the essentials Worried and without answers, the Cransac parents’ association reaffirms its wish to maintain the school canteen kitchen, threatened with closure for many months by the municipality.
“This canteen is a bit of our heritage.” In the premises of the Cransac parents’ association, in the playground of the Emile Zola elementary school, a press conference was organized this Friday to discuss the future of the canteen and the threat weighing on his kitchen. For several weeks now, the mayor would like to call on a private service provider to deliver meals to the 150 young people in the village. An initiative that made parents jump. “We fight for our children and for them to have quality products to eat at lunchtime. Currently, they eat better there than at home. These are fresh products, peeled the same day. We see communities going to get meals in Baraqueville while we talk about ecology every day. It goes against current values”, take offense at the representatives of the parents of students who claim to have collected 700 signatures on a petition to defend the canteen.
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“We cannot save money on our children’s plates”
At the origin of the change, a desire expressed by the cook in place to leave this service for green spaces – information since denied -, a non-compliance with the hygiene standards of the structure, contested by the parents of students, and a deficit of €100,000 generated each year. “There is normal work to bring it up to standard but it is not an obstacle to the operation of the school canteen,” said Jean-Luc Vernhes, former vice-president of the association and staff representative at the CGT union. According to them, the municipality’s approach would mainly aim to save money. “A public service is not a business. […] We can’t save money on our children’s meals.”
Opposition exacerbated by the vagueness maintained around this project, while the municipality’s budget for 2024 will soon be voted on in the municipal council. “We know that the municipality is prospecting in search of public or private providers capable of providing 150 meals per day. A 3-month trial has been mentioned. From the start, things were not done in a clear manner,” denounces the Union representative.
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A lack of dialogue
Since the demonstration organized to protest against this closure plan in front of the town hall at the beginning of December, which brought together more than 70 people and which the mayor had condemned, the dialogue seems definitively broken between the two parties. “He refuses to see us even though we have proposals to submit to him. This maintains tensions which are not good, neither for them nor for us”, regrets the parents’ association, chaired by Alain Lacombe, who plans to “call on an external conciliator”. In an exchange of emails, Bernard Canac then assured them “that the responsibility for school catering is a mission which is devolved to the mayor”, indicating that he wanted to “assume it personally and completely”. Contacted, the latter did not wish to react, sticking to the minimum: “this is a serious matter which should not be taken lightly. We are working on it calmly.”
2024-03-01 20:59:11
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