Toulouse: students guilty of incivility are liable to a call to order by a municipal jury
The town hall of Toulouse and the school inspectorate recently signed a partnership agreement for the implementation of a call to order for young perpetrators of incivility in the school environment.
The list of incivilities in the school environment, a reflection of society, is long and multifaceted: beatings, jostling, insults, harassment, cyber violence, theft, sexual violence, gender-based violence, racial, anti-Semitic or homophobic discrimination, damage to premises or materials, personal property, carrying weapons, intrusions, etc.
The city of Toulouse, which already practices the call to order in the context of incivility affecting public service agents, wants to tackle the phenomenon often denounced by the educational teams and the staff of schools and colleges of the Pink City .
A “benevolent” jury
In fact, this materialized on April 1 in the form of a partnership agreement between National Education and the town hall of Toulouse, which intends to “develop preventive actions aimed at young people”. It seems a missing link among the existing devices.
For the student, author of repeated incivilities in the school setting, this will be welded by a “call to order” in good and due form at the Capitol. The pupil and his parents will be received there during a somewhat solemn ceremony by a “benevolent” jury, made up of the elected delegate for the call to order, Maroua Bouzaida Sylla (with his tricolor scarf), the director of the municipal police, the coordinator of the local security and crime prevention council (CLSPD) and a representative of the academic inspectorate.
7.6% of middle school students in France
This new coercive device is part of the call to order protocol signed in April 2019 between the Capitol and the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The number of incivilities in the school environment? Studies by the Ministry of National Education show that 7.6% of middle and high school students are victims of it each year in France. Locally, the numbers are lacking, says city councilor Maroua Bouzaida Sylla.
“We have reports that regularly go back to our services through the educational teams and the staff of the Clae (leisure center associated with the school, editor’s note), explains the elected official who is also a high school teacher. The idea of this device is to see more clearly to deal with the subject in its magnitude, but we have no statistics”.
Three fields of application for the call to order
Three fields of application will be retained, indicate the municipal councilor, to constitute a call to order to the student at fault. First, school absenteeism, “from the moment the student missed four half-days of lessons without a major reason”, notes Maroua Bouzaida. Then come the incivilities relating to the acquisition of property, degradation, deterioration of furniture and the acquisition of educational and extracurricular staff.
“If the student commits one of these acts, we receive a form from the academic management of the national education services of Haute-Garonne (Dasen), validated by the prosecution. We then make sure that it is not a crime that falls within the jurisdiction of the courts. “In 2021, the call to order concerned “about sixty files” in Toulouse, most of which relate to incivility against community agents.