Are students in red-light districts second-class students for the Government of Quebec?
• Read also: Our Quebec schools in poor condition
These are comments received under a photo of the Louis-Joseph-Papineau school published on social networks. And I assure you, there is no exaggeration: “The school looks like a warehouse”, “a sawmill”, “a waste sorting plant”, “a prison where all that is missing is the barbed wire on the fence of the asphalt schoolyard which has no trees”.
Revolting
In the indifference of the elites, this public secondary school is in an incredible level of dilapidation and is distinguished by its classrooms without windows…
Worse, the request filed by the Center de services scolaire de Montréal CSSDM to drill windows in the classrooms has once again been refused by the Ministry of Education which, in bad faith, is playing ping-pong with the CSSDM. Even with a dropout rate of 32%, no one lights up in Quebec. It’s revolting !
Learning music in a disused toilet
A few streets away, at the Joseph-François-Perrault school, music students win gold medals in international competitions, but they practice in the cafeteria, in an old washroom, in stairwells . For 30 years, they have been asking for a concert hall, but nothing is happening.
Could you, Mr. Legault, seat the Ministers of Education, Culture, Metropolitan France, the Treasury Board and Finance as well as Valérie Plante, who is also quite mute, in a room so that they are closing a budget?
Saint-Michel, a forgotten district
Is it because Louis-Joseph is the school with the highest deprivation index in Quebec that we tolerate this windowless bunker?
Is it because the students of JFP unload their instrument at the Saint-Michel metro, one of the poorest and most multi-ethnic neighborhoods in Quebec, that these talented virtuosos do not deserve a dignified installation?
Budgets are released to counter armed violence and street gangs in Saint-Michel. Gunshots, drugs, it disturbs. Why not for secondary schools?
Mr. Legault, the young people of Saint-Michel, like those of Montreal North and Saint-Léonard, are counting on you.