St. Leonhard High School

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St. Leonhard High School
Jesuitenstrasse 9-11.JPG
type of school Language Lycée
founding 1625
address

Jesuitenstrasse 9

place Aachen
country North Rhine-Westphalia
Country Germany
Coordinates 50 ° 46 '22 "  N , 6 ° 4' 59"  E Coordinates: 50 ° 46 '22 "  N , 6 ° 4' 59"  E
carrier City Aachen
student about 780
Teachers 80
management Stefan Menzel
Website Homepage

The St. Leonhard Gymnasium in Aachen is an urban modern-language high school with a full day . The school was founded in 1625 by the Order of the Sepulchrines as a secondary school for daughters in the Heilig-Grab-Kloster St. Leonhard in Aachener Franzstraße, to which its current name also refers, and was moved to Jesuitenstraße in 1946. After going through several different types of school, the school received the status of a grammar school in 1909 and introduced co-education in 1982 . The grammar school has been authorized to offer the International Baccalaureate exams since 2007 and has been certified as a CertiLingua school since 2008 and a recognized European school with a German-French bilingual language train since 2009 .

history

St. Leonhard Monastery around 1900. Old postcard with a view of the chapel
St. Leonhard Monastery Franzstrasse

As early as the 13th century, the first canons of the Holy Sepulcher came to Aachen from Denkendorf Monastery and set up a monastery in what was then Burtscheider Strasse, now Franzstrasse, which they dedicated to St. Leonhard had consecrated. On November 23, 1625, the canons sold the monastery to their choir sisters, the sepulchrins from Visé , who founded a secondary school for girls there with an attached boarding school. The purpose of this facility was to provide the female urban youth with lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic as well as in the French language and in manual labor. Fathers from the Jesuit community in Aachen were available for religious instruction and services .

In October 1634 the monastery caught fire due to negligence in the in-house bakery and could only be rebuilt from 1644 onwards, after sufficient donations had been received by then. In the meantime, the sisters lived in four neighboring houses that were owned by the Burtscheid Abbey and in whose premises they could hold their classes. Finally, in 1662, the reconstruction of the monastery was completed in stages and by 1668 the refectory , as well as various study rooms and the garden followed. A valuable painting by Caspar de Crayer from Antwerp depicting the birth of Christ was inserted into the high altar of the church .

Over the years, the monastery acquired various estates in the area for self-sufficiency , including in the Spanish Netherlands in Hauseter Busch near Hauset and the Ravenhaus in Raeren , which they had to sell in the 1750s according to the council decision of the Duchy of Limburg , as well as an estate in Morsbach near Würselen .

After the French invasion in 1794, the school area of ​​the monastery was retained because of the teaching in French, but the monastery itself was secularized in 1802 . During this time, the school was very popular and mainly daughters from the upper and middle classes were brought up and taught.

When it was taken over by the Prussian administration in 1815, the occupancy numbers initially fell. Because of this, the school was reorganized on July 2, 1827 and, in addition to the existing boarding school, received an elementary school and a municipal real daughter school, both divided into two classes. During these years, the religious poet Luise Hensel taught at the school from 1827 to 1833 , for which a plaque was placed on the school building in 1912.

Finally, in 1848, some Ursuline Sisters from the Kalvarienberg Monastery in Ahrweiler came to Aachen and took over the management of the school until they were expelled in 1878 as a result of the culture war and reactivated the former monastery. During this time the school experienced an enormous boom and a new structure. Among other things, in 1855 the Ursulines introduced training to become an elementary school teacher and gave preparatory courses for higher education . In the 1870s, they looked after around 60 boarding school girls and around 500 day pupils from the area in regular schools. In addition, they taught around 80 girls in a newly established “factory school” and around 100 in a “poor preservation school” as well as around 200 female pupils from poor families in the catchment area of ​​the parish of St. Michael , today St. Michael-St. Dimitrios in Aachen.

In the 1890s, the boarding school was closed and converted into a municipal school exclusively for senior daughters. On July 26, 1909, St. Leonhard received the status of a lyceum , to which another women's high school was affiliated in 1916.

The time of National Socialism also left its mark on St. Leonhard. Initially, in 1933, numerous “un-German” books from the school library were burned and the subjects of heredity, racial studies, racial hygiene and population policy were introduced, and a year later so-called non-Aryans were dismissed from school or from school service. When schools were brought into line by the Nazi regime, on April 1, 1936, they merged with the Viktoriaschule and the “Städtische Oberlyzeum with three-year women's school” was created, which was provocatively called “Sankt Levi” by the Aacheners. During the numerous bombing raids in World War II , the school building was badly damaged by incendiary bombs in 1943 and destroyed in 1944. During these years the lessons took place as far as possible in different places, partly in the St. Ursula Gymnasium on Bergdriesch, partly in the rooms of the Viktoriaschule or in the Kgl. Building trade school on Blücherplatz as well as in cellars and bunkers and finally in Arnhem and Nijmegen as a result of the 1944 evacuation .

After the end of the war, the old school buildings in Franzstrasse were completely destroyed and the St. Leonhard resumed teaching on November 15, 1945 in the rooms of the former Hindenburg School, now the Couven-Gymnasium in Vinzenzstrasse. Six months later, at Whitsun 1946, the city of Aachen made the school building of the former Realgymnasium and later Rhein-Maas-Gymnasium Aachen available to St. Leonhard in Jesuitenstrasse, which in turn was looking for a new building.

From November 1950 the St. Leonhard received the status of a "New-language grammar school with women's upper school". Although English was given as the first, Latin as the second and French as the third foreign language, the grammar school received an exemption from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1962, with which French could be taught as the first and English as the third foreign language. The town twinning of Aachen with Reims and the school partnerships of St. Leonhard with partner schools in Lille , Reims and Strasbourg subsequently led to the official establishment of the bilingual branch becoming an integral part of the school profile in 1970 and the first 10 graduates receiving their bilingual Abitur certificate in the summer of 1979 could receive.

After the St. Leonhard had grown into the largest school among the grammar schools in Aachen in the 1960s, a class had to be accommodated in the elementary school at Fischmarkt due to lack of space and additional pavilions had to be built in the schoolyard. In 1976, the affiliated women's secondary school was dissolved and the school was renamed "Städtisches Mädchengymnasium St. Leonhard". According to an application from 1975, co-education was implemented in 1982 and boys were admitted to school for the first time.

school-building

Main building, extension and “Prinzenhof” after the redesign

The school building on Jesuitenstrasse, which was taken over in 1945, was built between 1888 and 1891 as a secondary school according to plans by the architect Joseph Laurent in the historicist style. After the Leonhard-Gymnasium moved in there in 1945, the school building was renovated, modernized and expanded several times while the school was still in operation and received a new roof in 1949, a year later a gymnasium with an auditorium, an enlarged schoolyard in 1955, and the first extension in 1959 1960 a new kitchen with dining room and a biology room. In 1969 the facade was renewed and a year later rooms for art education, a gym, a material room, a collection room as well as a textile design room and a language laboratory were set up. In the 1980s, the old building from 1891 was listed as a historical monument .

After the decision to introduce full-day operation from 2013, further significant renovation and supplementary construction work was required at the grammar school, including new buildings for specialist classes and a cafeteria as well as a redesign of the former "bread cutter parking lot" into an additional public, car-free meeting place. The so-called “Prinzenhof”, a three-winged city villa of the von Goltstein family, was located on this inner-city parking lot . This family had the house built in 1656 and expanded it in the 18th century according to plans by Laurenz Mefferdatis . After the heavy destruction in World War II, the villa was torn down and the square was redesigned as a parking area. Nowadays, only the neighboring Prinzenhofstrasse is reminiscent of the old courtyard.

The completely glazed façade of the new building on the square, which reflects the triangular gable side of the St. Michael-St-Dimitrios church opposite the square, attracts particular attention. With seven purple oversized throne seats made of artificial stone as a reference to Charlemagne, as well as individual solitary trees with additional seating, the public square was significantly upgraded as a school environment.

The entire construction work was completed in 2014 and was honored with the NRW School Building Award 2013 and the “Recognition of Good Buildings by the BDA Aachen 2014”.

School profile

As part of its focus as a modern-language grammar school, St. Leonhard enables students to acquire the Cambridge Certificate and the Certificaat Nederlands als Vreemde Taal (CNaVT) with a separate German-French DELF exam in addition to the main language French . The MINT subjects have also come to the fore in recent years and in 2015 the school received the certificate as a “MINT-friendly school”. In addition, the grammar school offers special projects within and outside of school, working groups or competitions such as JuniorAkademie NRW , Jugend debattiert , competition of the Federal Agency for Civic Education , math camp of RWTH Aachen or Kangaroo of Mathematics .

In 2017, the school project “GLAS” was awarded the first prize worth 5000 euros in the “Innovative teaching” category of the German Teacher's Prize as the best innovation of the year . "Glass" stands for the first letters of the participants: Gulpen , Leonhard, Aachen and Sophianum and the main objective was to consider whether authentic communication in foreign language lessons can be made possible over long distances without books, workbooks and copies.

School partnerships and collaborations (selection)

Personalities (selection)

  • Thomas Adamek (* 1991), Abitur 2010, actor
  • Clara Fey (1815–1894), founder of the order, student of Luise Hensel
  • Hermine Goossens (1878–1968), sculptor and ceramic artist
  • Luise Hensel (1798–1876), teacher at the St. Leonhard Higher School for Daughters from 1827 to 1833
  • Pauline von Mallinckrodt (1817–1881), founder of the order, student of Luise Hensel
  • Franziska Schervier (1819–1876), founder of the order, student of Luise Hensel
  • Aegidius Johann Peter Joseph Scheuren (1774–1844), around 1800 drawing teacher at the secondary school for girls
  • Maria Schmitz (1858–1945), around 1882 four years teacher at the secondary school for girls in St. Leonhard
  • Friedrich Thomas (1806–1879), as successor to Scheuren, drawing teacher for 30 years at the secondary school for girls
  • Heike Walpot (* 1960), graduated from high school in 1980, medical doctor and traffic pilot, Olympic participant in swimming

Web links

Commons : Leonhard-Gymnasium Aachen  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Aachen, St. Leonhard / Klosterkirche der Chorherren vom Hl. Grabe , in: Usage biographies of church buildings from August 19, 2011
  2. Christian Quix : The former monastery of the Sepulchrinen at St. Leonhard in Aachen. In: Contributions to the history of the city of Aachen and its surroundings . Verlag JA Mayer, Aachen 1838. pp. 12–27 ( digitalized )
  3. ^ Ingeborg Schild , Elisabeth Janssen: The Aachen East Cemetery. Mayersche Buchhandlung , Aachen 1991, pp. 230-232, ISBN 3-87519-116-1 .
  4. ^ Expansion of the St. Leonhard High School , on the site of the building management of the city of Aachen
  5. Extension of the new building and design of the gymnasium St. Leonhard Aachen , on baukunst-nrw.de
  6. ^ Award of good buildings by the BDA Aachen 2014 , on bda-nrw.de
  7. ^ Margot Gasper: German Teacher Award also for Aachener Gymnasium , in: Aachener Nachrichten of January 15, 2018