Comment This is a comment, written by an editorial staff member. The commentary expresses the writer’s views.
There is no shortage on those who shout warning during the day.
About juvenile delinquency. About gang mentality. About the enormous social experiment that involves letting an entire generation grow up in an unedited reality show on social media.
In something like this news picture it is easy to lose heart. And as parents.
Fortunately, there is – as always – also hope among the young. In good old-fashioned youthful commitment.
– We are striking because we do not want to lose our teachers, our environmental workers and our canteen, thirteen-year-old Sigmund Mjaavatn told BA last week.
Together with about He had met 70 fellow pupils from Rothaugen school to demonstrate against the austerity measures at the Bergen school.
Only at Rothaugen School – a junior high school with over 620 pupils divided into three levels – the financial crisis will mean that 17 substitutes will have to quit.
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Sigmund (13) and the gang refuse to go to school
The explanation is that the schools in recent years have not been able to stick to the budget they have been given. Last year, the principals in Bergen School spent NOK 120 million more than they should have.
Despite the fact that the current city council, if one counts kroner and øre, has increased the allowances for the schools, the alleged overspending seems to continue. Now the paring knife must be brought out.
It’s on time for the politicians who govern the city to a greater extent to look into the daily lives of those with the most important leadership jobs in Bergen municipality. The rectors must not only create a good and developing working environment for the teachers. They must ensure that every single student in the Bergen school receives the offer they are entitled to, and need in order to master the school day.
These principals work on the same weekday as the newspaper headlines depict. A weekday with increasing unrest among young people, more violence, more social pressure. A weekday where it is said that 13 is the new 16, and the pupils encounter classic youth problems earlier in primary school.
A weekday that makes higher demands on school and adults.
One can certainly have a very principled and strict view of budget discipline. These headmasters also have a responsibility to offer the pupils what they actually need, at a time when the expensive time also applies in schools.
The school owner – i.e. the school board Daniel Hägglund (Frp) – sits with a heavy responsibility to give principals, teachers and students what they need, so that Bergen will not only have a responsible school, but a school that is actually able to make a difference for those who grow up in the city.
To be a little diplomatic and cautious: There is nothing to suggest that the Bergen rectors are wasting the money. Everything indicates that it is the budget that is too tight. Everything indicates that the good professionals at the schools need more – not less – resources.
The school board, and others, may well be terribly uneasy about the development one sees in the youth environment. At the recent national meeting of the FRP, Hägglund braved it and called for a war against youth crime.
The uneasiness is shared by many. The fact that parents in both Fana and Åsane get involved, dare to speak up, mobilize for cooperation, shows that in Bergen there are some villages with adults who are not only worried about their own children, but who take great responsibility.
The most important city council can do, is still not to talk in the headlines, but to make arrangements for a safe and good school. It is simply not the time to expose the adults in the Bergen school to more stress and pressure. The school board must now take that seriously.
It may soon prove to have some effect in the fight against rootless youth, too. Nevertheless, there must be no doubt; it is the learning environment and learning that are most important in the school. There are other agencies that must take the main responsibility for stopping youth crime.
It is nevertheless not to avoid problems also affecting the schools. It is the politicians who are responsible for making the school as well equipped to function as possible.
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Large demonstrations outside the Town Hall – the argument continued in the city council
No one must believe that spending more money on schools will be some simple political job. The demographic development indicates that in the future one actually has to spend less on schools in the municipalities, in order to be able to spend more on care for the elderly.
It is nevertheless nothing to suggest that in the short term it will be advisable to reduce the use of resources on the content of the Bergen school. It is therefore important that the city council has notified that they will come up with a venture.
The young people who lined up outside the city council hall in Bergen need to be taken seriously. This does not happen through political squabbling, but through internalizing the messages of the students.
It is rather no disadvantage if the school pupils get to experience that healthy, factual and genuine political involvement can actually pay off.
It can be a seed for building trust between young people and the system. Perhaps it can also make it easier to reach young people on other fronts, too.
Trust can namely be a rather valuable currency when solving the other youth problems in Bergen, too.
