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Adil’s death has highlighted several shortcomings at the Sjumila School in Gothenburg.
But it’s not just about a single incident.
In Aftonbladet’s review, a picture emerges of a municipal school that has lost control, where there are no recess guards and students are thrown out of lessons straight into a crime-ridden area.
Adil, 8, died in March last year after an unfortunate fall from a mountain at Sjumilaskolan in Biskopsgården in Gothenburg. The area has already been hit hard by crime, shootings and drug sales. It is classified as one of Sweden’s vulnerable areas, where the environment is completely or partially characterized by a culture of silence, drug sales and the risk of parallel legal systems.
For a year, Adil’s mother had been trying to get help from the school, and when you read the social services report from 2021, a picture emerges of a school that has lost control: Substitutes kicking students out of lessons, with no adult keeping track of where they are going .
“Didn’t help the children”
For social services, Adil told about older students who steal “chips and drinks”, and that he – only 8 years old – found it difficult to say no when they asked him to help. When the older students had eaten the chips, they allegedly asked Adil to go to Willys and steal new chips for them.
The social services document also states that mother Wafaa is worried about what might happen when eight-year-old Adil went home alone, because she felt that “a lot is happening in the area”.
– He was a good guy but had problems at school. They did not help the children and there was no team that could help, says the mother.
In May 2021, the School Inspectorate assessed that the municipality of Gothenburg, which is the principal of the Sjumila School, did not meet the requirements for the education of newly arrived students. The school then also did not meet the requirements to notify and promptly investigate students’ need for special support.
Long history of defects
When you go back in time and read documents, a common thread of lack of action over several years emerges. In 2016, the School Inspectorate pointed out in a decision that was associated with a million dollar fine that, among other things, the school did not have enough break guards on site and that too few students meet the set goals. Students at the school have also stated the same thing in earlier as well as later investigations.
In the School Inspectorate’s follow-up from 2016, criticism from the then principal appears that the city of Gothenburg distributes resources unequally across the district’s schools, and that Sjumilaskolan is one of the schools with the worst schoolyard and worst indoor environment.
And the free text answers from a student survey in 2017 show that the students want more recess guards, calmer breaks, a better school yard and to feel safe and without bullying at school.
36 students were missing
– If you do something, you will be called to the headmaster’s luxurious office. But for the rest of us, the school has looked like this for a long time, everything is rotting, says a student who Aftonbladet talks to outside the school – she raises her hand and points to graffiti.
There is a well-known spread of rumors, especially against the social services in Gothenburg, that they take care of and even kidnap children. SVT Väst could tell after the summer holidays that 36 of the school’s around 500 students was missing from Sjumilaskolan, without a guardian informing the school.
According to some students Aftonbladet spoke to, the school has on several occasions brought in substitutes with insufficient language skills. In an email to Sjumila School’s management, three former ninth graders have asked how they are going to have a chance in society when their substitutes don’t even know Swedish? And the students in the schoolyard talk about a similar incident last spring.
– Last spring we had an older man as a substitute, he was over 60 and didn’t know Swedish very well, says one of them.
The student thinks it is good that there can be an indictment against the school’s and the municipality’s representatives for Adil’s death. She says that it used to be common for the school’s students to play on the same mountain that Adil slipped from.
Built over the mountain
In this review, Aftonbladet has revealed that the school, at a construction meeting with the municipality’s local administration in 2018, should have raised the risks of having a steep mountain in the schoolyard and that the school should have then asked the municipality for a fallout mat.
Instead, the municipality’s local supply company suggested that the municipality should put up a sign with the message “climbing prohibited”. The handwritten and undated document states:
“The school made it clear that it does not remove the risk and, moreover, it assumes that all children can read and know Swedish.”
But now the school has built over the mountain with a multi-storey wooden deck.
– They could have built it earlier, but they waited until after a child died, says the student who attends junior high school at Sjumilaskolan.
Aftonbladet has unsuccessfully sought Sjumilaskolan for a comment.