Christian school Norway threatened with closure because of staff shortage

The school, consisting of 12 students, lacks a principal and a teacher, Dagen reports. Its attempt to fill these vacancies was unsuccessful, according to chairman Per Ola Hovd. Therefore, the school board has decided to close the school for the next school year. "As the situation is now, we cannot run the school", Hovd acknowledges. He hopes that the closure will only be temporary.

The president of the school board suspects that the media controversy that arose last fall contributed to the problems that the school now has. At the time, Norwegian media criticised the school for its conservative views on homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion and gender equality. - "The media control much of what happens. The focus is on negative things, and of course, that has an impact."

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Deputy principal Bjorn Valde said at the time that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin and that the school teaches students that principle too.

In response to the media reports, the Norwegian Directorate of Education (Udir) ordered an inspection of the school. Later, it published a report that concluded that the school deviated on four out of eight points. At the same time, Udir stressed that it trusted the school board to fix these issues.

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Health service

According to Hovd, the discontinuation of school activities has nothing to do with the Udir report. "The supervision was good enough. The issue was that we had too little documentation of what we did during the lessons", he says. Hovd points out that the school has fixed most of the issues that Udir told them to. Only the matter of cooperation with the municipal health service is not solved yet, he says. "We have our own approved curricula which we are obliged to follow, including in sex education. The municipality's people are not obliged to do so."