City of Chemnitz wants to reduce unoccupied daycare places

Today, Mayor Dagmar Ruscheinsky and the City of Chemnitz Youth Welfare Office held a press conference to inform the public about the City of Chemnitz's plans to reduce the number of daycare places.

The Youth Welfare Office of the City of Chemnitz anticipates that around 1000 daycare places will be unfilled in Chemnitz over the next two years. The reasons for this are current city statistics and the continuing decline in the birth rate.

For this reason, the City of Chemnitz will propose to the City Council that childcare places be reduced or several facilities closed by 2028 at the latest.

The proposals will be based on the level of coverage in the areas and districts, the capacity utilisation of the facilities as of 30 June 2024 and the condition of the respective buildings or the existing need for renovation.

Mayor Dagmar Ruscheinsky: "In recent years, we have already reduced the number of places in centres without closing them. However, this is no longer possible with the surplus figures now available. Too few children in a centre will result in correspondingly lower staffing levels, which may mean that opening hours can no longer be fully guaranteed.
The under-utilisation of individual facilities is also likely to have an increasing effect on parental contributions, which are calculated on the basis of the average operating costs of the facilities and will continue to be incurred in full if places are reduced across the board.

Despite the proposed closures, we can offer all parents an alternative place close to their home or place of work and we will not be making any nursery teachers redundant. This means that every child in the city will continue to have the opportunity to attend a crèche or daycare centre."

Specifically, the facility at Fritz-Reuter-Straße 30 will have to be closed next year because the operating licence from the state youth welfare office is due to expire and will not be extended due to the traffic situation and noise pollution at the location. Whether the daycare centre at Reichenhainer Straße 33 will also have to close depends on the negotiations with the Free State regarding a possible new lease agreement, as the current one ends next June.

As part of the school network planning, the administration has proposed phasing out the Altendorf primary school or relocating it to the Flemming primary school as a class group for the Harthweg 2 facility. The relocation of Altendorf primary school would also mean the end of after-school care for children in the Harthweg 2 building.

If the Altendorf primary school is relocated in the future, the youth welfare office proposes closing the day care centre there.

A further six facilities should no longer accept children from next summer if possible and should therefore close by 2028 at the latest. The centres in question are

• Neue Straße 2, 09117 Chemnitz
• Albert-Schweitzer-Straße 71, 09116 Chemnitz
• Friedrich-Hähnel-Straße 7, 09120 Chemnitz (closure of the unrenovated half of the building)
• Alfred-Neubert-Straße 55/57, 09123 Chemnitz (reduction of crèche and kindergarten places, one half of the building is needed to care for the Charles-Darwin primary school's after-school care centre children)
• Robert-Siewert-Straße 68/70, 09122 Chemnitz
• Fürstenstraße 263 - 265, 09130 Chemnitz (closure was already decided with the daycare centre requirements plan B-058/2023)

It may be the case that facilities close earlier than 2028 if the number of children falls into a critical range for operations, which is around 50 children.

The youth welfare office has informed the parents of the children in the centres likely to be affected by the closures as a precautionary measure. The aim is to relocate the children in groups in order to maintain the children's familiar environment as far as possible.

The employees are to be deployed to other facilities - preferably with their groups. No nursery teachers are to be made redundant either.

The city would like to have the city council decide on this before the end of the year. Chemnitz has a total of 157 daycare centres, 77 of which are privately run