French pupils protest crumbling school on TikTok

Pupils at a high school in a run-down Paris suburb have gone viral on Tiktok calling out decrepit buildings and a lack of replacement teachers.

Published: 16 March 2024 07:47 CET

The exterior of the Lycee Blaise Cendrars in France

The exterior of the Lycee Blaise Cendrars in Sevran, France. Pupils from the school have have taken to TikTok to protest against the school’s crumbling buildings. Photo: Lycee Blaise Cendrars

In response, school authorities on Friday summoned the four teachers in the video, teachers and the regional education body told AFP.

Students and teachers in Seine-Saint-Denis, one of France’s poorest departments with a high immigrant population northeast of the capital, have been on strike off and on since late February.

With strong backing from parents, they are demanding more funds to better equip and staff their classrooms.

Pupils and several of their teachers at the Blaise-Cendrars high school last week brought attention to their plight with a Tiktok video that has reached 2.6 million views.

“We’re in Blaise-Cendrars… Of course we have a bucket for leaks because we don’t have a ceiling,” says one student at the school, named after a Swiss-born novelist and poet.

The short video takes users on a quick tour of their dilapidated school, from ill-equipped classrooms to a bathroom without soap, interviewing some teaching staff along the way.

“I’m a French teacher at Blaise-Cendrars… Of course when I was pregnant my students didn’t have French lessons for six months,” one says.

One teacher, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the summons by school officials to the meeting Friday was a form of “intimidation”, adding that the
teachers had not started the Tiktok account.

Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburb of 1.5 million inhabitants, has a poverty rate almost double the national average and a large young population.

Twenty years ago, protests and strike action that lasted two months resulted in the creation of 3,000 jobs.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron in January announced several changes in the education system, including testing school uniforms at dozens of schools — a trial towards possibly making them compulsory nationwide.

Student Lilly Guerry, in her penultimate year of high school at Blaise-Cendrars, told AFP on Tuesday she wished the state would listen.

“We’re fed up with being ignored, being abandoned by the government,” she said.

Lea Monbaylet, whose idea it was to start the Tiktok campaign, said finding replacement teachers should be a priority.

“It’s not uniforms that are going to give us a great education,” she said.

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France has in recent weeks been shaken by a series of attacks on schoolchildren by their peers, in particularly the fatal beating earlier this month of Shemseddine, 15, outside Paris.

The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party has accused Attal of not doing enough on security as the anti-immigration party soars ahead of the government coalition in polls for the June 9th election.

Speaking in Viry-Chatillon, the town where Shemseddine was killed, Attal condemned the “addiction of some of our adolescents to violence”, calling for “a real surge of authority… to curb violence”.

“There are twice as many adolescents involved in assault cases, four times more in drug trafficking, and seven times more in armed robberies than in the general population,” he said.

Measures will include expanding compulsory school attendance to all the days of the week from 8am to 6pm for children of collège age (11 to 15).

“In the day the place to be is at school, to work and to learn,” said Attal, who was also marking 100 days in office since being appointed in January by President Emmanuel Macron to turn round the government’s fortunes.

Parents needed to take more responsibility, said Attal, warning that particularly disruptive children would have sanctions marked on their final grades.

OPINION: No, France is not suffering an unprecedented wave of violence

Promoting an old-fashioned back-to-basics approach to school authority, he said “You break something – you repair it. You make a mess – you clear it up. And if you disobey – we teach you respect.”

Attal also floated the possibility of children in exceptional cases being denied the right to special treatment on account of their minority in legal cases.

Thus 16-year-olds could be forced to immediately appear in court after violations “like adults”, he said. In France, the age of majority is 18, in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Macron and Attal face an uphill struggle to reverse the tide ahead of the European elections. Current polls point to the risk of a major debacle that would overshadow the rest of the president’s second mandate up to 2027.

A poll this week by Ifop-Fiducial showed the RN on 32.5 percent with the government coalition way behind on 18 percent.