PARIS (AFP): 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.
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.
