Since the end of September, the Champlain high school in Chennevières-sur-Marne has suffered several bomb threats per week, sometimes even two per day. For weeks, lost lesson hours have been piling up and families can’t take it anymore.
It has become a sad routine. At the Samuel-de-Chaplain high school in Chennevières-sur-Marne in Val-de-Marne, bomb threats are increasing. With each alert, the same scenario repeats itself: this entire large high school of 2,000 students is evacuated. A very large police force is deployed in the neighborhood and the young people are sent home for several hours, or even the whole day. We are far from an atmosphere conducive to work: “I feel like I’m on vacation. Every time we get up so that in the end there’s no class”explains a student.
Parents of students are mobilizing. They are very worried about their children’s education. A collective has been formed, it estimates the number of hours of lessons lost since the end of September at around a hundred: “How do we deal with exams? Where is equal opportunity?alarms a mother. There were the school holidays, I said to myself ‘we’re going to be positive for the start of the school year’. Finally, on November 6, it started again with a new alert and since then, it’s been once or twice a day. All these lost hours are not made up for.”
Demotivated students
Some hours are sometimes switched to distance learning, but students say that video lessons have already been hacked. They do not all have the necessary equipment and especially young people have more difficulty keeping up, alone, in their room. A mother, in tears, is very worried and says that these regular evacuations have completely demotivated her daughter, who is repeating her final year: “Seeing her child in this state… She says to me, ‘Mom, it’s okay, there’s no need.’ She picks up.”
Young people and parents alike feel helpless, even more so those preparing for the baccalaureate. This is the case for Elie, distressed by these alerts: “There is stress. We wonder if there is really a bomb, are we really going to die, etc. It scares us.”
“When I hear the ringing, even though I know there’s not really a bomb, it really scares me.”
Elie, final year studentat franceinfo
Not to mention the stress for his future. “I’m working hard to pass the baccalaureate. Finding myself there, destitute, with nothing… I’m going to get to the baccalaureate and maybe I won’t have finished the program because of these false or real alerts. That makes me stressed, it’s my future that is at stake. What am I going to write in my Parcoursup? What did I do during the year? I didn’t do anything. There were alerts every day, it became daily, this is not possible.” These families want to organize a demonstration at the end of the week. For their part, the teachers’ unions have filed a strike notice for Thursday. The mayors of the towns in the sector have also alerted the rectorate, who did not wish to respond to our requests for the moment.
Other high schools in Val-de-Marne are also affected by these bomb threats. According to the prefecture, there have been more than a hundred, including 28 since the start of the school year on November 6. The department’s judicial police are dealing with more than 50 cases and several young people have been arrested with profiles of students or former students. Finally, the prefecture indicates “evaluate the degree of threat for each alert” For “be able to put in place a security system adapted on a case-by-case basis”. She claims to have “awareness of the enormous impacts on the education of young people from the high schools concerned but also of the mobilization of the police and of the stress generated for the teaching teams”.