“Last year we suffered a lot, our parents, but also our children. We don’t want that to happen again.Amandin, mother of two four-and-a-half-year-old girls, is overwhelmed just one month after the start of the school year. This resident of Villejuif in Val-de-Marne laments the growing number of absent teachers who have not been replaced. “Last year my daughter missed four weeks of school. he is nervous. In the whole city, 1300 days are missing only for the primary, which have not been replaced.»
Often learning of the teacher’s absence that very morning, Amandine found herself more than onceher daughters in her arms“. It’s then a race against time for parents to find childcare. “We try to find a babysitter or take a day off, but when you’re an entrepreneur like me, a day without work is a day without money coming into the household.Tired of these morning vagaries, the young mother decided to join forces with other parents to make her anger heard.
More than 170 parents of pupils have joined the #Onveutdesprofs collective, which was launched last June after a year marked by detention and health protocols. For this group to be aware that teachers are doing their best andare also victims of the system“, “the goal is to condemn the state“as a result”repeated absences of unreplaced teachers harming students“. If the average number of missed classes, which allows students to wander the corridors or a permanent room, is 104 hours per student, some children accumulate nearly 300 hours of missed classes.
To date, 127 first applications for compensation from the rectories have been submitted. The bill will be around €200,000violation of public service“, according to the complainants. More than 1500 files are being processed.
Lack of public service
The group is led by two lawyers, Maître Joyce Pitcher, who specializes in collective actions, and Maître Louis le Foyer de Costil, a lawyer in the field of education law. “The parents came to see me last May, explaining their situation and their grief. So we decided to create a collective action, bringing together more concerned parentssays master Joyce Pitcher. If in the beginning the parents were exclusively from Ile-de-France, now they come from around twenty French academies. “The idea is not to make money, but to respond to the state“, warns the lawyer from Paris.
Such an approach is not completely new. Already in 1988, the Council of State condemned the state to pay 1,000 francs to the parents of a schoolboy whose teacher was absent for seven hours. “The mission of the common interest of education imposes on the Minister of National Education the legal obligation to ensure the teaching of all compulsory subjects; the judges then wrote. Violation of this legal obligation is a defect that may involve state liability.»
Based on this case law, Maître le Foyer de Costil is convinced that “The state will definitely be condemned for the violation of public service“. The obligation of education concerns not only the parents, but also the state. “It is a constitutional rule», adds the lawyer. in point 13 of Preface: since 1946, thus inscribed that “The organization of free and secular public education at all levels is the responsibility of the state.”
The nation guarantees equal access to education, vocational training and culture for children and adults. It is the responsibility of the state to provide free and secular public education at all levels
1946 with constitutional value
The initiative has certainly convinced some parents, but it is not unanimous. For Laurent Zameschkowski, spokesperson for PEEP, the first federation of parents’ associations.there will be no compensation until the loss, which may last a lifetime“. According to him, it is not possible to assess the consequences on the child, depending on the missed material, the number of missed hours, but also on the level of each student.
“For some this will be disastrous, they will develop real loopholes, but for others it will be less of a problem.“So Amandine was afraid for one of her daughters. “He started to develop a kind of school phobia, he didn’t want to go to school anymore.According to the mother, who is involved in community school life, kindergarten and elementary grades have “greatly affectedwith these repeated absences. Some areas seem more concerned than others, reports Laurent Zameschkowski. Among them, the departments suffering from the lack of attractiveness, as well as the Ile-de-France academies. When contacted, the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not respond.
Source: Le Figaro
