In Toulouse, “ghetto colleges” closed in the Mirail district: “These students deserved better”
Closed since 2020, the Badious college located in the Reynerie district, is doomed to destruction. That of Bellefontaine closes next summer. Two ghetto establishments symbolizing the failure of the city’s policies.
Closed since the summer of 2020, the Raymond Badiou college, Mirail district in Reynerie, is nothing more than a blockhouse of railings and concrete invaded by weeds. For more than a year, the students have been distributed among five other establishments (Bellevue, Fermat, les Chalets, Balma and Tournefeuille), in the name of social diversity. In the Bellefontaine district, the college must also close its doors in the summer of 2022. But the building is kept for a probable project with the food bank.
Today, these decisions are taken “belatedly” in the eyes of those who ensured the survival of these establishments. As evidenced by many actors we have met. The harsh reality of the Badiou college, truly sucked up by the “laws” of a ghettoized district, is the result of the obstinate desire to maintain a quality public service. While in 2010 the deleterious social climate and the low patent success rate (73% in 2017, against 90.90% at the departmental level) definitely sounded the death knell for the dream of social diversity. “We lived in a sort of anxiety-inducing solitude,” recalls a former college student. These students deserved to be taken out of this neighborhood which was closing in on them like a trap. We were faced with the blindness of certain political leaders ”.
Between the rise in delinquency, drug trafficking at the foot of public housing bars which adjoin the college and the rise of religious fundamentalism, the establishment had become the extension of these long corridors of building which have “de-murdered” the educational space overflowed on all sides.
Symbol of failure of city policies
“I earn in a day, what you earn in a month,” argued a young sixth-grade dealer in front of the dumbfounded teaching team. Faced with the resignation of certain parents, it is an imam who took charge of the education of certain college students. In line with the Obin report, in 2004, teachers, including some victims of assault, made the same observation: “students unlearned, once in the street, what they learned at school”. Broken mirrors in the girls’ toilets, to prevent them from putting on make-up, delays or repeated absence of pupils for religious reasons, “every day, it is the rules of secularism and the Republic, which had to be defended”, remembers a college alumnus at the risk of being called “Islamophobic” by SOS Racisme. “We did with the town planning that was delivered to us. We are responsible for education but not for town planning. In this specific case, the goal is the mixing of students. Rebuilding a college in the same place does not. did not make sense “, defends today Vincent Gibert, vice-president of the departmental council, in charge of education.
However, the former educational officials of this establishment believed in a future for its 340 students, who were threatened by academic failure. “There were amazing kids, remembers the former Principal of Badiou College, Maryse Panebière, who carried this establishment at arm’s length between 2007 and 2009. It was not a problem of resources. We had the support of the teams. pedagogical and educational as well as the Rector and the inspector of the academy. But the pressure from the neighborhood was too strong “. His wish to see this building transformed into a literacy center for women or evening classes was not accepted.
Two other colleges are under construction in Saint-Simon, avenue Eisenhower, and in the Guilhermy sector, in Toulouse. One kilometer as the crow flies from the HLM bars.