French Education Minister announces partial or total closure of 500 schools amid student protests

PARIS – Up to 500 schools across France will be totally or partly closed on Oct 5 due to the protests by teenage pupils that have shaken the country, the education minister said.

Lessons will be “totally or partly suspended” in some “400-500“ high schools as the security conditions “have not been fulfilled”, said Education Minister Edouard Geffray on Oct 4, adding that 24 schools had been “burned or ransacked” since the start of the movement.

The teens at French high schools, known as lycees, say that their studies are being ruined by high teacher absences, overlong school days and dilapidated facilities, as well as other grievances.

Geffray said the number of schools affected on Oct 5 would be comparable to the figure from Oct 2 but vowed there would be a “partial, progressive return to lessons”.

The movement began at a Paris school on Sept 17 but grew last week into nationwide protests marked in places by outbursts of violence involving teenagers and security forces, which sometimes used tear gas and batons to disperse the children.

“There are activists – particularly from the far-left – who have infiltrated the high school student movement, hijacked it from the students themselves, and engaged in extreme violence,” Gefrray claimed.

“Clearly, this poses a risk to both our staff and our students,” he alleged, adding that 78 education staff members had been wounded – “something we have never seen before”.

“They were deliberately targeted because they were employees of the national education system,” Geffray claimed.

Organisers have called for the protests to continue on Oct 6, citing a lack of “concrete measures” from the government.

Over 5,000 people, 85 per cent of them minors, have been arrested since the start of the movement.

Critics have accused police of heavy-handed tactics.

A 16-year-old was detained on Oct 4 over the assault of a teacher in the southern town of La Ciotat. The teacher, 59, was doused with gasoline and struck on the sidelines of a high school student protest on Oct 2.

A video circulating on social media shows an individual dressed entirely in black with a masked face splashing liquid onto the teacher, who then clutches his face while a tree burns nearby. AFP