Nearly half of Czech municipalities can't afford their own kindergarten

Almost half of Czech municipalities are unable to run their own kindergarten and are forced to arrange for their children's education with neighbouring municipalities. According to a study by the Aspen Institute, out of the country's 6,254 municipalities, only 3,399 have their own preschool facility, while just 2,635 municipalities maintain primary schools, jointly running a total of 3,620 state schools.

When an agreement is cancelled without warning

By law, every municipality is obliged to ensure its residents have access to school education. If a municipality has no school of its own, it signs an agreement with schools in neighbouring towns or villages. The trouble is that once those schools fill up, the agreement can be terminated unilaterally — leaving the municipality to scramble for new options, with no say in the decisions made by a school it doesn't help run.

A telling example was described by Radomír Pavlíček, mayor of the South Moravian village of Železné: the town of Tišnov, he said, called an extraordinary council meeting without any warning whatsoever, with the sole item on the agenda being the scrapping of the existing school catchment areas. "We were basically thrown overboard," he told the study's authors.

Kindergartens are now mandatory for toddlers too

The situation is complicated further by the fact that, on top of compulsory schooling for children aged 6 to 15, municipalities must now also guarantee kindergarten places for every child over the age of three. According to the study's calculations, in regions with many small villages (fewer than 500 residents), one kindergarten for every five such villages would be sufficient. But building and launching a kindergarten requires serious investment that a small municipality often simply cannot afford — which is why experts recommend joining forces with neighbours that also lack their own school.

Public procurement poses a separate challenge: small municipalities struggle to attract contractors, since companies see little profit in taking on such small-scale jobs. Low interest reduces competition and drives up the final tender price. Elections add another layer of instability — after a change in council composition, attitudes towards a project can shift dramatically, undermining the predictability of long-term planning.

The solution: joining forces in school unions

According to the study's authors, one way forward is to set up voluntary associations of municipalities and so-called joint "union schools" — one or several kindergartens and primary schools run jointly by several municipalities at once. The main advantage of this model is that representatives of each municipality retain a voice and take part in decisions on the school's budget and operations. It doesn't grant full autonomy, but survey participants didn't cite any serious drawbacks.

An example of successful cooperation was given by Tomáš Rozenbaum, mayor of the village of Mšec, home to the joint school "ZŠ a MŠ bez hranic" (Primary and Kindergarten Without Borders): despite differing numbers of children from each municipality, all three municipalities in the union have an equal number of votes — regardless of whether a given municipality contributes only a kindergarten or a full-cycle primary school with kindergarten attached.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz