Barrandov Gets a Secondary School on Paper, on Land the District Already Owns

Praha 5's development committee was shown the concept study for a new secondary school on Barrandov on 15 September. The district announced it the same day. The study is not finished — the council says it will be worked up further — but it puts a building programme and a site on the table for a housing estate that, on the district's own count, has close to 30,000 residents and no secondary school.

The site is the so-called triangle near the streets Högerova, K Barrandovu and Štěpařská. The one piece of this that is already settled is the ground: the district says it has acquired the plot.

On the district's description the building would hold 16 form classrooms — 480 pupils — plus specialist teaching rooms. A sports hall usable by the public and an outdoor pitch are part of the project.

The governance detail is the news

The line worth reading twice is not the classroom count but who is doing the paperwork.

I am glad that we managed to agree with the capital city that the study will be procured by the district, which will speed up the preparation.

— Zdeněk Doležal (ODS), councillor for spatial development, Praha 5

That is a district taking on preparatory work for a school type it does not itself run, on the argument that doing it in-house is faster than waiting for the city to do it. It commits the district's own money and staff to a project it will hand over, and it is the kind of arrangement that either saves a year or produces a study the eventual investor asks to have redone.

Mayor Lukáš Herold (ODS) put the case for the school in one sentence.

Barrandov, with its nearly 30,000 inhabitants, needs a secondary school.

— Lukáš Herold (ODS), mayor of Praha 5

What the announcement does not say

Quite a lot, and it is worth listing rather than filling in. The district gives no timetable: no date for finishing the study, none for a building permit, none for construction. It gives no cost, and no indication of who would pay for the building as opposed to the study. It does not name the architects. It does not say what the school would teach beyond "specialist teaching rooms", and it does not name the body that would eventually found and run it.

So the honest description of today's step is that Barrandov has a site, an owner for that site, a capacity figure and a sketch. That is further than most Prague school projects get before they appear in the press, and it is a long way short of a school. The one thing here with real weight is the land — a district that already owns the plot is not waiting on a landowner, a developer or a swap. Read against the other school projects this desk has followed this month, that is usually where the years go.