Because of a wave of student protests that has shaken the country, the education minister said, up to 500 schools across France will be totally or partly closed on Monday.
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 Sunday, 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. The movement began at a Paris school on September 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 students. A 16-year-old was detained on Sunday 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 Friday.
“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,” Geffray claimed. But Interior Minister Laurent Nunez stated that security forces “are not cracking down on young people” but rather “protecting” school and university students wishing to “peacefully voice their demands”.
