Teaching materials for the Olympic referendum: School board rows back half-heartedly

In your letter to the school boards of 10 April, the school authority points out that teachers can also use NOlympia’s offers for the design of lessons in relation to the referendum, as the initiative was successful. She justified this step on the grounds that the teaching materials that the pre-project group, based in the internal authority, had prepared for the citizenship referendum, which excluded the existence of a counter-opinion or the entire political process associated with it, had been sent on 5 February and that at that time the result of the collection of signatures had not yet been available.

The documents were sent to interested parties on 4 March. All the others received the documents in the week of March 9. The handover of the nearly 20 thousand signatures took place on 22 February and was mentioned in the media. The website of NOlympia-Hamburg exists since 2015. The Opinion has been online since 15 January. Thus, the existence of a counter-opinion was sufficiently clear even before the official finding of the existence and before the dispatch of the documents. The omission is not justified in terms of time and procedure.

In consultation with the school senator, the Citizenship Chancellery organizes a discussion round on the Olympic Games with representatives of the political groups in the town hall. 90 students are invited. All others from class 10 onwards can connect digitally live. NOlympia-Hamburg has not yet received an invitation to this event.

Eckart Maudrich, spokesperson for NOlympia-Hamburg:

‘That the school board is using questionable data to attempt its own misconduct in relation to the the Beutelsbach Consensus Unfortunately, legitimizing a process that was originally questionable does not make it any better. In any case, we would be available for the upcoming round of discussions on the Olympics.”