“Five levels per class, no!” deplore the parents of students at the Larceveau school

“5 levels / 40m2 = 30 sardines”, this is the division hung on a sign by the parents of students on the front of thepublic school of Larceveau. Indeed, they are worried about next year, with numbers still rising at school, that their children are far too much per class. As the sign indicates, this is already the case for one of the classes in the school which welcomes thirty students from five different levels, from the small section of kindergarten to CE1 in the same class. “We are many” sighs Julen, 5 and a half years old.

In another class of older, it starts to tighten too, as for Kilian in CM1: “sometimes when I want to move, I have to push my classmates a bit, because the tables are quite close to each other“. Classes already almost saturated, so parents mobilized and faced with a school that should welcome 85 students in all at the start of the next school year, they ask for half an extra teaching post, “enough to open an extra class” explains the parents of students. They were able to meet the management of the academic inspectorate who “assured them that mathematically speaking, it works“, says Audrey Jaurreguy, mother of a student and president of SIVU, the inter-municipal union with a single vocation, responsible for the operation of the schools of Ostibarret, “but this does not take into account the particularity of bilingual classes with fluctuating numbers“, she laments.

Parents all the more worried that for the moment it is mainly the toddlers of kindergarten who are mixed, but “these children will grow up, and as things stand, there won’t be room in the classrooms to put so many desks“. So the parents continue their mobilization so that their children do not lose in quality of learning. “When we opened this group of schools in 2016, we were promised a quality of education, and we are afraid that it will no longer be respected.“. For its part, the academic inspection explains that the sthe situation of this school, like that of all the others, will be reassessed at the start of the school year based on the number of employees on 1 September.