FPÖ – Krauss: Number of extraordinary students reveals City Councilor Wiederkehr’s failure

14.8 percent of Vienna’s elementary school students are listed as extraordinary students because their knowledge of German is insufficient to be able to follow regular lessons. What is striking is that 60 percent of these children were born in Austria and 17 percent even have Austrian citizenship. “If City Councilor for Education Wiederkehr is now using the federal government as an excuse for a lack of resources in promoting German, that is an outrageous shift in responsibility. Instead of investing money in image campaigns and PR stunts, he should have taken appropriate measures on his own responsibility long ago to tackle and solve this problem himself, which is not new,” criticizes the education spokesman for the Vienna FPÖ, club chairman Maximilian Krauss.

“Wiederkehr watched the family reunification in silence and apparently did not consider the impact on the education system at all. The fact that children who have already attended kindergarten here for three years still do not speak German sufficiently because there is simply no obligation to do so shows the blatant failure of this city government. Parents must be held accountable here – if necessary by cutting public funds.”

For Krauss, returning has long been intolerable: “Returning should be canceled. But the SPÖ under Mayor Ludwig is unlikely to take this step, because Wiederkehr is a willing accomplice of the socialists. In return, Ludwig even accepts that our children’s education will suffer massively and that a good start to an independent life will be made almost impossible for them.”