Residents of the rural Bolesławiec municipality from Dąbrowa Bolesławiecka and the surrounding area vigorously defended the school in Dąbrowa.
In October 2021, a post appeared on Facebook page Gmina Bolesławiec – Oczami Mieszkańców, reporting that the school in Dąbrowa was probably going to be phased out by wójt Andrzej Dutkowski. Soon afterward, Dąbrowa residents contacted the istotne.pl service to publicize the matter.
The reader who brought the matter to our attention wrote:
Our wójt is seeking to close it (the school in Dąbrowa, ed. note) while simultaneously portraying it in the worst possible light, although that is not the case at all. Together, we are trying to do everything we can to avoid the worst, but we need the power of the media to publicize the whole situation.
Andrzej Dutkowski denied the information posted on social media on the Gmina Bolesławiec – Oczami Mieszkańców page. He told our publication that there was no question of abolishing the school, but that there was a proposal to lower the school’s organizational level, and that the idea was still undergoing public consultation. At the time, the wójt also held the teachers at the Dąbrowa school responsible for the information about the consultation leaking after the council meeting, before the wójt’s meeting with parents.
Residents invited to consultations with the wójt expressed their views sharply on the proposal to lower the school’s organizational level. More than one hundred people came to the meeting with the wójt and municipal officials. The parents did not want to watch a presentation about the school or listen to the wójt’s assurances that nothing threatened it. They immediately brought out the heavy artillery and picked apart every statement by the officials. They spoke about the lack of funding for the school and the imprecise, indeed manipulated, presentation of eighth-grade exam results, and criticized the lack of renovations at the institution for several years. They did not trust the wójt’s assurance that he would not eventually abolish the school.
“I cannot understand you—what do you want from this school?” said Lucyna Krzyśko, former village head of Krępnica, at the meeting. “How many times will I have to defend this school? I stood up at council sessions so many times and said: keep your hands off this school. I fought for this school when there were 45 children; now there are about one hundred. This school is everything for these children and their parents right now. The children learn things at school and then pass them on at home, in the villages. The wójt built community centers and has no idea what to do with them; those community centers are closed. It is a time of epidemic now, but there was no epidemic before and nothing happened in those community centers either. Yet something was always happening at the school in Dąbrowa. The teachers prepared programs with the children and invited grandparents and parents, but what happened in the community center? I said that they would close this school over my dead body. Mr. Wójt, leave these parents and children in peace, just let us live, because I no longer want to defend this school. I want this school to remain, and I want to be able to enjoy that,” Lucyna Krzyśko appealed to the wójt.
The actions of the residents were taken seriously by officials of the Bolesławiec municipality, and when it came time to submit project applications to the government fund, expanding the school in Dąbrowa became the priority. We congratulate the residents and officials on such a good solution to an important social issue for the municipality.