Prague Lends Praha 7 the Last 166 Million for a School It Cannot Fill Yet

Prague's city assembly voted late on Thursday night, 10 September, to lend Praha 7 the money it was short of. The district gets 165.8 million crowns as a repayable advance towards a new primary school on Jankovcova street in Holešovice, and will pay it back in fifteen annual instalments starting in 2030. ČTK reported the decision.

The loan is the last piece of a financing package the district settled with the city hall in June. Of the 903 million crowns the school is estimated to cost, the magistrate covers 60 percent as a grant, another 20 percent is this interest-free loan, and Praha 7 finds the remaining fifth itself. Martin Tománek (Praha Sobě), the Praha 7 councillor, set out that split when the agreement was reached in June. The contractor tender went out in July and work is meant to start this autumn.

Zdeněk Kovářík (ODS), the Prague councillor who handles the city's finances, used the vote to argue for the instrument rather than the building.

A repayable financial advance is a tool that makes sense to me. This is exactly what responsible financial cooperation between the capital and its districts should look like.

— Zdeněk Kovářík, councillor of the City of Prague

What gets built

The school will stand on the block between Jankovcova, U Vody and Varhulíkové, close to the left bank of the Vltava — on the line of the former Přádelní street, which the district intends to bring back so that Jankovcova connects through to the embankment. That is a street being reopened as a by-product of a school, in a quarter where the grid was broken up by industry and has been slow to knit back together.

The building has six floors above ground and one below, with 18 classrooms for roughly 550 pupils. There are outdoor sports facilities, a garden, a large-capacity kitchen and a canteen that doubles as an assembly hall, plus a playing field on the roof. It takes the name of Jan Vodňanský, the Holešovice writer, songwriter, poet and man of the theatre.

The arithmetic behind the loan

Praha 7 runs six primary schools with a combined capacity of 3,370 places, and ČTK reports they are full to the last one. The district's own demographic study expects 4,500 children aged between six and fourteen to be living in Praha 7 by 2029. The district has about 48,000 inhabitants across Holešovice, Bubny and parts of Bubeneč and Libeň.

Set those figures side by side — this is arithmetic on the district's own numbers, not a claim the sources make — and 550 new places take the total to 3,920 against a cohort of 4,500. The school closes most of the gap that opens by 2029. It does not close all of it, and it is the only one being financed.

The cost works out at about 1.64 million crowns per pupil place. That is the kind of figure that tends to be quoted back at a city when the next district asks for the same deal, and Kovářík's framing of the advance as a model for how the capital should work with its městské části is an invitation to exactly that conversation. The advance is repayable; the grant that covers three fifths of the building is not.

What the decision settles is the money. What it does not settle is the schedule: the tender was announced in July and the works are only due to begin in the autumn, which means the first cohort is still several years of construction away from a building that the district's demographers say is needed by the end of the decade.