While the thermometer is close to 2°C in the early morning, the fifth graders of a public college in the 15th arrondissement of Paris are freezing.
In the classroom, everyone is in coats or with a scarf around their necks.
“
It must be between 12°C and 15°C, it's not possible,
protests Pauline*, their French teacher.
It's hard enough to motivate them at this time of year.
They are tired and waiting for the Christmas holidays, so imagine what it can be like when they are stuck in their down jackets.
According to the management of the establishment, the heaters were out of order but have since been repaired.
Read alsoLeisure, food, energy… The French are already cutting back on their spending
However, the Parisian college is not an isolated case.
At a time of energy restrictions, the government has called on all public establishments, including schools, to lower temperatures to 19°C, against 22°C - 23°C usually.
Some municipalities are even forced to make additional drastic savings, especially on the heating bill.
From everywhere on the French territory, and particularly in the small towns, parents complain of icy classrooms, where the children shiver more than they work there.
On December 1, Elisabeth Borne sent a circular to the prefects, alerting to possible power cuts in schools.
Objective: lower the bill
Restrictions that annoy parents, teachers and city officials.
And make children shiver.
Agnès is the mother of Timéo and Léa, aged 4 and 7, in Limoges.
The day after the All Saints holidays, she had the unpleasant surprise of picking them up very cold and flu-like.
“
When I asked them if they had had a good day, they told me that it was cold in the classroom and that they had stayed in their coats.
»
Surprised, she asks the director for an explanation.
The latter tells him that they left the heaters off during the two weeks of vacation.
As a result, it was barely 12°C in the classroom.
Same situation in Évreux in the Eure where the children had to wait almost until the end of October for the heating to be turned on again.
Reason given by the town hall: the energy sobriety plan.
Read alsoEnergy crisis: swimming in schools threatened by the closure of swimming pools
With galloping inflation, the expenses of town halls, departments and regions have exploded, without the resources following.
Thus pushing communities to cut back on each of the budgets.
School included.
Now is the time for all the little savings.
For the Normandy region alone, the cost of energy was multiplied by 2.5 compared to last year.
If the State grants local authorities a price shield limiting price increases to 25%, this is still insufficient.
"
We ask managers to do as they do at home: turn off the lights, favor LEDs, wash the dishes at night, turn off the servers who usually stayed on standby...
“Explains Bertrand Deniaud, in charge of educational issues for the Normandy region, responsible for 400 colleges.
Added to this are additional measures such as lowering the heating to 8°C at night, delaying the heating of buildings as much as possible, limiting the rooms where the radiators are on, etc.
With 30% of the consumption of municipal buildings, schools are the biggest consumers of energy, ahead of sports and cultural facilities, warns the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
What's more, when buildings are energy sieves, gets annoyed Guislaine David, spokesperson for Snuipp-Fsu, the first primary union.
Poor insulation, single-glazed windows, drafts... The school lets in the heat in the summer and the cold in the winter.
Fleeces, renovating buildings: finding more or less sustainable solutions
If in other years the situation was tenable by pushing the thermostat, winter 2022 promises to be harsher.
In the English Channel, the town hall of Périers has decided to offer its 310 students a 100% Made In France fleece on which the letters "
Save the planet
" are embroidered.
For Laurent Zameczkowski, vice-president of Peep, the federation of parents of students in the public, such an initiative is not sustainable.
She even "
smiles
" Adrien Misson, spokesperson for the UNSA teachers' union.
“
We have to imagine important measures and stop saving pennies
.”
Together, they refuse that school children pay the price of an inflation not collected by the State.
“A child cannot work properly with a coat or with frozen fingers,
believes Laurent Zameczkowski.
The school must keep its teaching commitments.
In order to find solutions for the future, the town hall of Neuilly-sur-Marne, in Seine-Saint-Denis, has bet on the renovation of buildings.
“
80% of our investment budget will go there
”, confides to
Le Figaro
Zartoshte Bakhtiari, the mayor of this city where 20% of the population lives in poverty.
Beyond the insulation which is the first project of the school building plan of the government of National Education, the energy renovation of schools also involves the revegetation of playgrounds, the search for new sources of more renewable energy .
For his part, Matignon specified that in the event of a scheduled power cut, there will be no canteen service and the children will not be received at school in the morning, thus limiting the hours without heating in the classes. .
