Toulouse: these parents who are mobilizing to save classes threatened with closure
On the eve, Thursday June 23, of the last departmental council for national education (CDEN), which draws the school map for the start of the 2022 school year in Haute-Garonne, a brief overview of the hot spots.
It will be, Thursday, June 23, the last departmental council of national education (CDEN), which will sit at the prefecture of Haute-Garonne. Composed of representatives of local authorities, staff of educational establishments and user training, parents of students, associations, unions, it must decide on the future school map of the 1st degree.
The closings and openings of classes for the start of the school year will be recorded there by the academic inspectorate, which has already sparked mobilizations, on both sides, of parents of students worried about seeing “the number of students still increase in the classes” . However, according to our information, the academic director Mathieu Sieye could announce “more openings than closings”.
angry parents
On June 16, it was the parents of students from the Michoun nursery school in Toulouse (Roseraie) who stepped up to the plate after learning that the school was losing a class (four instead of five). Consequence: “This means classes with an average of 33 students,” says a parent. This is unacceptable. Our school is more and more abandoned and the situation, both for students and for teachers, continues to be more and more precarious”.
Depending on the configuration of the workforce, the problems encountered are different from one school to another. The families of the two schools in Pechbonnieu, north of Toulouse, are also up against, this time, the opening of a class which, according to them, does not stick to reality.
The problem of overloaded classes
“Faced with overstaffed classes for years, the academy inspection proposed the opening of a class in elementary school for the start of the 2022 school year, explains Fabien, a student father. But the condition is the opening of a double-level class large section-CP. The opening of this class will not significantly reduce the number of students per class, either for the elementary school or for the nursery school. The parents of students are against this mixing[…]»
Toulouse schools do not escape the budgetary rule which is imposed on the rectorate each year, as feared by the main 1st degree union Snuipp-FSU 31. “The allocation will be largely insufficient, we will find ourselves in schools with numbers of 28, 29, 30 pupils in kindergarten, assures Marie Gascard, co-secretary of Snuipp-FSU. With 60 additional teaching posts at the start of the school year, we will not be able to achieve the objectives set by the ministry to reduce all the classes of large section, CP and CE1 to 24 students. »
The case of the Port-Garaud school
The consequence of overcrowded classes, according to the teacher union? “The schooling of children from the age of 2 will no longer be possible, notes Marie Gascard. In addition, we will have zero creation of replacement positions, but we are seeing a massive influx of contract workers who are hired on a simple CV, without an interview, and who are put in front of a class overnight.
Symbol of these classes which disappear according to the vagaries of demography, the smallest nursery school in Toulouse Port-Garaud, which educates about forty students in only two classes, and threatened with closure this year. Located between the Carmes and Saint-Michel, the establishment is defended tooth and nail by the parents of students. “We alerted the services of the town hall to the very low numbers in this school year after year with a projection of twenty-seven students at the start of the school year and the town hall took the decision to close it”, announced last February the academy inspector Louis Alberici.