“
We suffered a lot last year, us parents but also our children.
We don't want this to happen again!
Only a month after the start of the school year, Amandine, mother of two four-and-a-half-year-old girls, is overwhelmed.
This resident of Villejuif, in Val-de-Marne, deplores the growing number of absent teachers who have not been replaced.
“
My daughter missed four weeks of class last year, she
annoys.
Throughout the city, there are 1300 days of absence, just for the primary, which have not been replaced.
»
Often learning the very morning of the absence of the teacher, Amandine found herself more than once "
her daughters on her arms
".
Then begins for the parents a race against time to find a means of childcare.
“
We try to find a nanny or free ourselves from a day's work, but when you're an entrepreneur like me, a day without work is a day without any money coming into the household.
Exhausted by these morning vagaries, the young mother decided to join forces with other parents to make her anger heard.
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More than 170 parents of students have joined the #Onveutdesprofs collective, launched last June, after a year punctuated by confinement and health protocols.
For this group, aware that teachers do their best and "
are also victims of the system
", "
the objective is to have the State condemned
" following "
repeated absences of unreplaced teachers, which cause harm to students
.
If the average of canceled lessons, leaving students to wander in the corridors or in the perm room, is 104 hours per student, some children accumulate nearly 300 hours of missed lessons.
To date, 127 first requests for compensation from the rectorates have been filed.
The bill would amount to nearly 200,000 euros for “
lack of public service
”, according to the complainants.
More than 1500 files are being processed.
Lack of public service
At the head of the group are two lawyers: Maître Joyce Pitcher, specialized in collective actions, and Maître Louis le Foyer de Costil, lawyer in education law.
“
Parents came to see me last May, explaining their situation and their distress.
We therefore decided to set up a collective action by bringing together more concerned parents
, ”says Maître Joyce Pitcher.
If the parents were exclusively Ile-de-France at the beginning, they now come from around twenty academies throughout France.
“
The idea is not to make money but to get the state to react
,” warns the Parisian lawyer.
Such an approach is not entirely new.
Already in 1988, the Council of State condemned the State to pay 1000 francs to the parents of a schoolboy whose teacher had been absent for seven hours.
“
The mission of general interest of teaching imposes on the Minister of National Education the legal obligation to ensure the teaching of all compulsory subjects,
wrote the judges at the time.
The breach of this legal obligation constitutes a fault likely to engage the responsibility of the State.
»
Read alsoVocations crisis, resignations… National Education is desperately looking for teachers
Based on this case law, Maître le Foyer de Costil is convinced that “
the State will necessarily be condemned for breach of public service
”.
The obligation of education does not only apply to parents, but also to the State.
“
It is a constitutional rule
,
”
adds the lawyer.
In point 13 of the
1946
Preamble
,
it is thus inscribed that
“the organization of free and secular public education at all levels is a duty of the State”:
The Nation guarantees equal access for children and adults to education, vocational training and culture.
The organization of free and secular public education at all levels is a duty of the State
Preamble of 1946, with constitutional value
The initiative has certainly convinced a certain number of parents, however it is not unanimous.
For Laurent Zamesczkowski, spokesperson for the PEEP, the first federation of parents' associations, "
no compensation will be equal to damage that can last a lifetime
".
According to him, it is impossible to assess the consequences on the child, these depending on the missed material, the number of hours skipped but also on the level of each student.
“
For some it will be catastrophic, they will cultivate real shortcomings while for others it will be less of a problem.
“Amandine was thus afraid for one of her daughters.
“
She started to develop a kind of school phobia, she didn't want to go to school anymore.
“According to the mother, involved in municipal school life, the nursery and primary classes have”
been strongly affected
“by these repeated absences.
Some territories seem more concerned than others, reports Laurent Zamesczkowski.
Among them, the departments suffering from a lack of attractiveness as well as the Ile-de-France academies.
Contacted, the Ministry of National Education did not react.
