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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In a message sent to staff on Thursday evening, its management said the buildings in central Paris “will remain closed tomorrow, Friday May 3rd. We ask you to continue to work from home”.

A committee of pro-Palestinian students earlier on Thursday announced a “peaceful sit-in” at Sciences Po and said six students were starting a hunger strike “in solidarity with Palestinian victims” in war-torn Gaza.

Sciences Po is widely considered France’s top political science school and counts President Emmanuel Macron among its alumni.

Echoing tense demonstrations rocking many top US universities, students at Sciences Po have staged a series of protests, with some furious over the Israel-Hamas war and ensuing humanitarian crisis in the besieged Palestinian territory of Gaza.

France is home to the world’s largest Jewish population after Israel and the United States, as well as Europe’s biggest Muslim community.

The Paris regional authority’s right-wing head Valerie Pécresse temporarily suspended funding to Sciences Po earlier this week over the protests, condemning what she called “a minority of radicalised people calling for anti-Semitic hatred”.

The war started with Hamas’s unprecedented October 7th attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel estimates that 129 captives seized by militants during their attack remain in Gaza. The military says 34 of them are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 34,596 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

A member of the student committee who identified himself only as Hicham said the hunger strikes would continue until the university’s board voted on holding an investigation into its partnerships with Israeli universities.

Sciences Po’s acting administrator Jean Basseres said he had refused that call during a debate with students, held at the university in a bid to calm days of protests.

Higher Education Minister Sylvie Retailleau earlier on Thursday called on university heads to “keep order”, including by calling in the police if needed.