For more than a hundred graduates of the State Music School—musically talented daughters and sons of Bolesławiec—are now “wandering around the world” and seeking refuge outside our “stepmotherly” city.
It is hard to believe that council members, including teachers and educators (?), remain deaf and insensitive to this subtle problem. Apparently, someone from this “educational” group presented a proposal to the committee that, instead of establishing a school, graduates of the first-degree State Music School should be offered something like scholarships to continue their education in other cities. This means that other cities should benefit from the talents of our children, because talented people are apparently not needed in our city. This is more or less the council members’ position. The city authorities, meanwhile, defend themselves with the argument that schools are not the city’s responsibility at all. The city may, but does not have to, fund education.
More than a year ago, in the January issue of “Głos Bolesławca” (in the article “This School Must Come into Being”), I appealed, among other things, through the voices of musician-educators, for goodwill and understanding. Ms Dorota Pińczuk, MA, Director of the State Music School, said: “... those who do not know this problem do not even realize what a loss the city suffers by losing such talented people... After all, these people could create musical life here, on the spot, build orchestras and ensembles, and go into primary and secondary schools, where music is already a memory... We simply must open this school...”
The matter is still the second-degree music school which—as I remind you—has been “under construction” for eleven years, and whose nearly completed building continues to stand empty and intimidate passers-by. In a few more years, the billions of złoty invested in this building will go to waste.
At one point, Bolesławiec residents interested in the matter placed their hopes in their ?own” Member of Parliament and their (also “own”) Senator, and later looked pleadingly at the councillors and city fathers. Unfortunately, to no avail. ... At the same time, Żagań, much smaller than Bolesławiec (also a town on the Bóbr), was struggling with similar problems. There, too, a second-degree State Music School building stood unused, and there was no money to open it. But there were people with a somewhat more subtle “ear” and a more benevolent approach to the “matter”.
The municipal councillors and the Board, together with the military stationed there, made the appropriate decision and took action, and in this way (attention, Readers, for such an event deserves to be recorded in the city chronicle in letters of gold!) ŻAGAŃ NOW HAS ITS OWN municipal SECOND-DEGREE MUSIC SCHOOL. One can only envy Żagań such councillors and city fathers! Maintaining the school does not cost the city all that much—approximately half a billion złoty. (The city also subsidizes the Community Music Centre in the amount of PLN 260 million and fully finances the purchase of instruments and bears the costs of maintaining the school orchestra, which recently performed, among other places, in our city.
Let us recall that our city’s budget amounted to approximately 75 billion złoty. Could it really not have been possible to “come up with” (or perhaps borrow?) one billion złoty, for example, for the school of arts that had been waiting so many years for its “conception”?
The term of office of the local government and council that found neither a “way” nor the funds for a second-degree music school, a sports and entertainment hall, or even a local newspaper—where disappointed voters could occasionally be given an explanation for the inability—is soon coming to an end. A period of “courting” potential voters by various political and social groups in order to gain local-government power is beginning. I publicly declare that I will not support a programme that leaves out the issue of the second-degree music school.