate. The reason: The father of a child, which should be schooled, is a Berlin AfD MP. According to the "Berliner Zeitung" on the one hand fears were expressed at the school that the father of the child "could endanger the school peace" by xenophobic or nationalistic statements.
On the other hand, there were admonishing voices that pointed to the freedom of expression and criticized that here a child is taken in clan attachment. At several meetings parents discussed whether this child is allowed to study in this school or not. At the end, last fall, the school decided: No, the child will not be admitted.
Procedure "not to complain about"
Berlin's Senator Sandra Scheeres (SPD) saw it as "very critical". Also the federation of the free Waldorf schools had declared, he wished that the school rethink their decision again. The Berlin AfD parliamentary group leader Georg Pazderski spoke of "exclusion and clan attachment."
The popular school, however, justified their decision as follows: There is no way to accommodate the child who attended the associated Waldorf kindergarten, with the necessary impartiality and impartiality.
On Thursday, the Senate School Administration announced that the school's actions were "not objectionable". This resulted in an assessment of the case. Private schools are allowed to decide for themselves who to take. The General Equal Treatment Act (AGG) was only "limited applicable", namely "discrimination on grounds of race or because of ethnic origin," it said.
Private schools could organize their teaching in terms of educational goals, world view, methods and content on their own responsibility. This freedom of design also applies to the selection of students.
It is not the first time that a Waldorf school is arguing about dealing with children whose parents belong to the so-called New Right: In Hitzacker, a school announced the contract with a family whose father is an NPD man. And last summer, the board of the Waldorf School Vienna-West decided that two boys have to leave school whose mother is the philosopher Caroline Sommerfeld, an icon of the New Right.