Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said Thursday evening that "at least 150,000 middle school students in grades 6 and 5" will return to school next week in France in the green zones, which represents "approximately 4,000 colleges ” .
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"The colleges of the green departments will reopen next week, and tonight I know that there are at least 85% of them who will be able to do it, that means about 4,000 colleges which will reopen for the classes of 6th and 5th, " explained the minister interviewed to the newspaper at 8:00 pm on TF1. Jean-Michel Blanquer said that this represents "at least 150,000 students".
"It is a beginning, it is a start, we are doing things step by step for these students but it is important that they can find their way back to the colleges," continued the Minister.
He added that "the fact of not going to school from March to September (him) would seem something really serious. And we know that there is a social issue behind this because the most disadvantaged students need school (...) ”.
At the beginning of May, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe had confirmed that the colleges could not reopen in the departments classified in the red zone, where the coronavirus "is still circulating actively and where the hospital is still in high tension".
No information on high schools
Asked about the reopening of the 4th and 3rd classes of the colleges located in the red zones and all of the lycées in France, Jean-Michel Blanquer said that "at this stage, (he) cannot say anything about it more. With the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic, we said that it was in the last days of May that we would take into account the evolution of the epidemic to know if we can go further, " he said. he called back.
In Corsica, where only 1.6% of schoolchildren were welcomed on Tuesday, no secondary school or high school will reopen before the start of the school year in September, a situation regretted by the rector, according to whom this measure "deprives parents of the right to schooling of their children ” .